Name: What is Mary's room thought experiment?
Uploaded: 2024-05-29T01:17:11.000Z
Duration: 1 min 17 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The Mary's Room Thought Experiment, a thought experiment proposed by philosopher Frank Jackson, provides an intriguing insight into the nature of subjective experience.

In this scenario, he imagines a scientist named Mary who lives her entire life in a black and white room.

Despite her confinement, Mary becomes an expert on the science of color vision and understand all the physical and neurological facts about how human perceive color.

However, she herself has never actually seen any color firsthand.

The experiment raises the question, what happened when Mary finally stepped out of her monochromatic environment and see a vibrant color, such as red, for the first time?

According to Jackson, when Mary finally see the color red, she gains new knowledge, that is, what red truly looks like.

This suggests that the subjective experience of seeing red provides distinct kind of information that cannot be fully captured by objective physical description alone.

 The thought experiment is designed to demonstrate that there is an aspect of consciousness often referred to as qualia that goes beyond physical explanations, challenging purely physicalist account of the mind.