I think a lot of this actually comes down to the weaknesses of language, both scientific and traditional. Nothing can be perfectly described. Hearing about an experience is very different from experiencing it
I think the scenario implied that the language limit is just not taken into the account. Even though which language describes a certain concept matters a lot, since different cultures put their thoughts into words differently. But assume that everything there is to know about color, Mary knows it. But what Im thinking is, hearing or reading about color, thinking about color, and seeing and experiencing color, are all different processes that involve different parts of our brain. Even though all of them are supposed to contain the same information about a specific phenomenon, which exists outside of our perception. The way we take it in matters, naturally. Not necessarily in hard data we can extract from that happening, but also our personal experience in perceiving it.
@@leonguide93 That's a pretty huge thing to just be implied, though you may be right. But even laying aside questions of communication, our brains are hugely organized by language, so if somehow a piece of knowledge that would be poorly described by language was transplanted into Mary's brain,bit would be hard for her even to organize and think of it, without language to do so, and there the weakness of language comes in again
Learning everything through reading or hearing doesn't necessarily mean you have actually learned everything. As you say, language is imprecise. Who hasn't struggled with finding the right words to accurately describe a thought or feeling?
troublesgrippin Arabic is the epitome of spoken language, google some of its miraculous sentence/word structure. It simply is unmatched, every word has a root word that aligns with the annunciation of its roots. So a word like writing, library, he wrote (which is one word in Arabic), he’s writing, the writer, written word, the writers, all come from an amalgamation of the same three letters of ك ت ب. There’s literally a science to it, unlike English which is a patwa of different Romance language. Arabic is unexplainable.
@@Bettereveryday003 .....and that is important to what she said because? Now, I don't know Arabic, but I'm sure you have a word for red. So how would you describe how red actually looks? Not the wavelengths, not the threshold energy....just "red". I don't think you can describe a color in any language.
@@CupOvTee Why is that silly? This experiment is itself a proof of that. If your parents say not to touch the fire, it's just an information for you. You'll never know how it will be until you touch it for yourself. Only then is becomes knowledge. Memory is not knowledge. So Google is knowledgeable that you? Why Google, even a traditional calculator is knowledgeable than you? Memory or information is not knowledge. Information obtained through experience or an information that is experienced is knowledge.
@@sokunine I still don't see why this is even a useful or interesting question. Of course we can't know what it's like to be a bat. We can study and understand every single detail about how a bat lives and how its brain works, but unless you can turn yourself into one you'll never know what the subjective experience of being a bat is like. You don't even need to go as far as being a bat. There is literally no way you can ever know what the subjective experience of being your mother or some friend of yours is like. Knowledge and experience seem to be distinct things that can influence each other but it doesn't seem even slightly controversial to say that Mary experiences or learns something new when she first sees color.
@Punished Aniquin There's obviously a value to philosophy; it's the basis of our entire scientific and logic system. But yeah, so much of it seems like pointless drivel for the sake of pointless drivel.
@@davidbarroso1960 we can map average neural activation onto qualia, though, which makes me think there’s some sort of complex but ultimately semi-reductionist way of describing sensation and feeling
@@tomaskresina5782 Correlation is not causation. Just because certain feelings are mapped to certain areas of the brain does not mean that these areas of the brain cause these feelings. It could be that the brain is a conduit, a transmitter for consciousness, and not its producer.
Kinda reminds me of how I studied grief and loss from both a psychological and physical perspective but didn’t truly understand it until I lost my dad nothing could ever prepare you until you actually feel it for yourself, nothing will ever top personal experience
This!! I feel this on a whole other level. I also kind of make that connection to a spiritual awakening. There are often events that trigger a spiritual awakening. Some have heard and read about it, but when you go through something to trigger that new state of thinking and being, it's a whole new experience that catapults you into a new way of life. Others may thing its cosmic woo-woo, but only the person who has gone through that transformation can really appreciate and understand it. I'm also sorry for the loss of your dad. Sending much love.
Why would school teach us anything important? In younger grades they just give a big "fuck you" and 50% of the things you learn will in no way correspond with what you become. While yes it would be nice, its never gonna happen
Hassenboy Philosophy is, at its core, pure logic applied to everything. The important part is not learning about this thought experiment, but the logic behind the arguments.
RasRas342 I have nothing against philosophy. What astounds me is how renowned professional philosophers can't tackle such a trivial problem as the Mary's Room. The academic world is filled with psychologists, theologians, anthropologists, philosophers etc. who gets stuck in thought experiments, while the natural scientists progresses with concepts that are beyond the apprehension of these fools. As a student of physics, I can't discuss physics at the same low level as the average person. My knowledge of the physical world is so much more refined that it isn't possible to have a discussion that is intriguing for me. They can't teach me anything. As a student of computational neuroscience, I percieve these academic philosophers as one small step above the competence level of the average person. They haven't taught me anything in years. It is a pity they won't progress, but that is the way of pure philosophy.
You learn resolution, determination and purpose, when finally getting to experience a complete solutions outcome. like you can do all the work to make a rocket fly, and imagine it, make models, etc but to see it actually fly with all the effort, work, and knowledge put into it, you finally realize purpose. You may see thing clearly when the data is in front of you, but there is an extra amount of clarity that comes from seeing it's purpose.
I love hearing that he reversed his own position on the thought. According to Kierkegaard, arriving at a paradoxical thought, to ones original position, is the highest point one can attain in philosophizing.
I agree with his final position. In experiencing the color he is learning about himself… the human, the consciousness experience, not really learning something new about the color but something about how his own brain interprets it.
If Mary was shown a red and a blue Apple at the same time and she had never seen color before, could she say which color was which? If so then she learned nothing new because she knows enough to tell them apart. If she can not determine which color is which then her seeing color for the first time mean she is learning something
I really appreciated this idea. In this case, she would have to just distinguish colors or she would have to know which is red and which is blue? I think she wouldn't know which one is the red
@@eliseuantonio6652 she knows. Se can measurment by the temprature of the colour, the level of energy, etc That is the question of this experiment. Is it merry learn something new? The answer of this question is important. Because in the future, human will deal with cloning cell, or AI super computer
Nonsense. Let me present an analogy: Mary knows all there is about math. However, the books she has learned from do not contain numerical symbols. They only refer to numbers by a unique name for each. One day, she is presented with the image of 1 and 2. Can she tell which is which? No, their meaning is arbitrary. She will need to be told that 1 is "one" and 2 is "two". 1 and 2, like red and blue, are arbitrary interfaces between communication and intelligence. Where mankind created the symbols of 1 and 2, evolution has linked specific combinations of inputs from our eyes to very small parts of our brain, so that we associate this input with this concept. Since Mary knows all about colors, does she know that apples are always red, yellow, or green? If so, Mary knows that the color she sees, although she cannot name it, must be somewhere along the color spectrum between red and green. Show her a standard American traffic light instead, and you'll find that she knows exactly which color each light most likely is. She slots this interpretation of light wavelength by her unconscious mind into her bank of all knowledge. Has she learned something new? Yes, but it has no meaning.
what if I say comparison is a distortion of reality and our sensory organs a part of that the way 5 sense organs percieve something aren't grasp whole damn thing like you can see your hand just one side you can't see both sides at the same time...
I completely agree with the counterargument that language is to blame. If there was a way in which we could describe what seeing felt like to a blind person than perhaps they wouldn't "learn" anything if they suddenly started seeing. Since our speech is limited when it comes to describing experiences and emotions, we can't do this. Mary knew everything about vision except what it felt like, and that's important. Someone else in the comment section summarized it perfectly, knowledge does not equal understanding.
Joshua Begin is it even possible to completely describe something such as that? I don't think it is possible to convey an idea to someone since the idea has to be learned as a concept in their head before you can do that. For them to learn a concept they have to experience it.
+Flying Swordfish We can describe how the colour physically works and how It goes to the brain, but not how the brain " *see* " it, how it *feels*.... Is like telling someone how it is to be in rain when this person never gets wet on its entire life or never touched water
Exactly. I too have been thinking about that. The fact that language is always used describing scientific enquiry, even mathematics is a language of symbols and logic so it is not fundamentally different from all languages (only that it is far more rigorous to prevent ambiguity, but in the end it still is described and interpreted by humans). This means that science in fact does have a limit, or rather, the scientific thought process (as described by Karl Popper) has a limit, and that limit lies in our ability to ask questions. "How, why, what, is.." these are the questions that we can ask today about any object, observation, causal link, etc.
Gustavo de Camargo I know, that's not what my question asked. The original comment says that "if there was a way in which we described what seeing felt like... then perhaps they wouldn't learn anything if they started seeing", and that "language is to blame". My question asked whether this was possible using language, because I don't think it is. My comment asked the exact same question as Mr John Hunter's.
Oh it's not some fundamental flaw in our language. It's the fact that any string of words you can read in a reasonable period of time is going to be a simplification of the sheer amount of data your senses take in. It's not that you can't fully understand the facts of something. It's that descriptions aren't made for the purpose of granting full understanding. They're labels.
Isn’t it funny how Jackson probably spent a lifetime to come to conclusions and compare them to form the final question, while we are presented into the topic through a 3 min video.. Internet itself it’s such a privilege, big thanks to Ted education
hearing and accepting a conclusion is different from exploring and arriving at that conclusion..so our experience is different from Jacksons and that my friend is the major drawback of knowledge acquired from internet, and hence can be argued as how internet ruined us ;P
It is because we're so close to its inception generationally, we can appreciate the before and after more profoundly. From a knowledge creation standpoint, however, it's not much that different than wearing clothes. I imagine we feel similarly about the internet as our first ancestors did when marveling at the ease of use of the recent technology, "a fur to cover oneself with," conceived by the smartest of the cave durdlers.
@@malakaicarlsen whatever u r saying is right with respect to evolution..but i wonder if a philosophical thought experiment has any relevance in evolution, or rather the evolution of the human mind..just because one has accepted a sophisticated concept seldom means they hav really understood it..like fire or matter or energy.. the relevance here should be for that "understanding", and hence a thought experiment
I think I fall in the "her knowledge wasn't complete to begin with" group. She may have known the wavelengths of colors, what causes them etc. but I dont think she would've fully understand what the colors are supposed to look like exactly. I don't think you can describe a color to someone without referencing another color or object. She probably wouldve had an idea but not an exact one That's just my thought tho
I think you have a point there; you could make another parallel to someone being born deaf. You don't know sound, but as you grow up, your learn language references like sign language. You learn how to read. You see people open their mouths, make incomplete hand gestures, and yet see that they understand what they are saying. You might even learn to read lips from the references you already have to sign language and reading. You haven't heard sound, but you know of it's importance in context and communication. Then imagine you have the chance to get a cochlea implant, a device that will allow you to hear for the first time. Your parents go with you so the doctor can turn it on after you have recovered from surgery. What do you learn, considering all the references to language and sound you know? You learn the sound of your mother's voice. We are all of us inherently informed by emotional attachments, references and contexts, and we always learn something new by them.
@@bozieduble8541 yes, if the deaf person had studied sound waves or something he would know his mother’s voice would sound “high” it “low” but he doesn’t know what high and low sounds like so he is learning something
In fact, you could lie to Mary. When showing her the red apple for the first time, tell her it is blue, and she will have to believe it. She may know the wavelengths of blue and red, but if she has never seen the red and blue colours, the first time she sees one of them she won't know which one it is. If it is red and is told it is blue, she can only find out she's been lied to when measuring wavelength of the red colour she's been told is blue.
@@chusty93 I don't think it would work. I'm sure knowing everything about color she would definitely know that apples are red based on molecular structure of apple peel. What she never saw is actually the color itself, but she knows everything about the color and objects that emmit this color. BTW in my opinion knowing how exactly color looks for humans is not necessary any sort of useful knowledge. We know a lot about universe because our knowledge of infrared, ultraviolet and x-rays even that we don't see them. In a way we already live in the Mary's room where everything we see is in visible spectrum for human eye. I don't think that we have a gap in our understanding of the world simply because we don't see outside of the visible spectrum.
@@belnick "I don't think it would work. I'm sure knowing everything about color she would definitely know that apples are red based on molecular structure of apple peel. " Remember that the thought experiment is through images, not the objects themselves. You show Mary a coloured image of an apple for the first time and tell her it's blue. Or you can edit the image so the apple looks blue, and tell her that the apple is red. She has no way to know what is red or blue. But in any way, even knowing the molecular structure of an apple peel and that it would imply a red colour, if she has never actually seen it, if you show her the edited image of an apple that looks blue, she will be fooled, she must conclude "so that's how the red colour that comes from such molecular structure looks like", even if you're showing her a blue apple image. "BTW in my opinion knowing how exactly color looks for humans is not necessary any sort of useful knowledge. We know a lot about universe because our knowledge of infrared, ultraviolet and x-rays even that we don't see them. " No, certainly not. Knowing how something looks like is not key to building knowledge. Knowledge depends on language in the end. We both "know" that apples are red, not because we see the same, but because we claim the same. You measure wavelength of the apple colour and say a number, and I measure the wavelength too and claim the same number as you, and thus we conclude we see the same colour in the apple, red. But the thing is, I technically only know that you claim the same measurement that I do, I cannot know if what I perceive as red is what you perceive as red through your eyes, maybe we measure the same but in my consciousness I see red but your mind colours the apple blue, not red, but I will never be able to see through your eyes, to be in your mind, and know that we in fact see the same. It's a purely epistemological problem. In the same way operates measuring infrared or uv, except that in this case neither of us can see it apparently, but we claim to measure the same thing. "In a way we already live in the Mary's room where everything we see is in visible spectrum for human eye. I don't think that we have a gap in our understanding of the world simply because we don't see outside of the visible spectrum." There is no gap in understanding the world, but certainly in knowing it. We know how the visible spectrum looks like, but not how the infrared looks like, or the UV. In a similar way, a colourblind person has a gap in comparison to the rest of people, since he doesn't know how green looks like. A colourblind person can understand fully how the green colour works, what produces it, etc, but he cannot know how it looks like. Understanding how something is, is different from knowing how it looks like. It's a different type of knowledge.
@@ArtfMyles Well, I think if our body cells or the particles experience something new , then normally ' we', our conscience will also feel something new.
So if she learned everything about experiencing new experiences, could she learn something from experiencing something new that she already knows everything about?
Mary did not know what color looked like because that cannot be explained in words. Imagine if she had never felt pain. It would definitely be a new learning experience. She did not know, then she did. She learned.
I agree with his final position. In experiencing the color he is learning about himself… the human, the consciousness experience, not really learning something new about the color but something about how his own brain interprets it.
Pain is different than color. If we define color as a wavelength it is a physical attribute. Pain however is not a physical attribute. It’s the consequence of a physical activity so things like heat or pressure can cause pain. So to learn about pain you must experience it because that is what it is. If we define color as the experience triggered by the electrical-magnetic waves then I agree it is like pain and you must experience it to know it but the description of knowing color (wavelengths, propagation etc.) is referring to process of detecting and interpreting it so it’s the physical aspect. In practice though we are humans so we want to know how the physical affects is physically, biologically and mentally so we generally would consider knowing the feeling as part of knowing about whatever entity generates that felling. It’s like he lady in Top Gun who knows all about the jets (the government sees to it that she does) but not the experience of actually flying them. As a human she is missing out on the best part.
It's possible that Mary knows all the facts, yet actually seeing the color of the apple managed to bring together all of the necessary facts. You can have all the ingredients in the pantry, but you don't necessarily know how to bake a cake.
You can have all the ingredients, the recipe, be the best baker in the world, know everything there's to know about cakes, how they look, how they smell, how they sound like when you cut them, the texture of the cooked dough, know how they taste like, know that cake tastes good, even know that the brain releases endorphins when you eat it, but you never actually put a piece of cake in your mouth. Would eating it actually provide new information?
@Ivan That would mean her knowledge was incomplete before she had the experience. In other words, if she had complete knowledge, that would include how to fit all the pieces of knowledge together.
Ivan Ooze I think a better explanation is that seeing a color is not a piece of information but a skill, comparable to knowing how to play a sport. Mary can study tennis games all she wants in her little lab, but unless she hits the court herself and trains her body, don’t expect her to play worth a plugged nickel.
I think it is just that knowing about neurons and seeing colors activate different parts of the brain. They are just two different things, so they feel different.
A teacher I had in our Local Language (Filipino) once made us do this. We needed to write a poem about the environment within the session. While other teachers made their classes write a poem based on what they see from their chair to the window and all they see are the trees and don't really feel it, our teacher made us walk around the campus (our campus is quite big and we had mini forests) to experience the whole thing and actually feel how it was to be like. And as he said it, you cannot write about something without experiencing it. I think that the same goes for this experiment. You cannot fully know something if you don't experience it. But aside from that, this is good to reflect about.
This is something I've thought about with my schizophrenia. When I'm talking to doctors about it that have studied it for a long time theres still a huge barrier. No matter how much I've been talking about my experiences and feelings, there has never been a satisfying outlet for me to communicate them. And even now that I'm a lot better I can still feel that in my chest that I've been alone in my experience.
Saskia Den Boer Exactly. Thank you. A man will never comprehend what it is like to have a period, or what it is like to carry a child around for 9 months and then have to give birth. The emotions, the changing body, the pain, the fluids, the doctor appointments, the cravings etc.
@@audreybenton8856 But it is all physical. It happens in our bodies and minds, whoever is not experiencing it can't comprehend the qualia involved, the feeling itself, but we can still describe it with science and understand *why* we fell this and that.
There is a difference between knowing and experiencing. Mary knows all about the colour red but she hasn't seen it. So seeing the colour red would give her an experiential knowledge about it. Now She would be able to tell the difference between Red and Black just by looking. Mary has now acquired a higher knowledge about the colour Red than what she had learned from all the facts about the colour Red.
Entropy 5 argument isn't that she learned everything about color red but that she learned everything about seeing red yet she learnt something new about *seeing * red which shows that there is more to seeing red than its complete physical description. It means that subjective expierence is irreducible.
Michael and Brytany Jordan is it the same with someone who studies about let's say depression but the person doesn't actually know what depression is until maybe he/she experienced it later then he/she would learn sth new? but I'm curious about this 'new' thing? what kind of new thing?
isn't it also important that one will be able to acquire the knowledge of which objects have similar colors and which don't only after experiencing/seeing them in color? Things that have (dis-)similar colors will change your perception/understanding of the world around you. e.g. a fruit is raw or ripe; some foods being poisonous vs non-poisonous
Before I went on vacation to Mexico, I read about this cave of water I would be going to on a trip outside the resort. It sounded so amazing so that's why I bought a ticket to go. When I read about it, it talked about how clear and blue and the water was and how it was life changing. Reading about it was absolutely nothing like experiencing it. It was a totally different concept.
That's not the point the video is trying to make. Imagine you were told exactly how the cave of water was, including everything about its properties. How would you feel then upon seeing it? Obviously people can be sold faulty information
I agree that Mary would learn something new, in that she would experience something she had never experienced, actually perceiving color. Neurotransmitters in her brain would be produced that had never been produced, connecting to receptors that correspond with colors. This would have never happened despite her studying this process. Yet, this thought experiment does not pertain to physicalism. This purely goes to show that someone can't convey an experience through physical descriptions, and have you know what it is like to have this experience. Physicalism is indisputably correct, and the knowledge argument doesn't even contradict this, just states something already known.
PerplexusProductions -- There is a flaw in your reasoning. Let's clarify one thing. Mary's knowledge, in respect to what she can actually learn, given the conditions precised in the thought experiment, is absolute. Mary cannot forget, Mary cannot misuse her judgment. Mary is impartial, she cannot be fooled by statements that don't accurately describe reality. She's read everything the people that came before her found and has then extended her knowledge accordingly, to a point where nothing else she can know remains a mystery. She knows everything observing the physical phenomenons that follow any motion the consciousness of a subject makes can allow her to know. If she can know something, then she knows it. Then you say that Mary, in experiencing color, would learn what it is to see color. But if such is the case, knowing what it is to see color would have been out of her reach, while she was learning the theory of it all. Then, observing the physical phenomenons that follow any motion the consciousness of a subject makes cannot allow her to know everything about reality. Then physicalism cannot be true.
Kassidar That's actually a good point I have never heard before, although I always took the thought experiment to imply "black and white" to be greyscale, the way our night vision works, rather then perfect white light of varying intensities
alazrabed Procedural knowledge cannot be learned declaratively. It's the same as expecting someone with perfect "knowledge" of riding a bike, or playing a sport, to be able do this as soon as they leave the room. Vision is slightly different due to the palpability of the qualia, but in principle is not different
We know from seeing colourblind people's reactions to seeing the full colour spectrum through specialised glasses that there is more to the experience than facts: the emotional. Thought experiments rarely work because they try to place humans in non-human situations, ignoring the emotional or realistic outcomes in the name of arbitration.
Yes, but Mary here knows absolutely everything about colour theoretically, every single fact and knowledge about it, which makes her different from how normal colourblind people would/do feel when they experience colour. The argument that she would've already created the mental state of how it feels from her knowledge and her seeing it in real life would just make it click in place can be made (although I don't agree with it).
@@riyak.7393 Humans cannot imagine something not based on experience. We reshape the same information, like creating new neural pathways. The neural pathway she made, allows her to build on what she knows and what she is told, but never activates the sight part of her brain with new information, it activates the creativity part of her brain which only causes a stimulus to her mind ,not her eyes. The sight can be reconstructed with chemicals without the appropiate stimuli but it is still a subconcious process (eg; synthenesia). Her eyes were stimulated by the subconcious' naturally made neural sight pathways that the neural pathways built on learning from text cannot. She can see different colours and learn to distinguish them but the specific pathway being built is through her eyes and her sight part of her brain than in her memory which stores a link to the already formed visual information in the sight part of her brain that she physically cannot recreate.
This kind of makes me cry. The beauty and simplicity of the apple in comparison to the meaning behind it is just really emotional to me for some reason.
I mean once she sees the apple, she would probably be like, "I understand what this is doing to my brain; my eyes are seeing it and sending neural impulses and everything, but I didn't know that it actually _looked like this specifically_." ~:~
True. Not to mention the shade of colour that you would see is vastly different to what can be described to. i.e. difference between 'red' and 'magenta'
Disagree. She would be like, "Yeah, that's what I expected. Nothing new there". You see, she knows *everything* about colour that can be known, up to and including what it would look like should she ever see it.
The whole point was about that “feel”. A robot can be programmed/trained to exclaim that it feels something when experiencing something new but it wouldn’t feel anything like you with your first person experience would.
@@faisalbantog4704 I assume reasonably I think that any life brought on by evolution is similar to me in having subjective experiences. Maybe at least ones with nerve cells. So if you are biological and not a robot with a Turing machine inside, I assume you are not an unfeeling automaton. It is really up to you and what you make of your consciousness.
What about applying this idea to psychiatry? A psychiatrist knows everything about mental diseases, but has probably never experienced one. Let's say, the psychiatrist might have experienced sorrow and some sort of depression, but never experienced schizophrenia, paranoia, and other hardcore mental diseases. I mean this in general, there might be some exceptions of course. Does this fact make psychiatrists a little bit "ignorant" or "unaware" about their specialty? Are they missing the "personal experience" to understand their patients in a better way?
Olga Garcia I think in this case, since psychiatrist can observe other people with such behaviours still can make some good judgments based off all the previous experiments. The more experienced is the psychiatrist the better understanding will have.. The case of Mary's room for a psychiatrist, would be explaining all these depression, schizophrenia and etc. without actually having her/him to observe anyone with those problems.
MultiAtieh Yeah, but observing people isn't enough because it doesn't mean they know what the patients think, see or feel. It's not the same to observe a patient with paranoia and suicidal tendencies, than to experience it. So, basically their knowledge is purely theoretical. Maybe, if psichiatrists have had some sort of personal experience regarding mental diseases, they could be more sensitive or better at what they are doing. They could see the disease and patient in a more holistic way. I am just wondering 🤔🤔🤔...
Look into borderline personality disorder and DBT sometime -- basically bpd was considered almost untreatable with an extremely poor prognosis for decades, until an actual bpd sufferer developed a new form of therapy for it, which turned out to be extremely effective. So yeah, I'd say a neurotypical psychiatrist will always have some barrier to understanding there that a fellow sufferer of any given illness won't.
It does make them "unaware", but that is why experiences psychiatrists are better. When you see others experiencing something, I feel like we can live their realities to an extent with empathy and mutual understanding
I believe that it is in the doctor's ability to empathise with the patient. The more the empathy, the more the doctor understands how the patients feel. Doctors without the empathy tend to not understand the patients. Experience teaches the doctors empathy.
I fully appreciate and am in awe of the fact that a simple 5 minute video can have such a profound impact on our thoughts and lead to deeply illuminating discussions. OK, so just sharing my opinion here, but what if instead of Mary the expert neurologist, we had a deaf and mute person who knew everything about the physics, biology, chemistry and linguistics of sound and speech, was well-versed in sign language and lip reading. Then, one day he is given a hearing aid which enables him to experience sound. Here the situation is really different. Most of us would now readily say that he couldn't have known before how sound "feels". Even though he knew everything about sound, he didn't "know" sound. This can also be seen as an argument that he didn't know everything about sound, since he didn't know what was his specific reaction to vibrational stimuli. But even then, he couldn't know what was being said, since before he didn't have access to how "t" or "a" or "sound" really sounded. So experience definitely matters. There is a lot to be said here. Maybe she could determine the colour's emission's physical properties, but isn't that what our eyes do? They have a certain pre-determined reaction to the wavelength, which we interpret as the sensation of colour. Now, imagine if she was shown a red apple(on the left) and a fake blue apple(on the right). How could she be sure which was a real apple? But her knowledge of the physical properties wouldn't change anything she experienced intuitively, would it? She was externally be informed that the apple on the left was red, while the apple on the right was blue. Perhaps we need a real life experiment to determine this. Ultimately, it all boils down to the simple question whether experience imparts knowledge, or merely assumes the shape of pre-existing information. This is what we need to answer.
Good analogy...it reminds me of thinking about how a blind person dreams...dreams in this context offer the opportunity to consciously experience sensory information...I think dreaming is tied to consciousness. It is all very interesting.
“There are no facts, only interpretations” -Nietzsche. The essence of Mary’s knowledge have changed. Maybe at first, Mary interpreted the color red (for example) as those specific nerve impulses that trigger specific areas in the brain etc... however when she saw the color her interpretation definitely may have changed into interpreting the color red relative to the memory of the experience itself (that picture of red) which involved her seeing the actual color. Basically at first, Mary had a learned interpretation about the color, after seeing the color she can now relate her interpretation of the color to an experience she saw and not to books or any source of knowledge. nonetheless, colors are colors because they are meant to be seen...aren’t they? :)
Also there are feelings associated with every color. Those feelings aren’t triggered until the experience happens. We can say that the interpretation became the experience.
@@Null1423rr i know this is from a while back, but then my question is what is it that makes Mary's experience innately different than others? If there were two of these neuroscientists, would their new experience yield different interpretations? I would think so, but why? You could attribute it to former experiences in life and such, but I think there's something fundamentally different there. Like Nietzsche's quote implies, everyone interprets experiences differently. I don't know if that's relevant, but I think it might be something you would enjoy thinking about. :)
@@josha1349 you mean “would they interpret the color red, upon seeing it, differently from others? Regarding that they’ve studied it thoroughly”? Maybe yeah…but I think if the neurons for the specific color activated then that’s something new for them and they can perceive “red” for example the same way everyone else does and not only by theory. Given that neither one of them is color blind :p I think theoretical studies are quite different from practical studies and would yield different yet connected results. I hope I haven’t misunderstood you 😅
@@Null1423rr I'm a bit late to join this discussion. But I've a couple of discussion points that I want to leave here for the greater audience. Let's say - the colour red of an apple invokes chemical reactions in certain parts of the brain, which will not be otherwise done, then that is a new sensation. But given the fact, those states are already documented, and recreated in the human psyche artificially, then we will not have a new experience, though the event we are exposed to, is first of its kind. Thinking from a perspective of information theory, knowledge is defined as new information gained through an event - if we can triangulate the order, delay and the overall structure of neurons getting excited in our brain due to a certain stimulus, we should ideally recreate the kind of effect that stimulus is supposed to have. I think this experiment is bounded by one's ability to know things in completeness and not interpretation of mental states into physical variables.
Can't we test this now? These days they have glasses that fix color blindness? So study a color blind person, before and after they have the glasses? I'm not sure if that would work or not, but it seems like a good way to test it??
Emack B I think Mary having learned "everything" about the physical side of colors is hypothetical, i.e. you probably can't really learn everything about a color
Thats exactly what i thought, despite of the theoritical side, experiencing it wud have an impact on our emotional side. I have seen that video about that glasses and see how different it is for a color blind person to experience color on the emotional way. This experiment is actually a simplification for understanding the universe thru science and other larger issues, and of course its different if we assume that issue it solely color issue.
you misunderstand how to glasses work. they are purely corrective in a way that fixes a color blinds person's vision by "equalizing" colors. it does not allow a black white color blind person to see color. it's complicated to explain, but let me try: the kind of colorblindness that can be corrected is a red-green kind, so they have fewer red or green (dont remember which) cone cells, so the colors look similar. the glasses block more light from the wavelengths that they can see just fine, so the proportions are the same for what they see and what a normal person sees. I dont think that this kind of difference would correspond with any kind of measurable difference, but I don't know for certain.
I experienced a small version of this a few years ago. I was reading a scifi novel, Childhood's End. Without getting to into it, or spoilers, a big reveal half-way through the book is what the aliens that humans have been talking to look like (the aliens have refused to "reveal themselves". As soon as they were described I remembered a book I'd had as a child (and long forgotten about) with artists' renderings of what famous scifi aliens looked like, and I remembered exactly what these aliens looked like. So I had this instant moment of clarity where something (the alien's appearance) was a complete surprise that I didn't know a split second ago, but also I knew exactly and had known since I was a child. It was an incredibly weird experience that is hard to describe. I know it's not exactly the same, but I can definitely see parallels to Mary's Room.
If you've ever heard somebody say "I'm at a loss for words", I wonder if it has to do with a person's lack of vocabulary, or that there's a gap between an experience and the words in a language which can explain the experience.
I think language is inherently limited. No matter how many words we come up with to describe color, hearing about it will never compare to experiencing it firsthand.
that’s actually so true, some experiences are just inexplicable. sometimes words don’t do them any justice. maybe that’s meant to be? what is the point of “experiencing” when all about it is already known?
People use this expression different ways. Typically, it's used when they don't know what they should say, not because they literally can't come up with language that describes how they perceived something. Personally, I use it to acknowledge somebody who told me something complicated when I fear my immediate verbal reaction would be useless or counterproductive towards helping them.
I think the simplest answer is that experiencing is continuous and vocabulary used to describe that experiencing is discrete -- no matter how eloquent you are.
Often that is all someone nonplussed with another's audacity (or perhaps generosity) might at first be able to manage to say. They are having a hard time wrapping their head around an occurrence or situation, like they aren't even yet sure what it is that is happening or if they are reading it right, if this is actual reality or some "pinch myself" dream. Once they grasp, the words come. Usually.
Maybe that's why near-death experiences are a thing. They've been as close it gets without going all the way. They've felt that like probably not many have
makes me think about that experiment where a formerly blind person who had had their vision restored was asked to identify a sphere by sight, having held and touched one when blind. they couldn’t do it. the real experience transcends each fact you might know about something
That is NOT true. I've seen a couple of grown people experience snow for the first time. They all clearly knew what snow was and had knowledge about snow. But, when they experienced it they were always amazed. They all discovered an understanding of it after the experience. Knowledge is not wisdom.
You can’t explain red to anyone. All you can do is reference things with “red” properties. What you subjectively experience as “red” may be what I experience as “blue” but we both call it “red”.
but Mary is different, she has complete and all future knowledge about the physical facts of colour, we cannot begin to comprehend what Mary actually knows
School should focus on teaching more important subjects such as Economics. Philosophy is not essential, and should just be left to university level education.
upsweep Completely disagree. Thinking about the world and others- and your relation to them, and how you effect it- is VITALLY important. Quite frankly we need more children learning to think- sooner than at 18. To know WHY you do something is more important. Otherwise we are mere machines with no imagination. The human race succeeds when we talk to each other and work things out. Just like we are doing now.
@@googleminus1442 Economics is not essential. Philosophy is because it includes topics such as how we know what is true as well as logical fallacies and reasoning. It is literally the basis of all of knowledge and reasoning.
@@Taladar2003 Economics is not essential? Lol. Economics is one hundred percent more essential to a modern society compared to philosophy. Can you make the argument that VERY basic philosophy is essential? Maybe, it is after all, taught in many university programs including economics, but that is only one course for one semester. Is it the basis of knowledge or reasoning? Maybe, but then in return I ask you how so many great minds that influence how we live today are not specifically students of philosophy? And yet if philosophy is what you claimed in your comment, "how we know what is true" or "reasoning" then surely those thinkers were already engaging in philosophy in one way or the other. Either basic philosophy, the essential part of philosophy, is not so essential, or people learn it on their own while studying other subjects which means it doesn't need to be specifically taught.
@@rachelhorwitz9086 You don't need philosophy, at least philosophy that has to be taught, to know WHY you do something. Kids need to understand at least basic economics as when they reach voting age, who they vote for is going to impact their life in many ways. You don't need philosophy (at least to the level that needs to be taught) to understand this representative's economic policies and how it will impact your life.
This makes me think of the Grand Canyon. You can see pictures and videos of it, read about its history, know its dimensions etc. And yet it is an absolutely jaw-dropping experience when you actually visit it for the first time.
Qwert _ Well the room isn't so much like a physical thing in the story its more like a lense within glasses or a metaphor if you will for color blindness
Replace white-grey color with only red colored light. If all the light is red then she can't see blue/green/white/yellow. Not much is achieved thinking about it though.
Mary will DEFINITELY learn whether or not she likes the color red when she sees that apple, and that's not something that can be gleaned through studying the physical processes of vision alone. So, point for the knowledge argument?
But would she be able to determine that the apple itself was the color "red"? And would she be able to determine that without reading that apples were red? You can know "facts" but can you apply them? Because liking a color isn't the same as knowing what that color is
colors can't be visualized from learning.Birds can see U.V colors but we can't. just leaning about U.V light and its properties won't give us experience of seeing it. Of course we can invent some technological aids to detect it's presence
Now that you mention that, I think that not even with a gadget to see U.V light we would be able to perceive it the same way as that of a bird, because our brains are simply not evolved to detect it, our gadget is giving us an interpretation of it by showing colors that our brains can detect, not the real thing. A bird's sight with U.V light included may not be close at all at what we see through technology, because it doesn't mimic their eye structure and functions nor their brain areas stimulated, it just adapts it for ours.
She may not learn anything new about the Apple but she can experience an emotion upon seeing color for the first time and that's what's not talked about in this video.
This is about determining wether the universe is describable by physics only or if there is something else to it. Emotions she feels are totally out of purpose and irrelevant here. Besides we already know emotions are describable by phisics only, we're just bags of electrical wires and people feeling they are special doesn't change anything to it.
@@prenomnom2574 I actually feel like the nuance of the whole situation here depends of the emotions she might feel upon seeing the color for the first time. Sure, the emotions are just a bunch of molecules interacting with each other and triggering certain receptors but we cannot know in advance what emotion is gonna be triggered by the experience because this is purely personal. In the case of emotions, being able to describe them doesn't mean knowing in advance what they are gonna be triggered by (even though we can always assume based on strong and similar patterns between individuals). Your feelings and emotions upon seeing something depend of quite a lot of factors like your past experiences, your physiology or even your culture just to name a few and that's what makes it an experience at the end of the day, and not mere knowledge anymore. That's why we say that experiences are personal in the first place. So Mary may know everything that there is to know about red but there is still a whole side of the story missing that she will never know in advance. I apologize for any mistake, english is not my first language. Thank you for reading.
@@Alex-up9dj I think I could agree with you on the fact that it's really hard to compute what emotions she's going to feel, but that's not the point I wanted to make. To me the real important and interesting matter which is tackled by these thought experiments is whether the world is computable and can be summed up by data behaving according to clear, without random, laws, or if there is something more to it (magic ? emotions ? deity ?). And the fact that all the physical knowledge Mary can own don't allow her to fully understand what color feels like is proposed as an argument in favor of "physics not being all there is to the world". So I don't have a clear answer to this problem (is world only physics?) as I am not a genie and many argument go for and against, but what I can tell is that the aspect of the emotions she would feel seeing color is not relevant here as it's only one other feeling she could go through and this feeling, as the one of seeing color, could be explained physically by science (electricity going through her head). This feeling is also something about which we can wonder if it is new data that she couldn't have discovered through science, but that's just complicating our exemple for nothing. To be clear what I'm trying to say is : "feeling when she sees color" is similar to "feeling of the emotions she has while seeing color", thus "not useful to focus on it" if we want to solve the problem of "is our world computable?".
@@prenomnom2574 Totally agree. And another discuss which follow your thought is if we will be able one day to exactly predict our society behaviour thanks to this "laws of emotions"
For example: We all have seen beautiful sunrise, mountains, rivers in photos to the extent that we got bored of it. But when we see it in real life, even a clean blue sky in city looks so beautiful that we keep staring at it for hours.
This is the same as General Relativity predicting gravitational waves exist and LIGO detecting them. We did not learn anything new about gravitational waves at LIGO (strictly speaking about 'learning' in the context of this video. I know people spent years at LIGO and learnt a great deal of things on how to build such tools). What was done at LIGO is an 'assertion' of our 'understanding' of gravity. The colourful apple popping on Mary's screen is an assertion of her understanding of color. This lets her conclude that her understanding is 'correct' based upon which she can now build new understandings. On the other hand, if the colourful apple never pops on her screen ever and she never ever 'sees' (read 'asserts' or 'proves to herself') colour, she cannot answer the question 'Does colour exist?' even though she knows everything about colour.
Well first of all there's the language barrier. No matter how hard you try, you cannot describe a color to a blind person, therefore you cannot write down the experience of seeing it. You can know how it functions, but experiencing it wold be VERY different from plainly understanding how it works. There are many colors outside of our color spectrum, yet even tho we know they exist we cannot see nor can we describe or even truly understand them. There are sounds our human ears can't detect, but they still exist, and if you go even further - even though we know about the existence of a fourth dimension (time), our human brain and senses cannot comprehend its existence. So no matter how hard you try, you cannot truly know something without experiencing it yourself. Here's a simpler example: a person could learn everything that one can learn about skydiving. He could know the physics of it and the reasons behind every little detail, he could listen to countless people describe their own experiences. But even with all this knowledge, he cannot truly understand the feeling (the physical, not the sentimental) of the wind or the speed in which you're falling.
I think a very good example of difference between mental state and physical state is mental illnesses. It is very hard to describe what someone may be feeling, and all the textbooks may give you signs, and symptoms, but these differ from person to person.
Well the experience she gets is that her coloreceptors were estimulated in a next level for the first time, so is not the same an all circunstances. You can't say you don't know how a blackhole works becouse you weren't destroyed by one. Even that we don't know.
When I was in deep meditation, I saw a colour named 'inorsium' which is between the UV rays and X-ray in electromagnetic waves spectrum, the light particles produced some signals in my eye cells,..... See? I could give all the theories about it but others would not understand it until he/she experiences it.
I'm only 13 and I could be entirely wrong, but Mary would definitely learn that red looks like that. You can know everything about food, but if you don't eat it, you don't know how it tastes. So Mary learns that red looks like that, red is not blue, and stuff like that.
22MinecraftGamer please don't start your comments/assertions with "I'm only 13." It makes you seem doubtful and completely destroys the ethos of your argument
Broderick Bunnell They do. They just don't actually know the words for them. There's a lot of things children intuitively know and understand, but they don't actually know the terms, definitions and formulae behind them. They know what an argument that appeals to emotions, logic, the rules, etc. are. They know that if you throw a ball up, the ball stops for a split second at its highest before coming back down. They know that the further away from the middle of a seesaw you both sit, the easier it is and the faster you both rock up and down than if you sat closer to the middle. Just because you don't know the formalities of a certain thing doesn't mean that the thing, in and of itself, is so foreign to them that they wouldn't recognize it.
You are controdicting yourself. You said if you learn about food but dont eat it you cant know what it tastes like. Therefore you learn about colour but if you dont see it you dont know what it looks like. She could know the fact that red is not blue. But she does not know what ether red nor blue look like. Even if mary was colour blind and could see all colours exept red she still would know what red looks like. Lets pretend on my colour spectrum i see one extra colour that you do not and i explain what it looks like lets call this colour nana. The sea is actually the colour nana but only the dar sort of sea not the light see through ones. Nana is not blue. Nana looks nothing like blue. But just like colour blind people see grass as brown although its green. You see the nana sea as blue but its not. Its nana. Nana is typically a bright colour. But nothing like yellow or green or red. So this colour exists and I know because I see it. And you know its not blue or red or green or yellow so do you then know what nana looks like?
This is exactly like my workplace. New engineers arrive full of confidence with all they've learned from books. However, they soon realize what you read in a book isn't always applicable in real life scenarios.
But the point of the thought experiment is that the actual color, according to a physicalist's perspective, would be completely understood solely by the facts, since the physical facts are supposedly all that exists
This is the problem. Idk if it’s with this video or the experiment or the fact that people simply don’t pay attention to details. But mary did not learn anything new about color. She is having a new experience that is changing how she sees the world. How she sees herself. How she sees everything that she’s ever learned. Almost like a traumatic experience like her soul transformed. Like she was a caterpillar who transformed into a butterfly. The caterpillar hatched from its larva and immediately consumes a bunch of plant matter(knowledge/facts/education) and then will shed its skin a few times in between. Then once that is down it will create its cocoon and nest itself into a transformation. For the caterpillar the only thing that changes is that it grows wings. It does not have a mirror or an instruction Manuel with observation notes about itself from Greek philosophers! Lol that experience and transformation of the butterfly did not need any instruction or guidance or assistance from anything other then access the an energy source to grow WITHIN to, and not from out of or out to. It’s transformation is only impactful when the spirit and consciousness of man is a witness to its nature. That is when man becomes inspired and starts to create a SOUL. Man can now observe and sense and interact with a part of itself it never knew before and now growing within that experience. Very much like the butterfly itself, in fact they are one in the same. If Mary were to have that experience with a butterfly from beginning to end. She isn’t learning something because that is when you have someone explain to you what are you supposed to be experiencing and then creating. Very much like a formula Input = output. But the colors mary sees on the butterfly and the fact she had the life cycle of the butterfly explained to her, did not stop the consciousness between mary and the butterfly from connecting DIRECTLY and that direct one on one sensory experience is expressed in the perception of color. And that cannot be described..
@@camerontaylor7471 Idk if Im right or wrong but just wanted to throw this out. What if she is learning how her consiouness represents the activation of certain color cones in her eyes?
She learned something new because of the "physical" fact that her nerve and brain were stimulated when she actually saw "colors", which she's never experienced before.
I thought of this, too. It is true - unless Mary is completely colourblind - and I mean COMPLETELY so: all rods, no working cones. In which case seeing the redness of the apple is impossible (so she learns nothing) unless the science was incomplete or wrong (in which case she has learned unfathomable things.)
I've heard a response to this, which suggests that Mary was born completely color blind and then a cure was created for that, allowing her to see red. So Mary's Room isn't really possible but some experience with the same implications is.
@@curranfrank2854 I bet she got the cure when her screen malfunctioned, happened to explode, sending shards of glass into her eye that somehow did a corrective surgery that fixed her colorblindness, while at the same time causing the screen to show color for the first time
I can relate to this. I observe people and their behaviors all the time and think I have life figured it out, but when I experience those things, turns out it's totally different then what I thought.
But Domhnall Gleeson used this thought experiment to describe knowledge vs.experience. You could argue that this thought experiment taught her that she needed to get out in the world -- in other words, it was her driving force.
This is a fantastic video; amazing job explaining Mary's room so succinctly. However, there is one main problem. You defined physicalism as the belief that all knowledge can be obtained via physical facts. This is the epistemological form of physicalism, but physicalism also has a metaphysical component, that being that the universe itself is purely physical/material, and that no part of it is composed of spiritual, mental, or otherwise non-physical substance. This thought experiment was designed to disprove both the epistemological AND metaphysical arguments for physicalism. In my opinion, Mary's room makes a good case for the arguments against epistemological physicalism; however, I think it is completely flawed when discussing metaphysical physicalism, as one could easily just say that some knowledge comes in the form of qualia, but is still produced by physical processes in the world. There are many much more effective arguments both against this type of physicalism and for substance dualism. But that's just my two cents.
It is like snow, you can know everything there is about it and you maybe have some feelings for it. But it will still blow your mind, when you experience it the first time.
After seeing this, I went and changed my computer setting so that my screen would be on a greyscale, and I can say, the apples Mary knew before discovering color are nothing like the bright red apple she sees one day on her screen.
The problem with this scenario is that by construction you've stated that she learned everything that there was to know about color vision and then contradicted that by removing an important aspect of learning about color vision: the experience of it. You've assumed contradictory axioms so the principle of explosion applies and you can conclude anything.
She knew what red was, but she didn't know what red looked like. A single photo is often superior to complex description. Until she saw the color, she didn't know the color red in her mind's eye. It's like how know one knows what ultraviolet looks like, we can only understand in relation to other colors, and know its physical properties.
Your brain can create images by thinking about everything in the image. If she knew everything about color vision, she could already be seeing her monochromatic room as a colorful one.
Here's an easy way to figure this out..... Look at colorblind people and their reactions to seeing proper colors for the first time, they always say "It's more colorful than I had imagined".
Nicolino Will , maybe our languages are the limiting factor when it comes to sharing an experience with others by using just words... I am unable to recall exactly but in the movie Arrival, those aliens had some special features(circular pattern to represent the time factor) in their language which humans still don't have which makes us unable to comprehend their language
Apples have made great contribution throughout history. Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head. Mary's room helped change our understanding on psychology The Apple company contributed significantly in technology. Reply if you know anymore contributions made by the mighty apple.
I am so glad we had to watch this for my philosophy classes...I completely agree with the statement that you can learn everything there is to know about something, but you will never fully know or understand until it is first-hand experience. I also agree that we do not have proper language to describe this sort of thing and that's why it is so confusing for us to understand/
Great video! But at 3:55 ,I have a feeling philosophers and physicists/physicians will be "seeing red" over experience verses expression till the end of time! 😀
Well in my opinion she has to learn something new, because she just knows how she is able to see that color, if she never saw it she doesn't know how the color looks like, so she will learn that. It is the same question as "can a blind man know and/or imagin how it is to see". He cannot, he can just understand it to some degree. But that just means that his and also Marry's knowledge isn't complete. So both teorys are true, you can't explain emotion or mental state or even filling to the point that other person know how it fills, but it is just because of inability to have or transfer 100% of informations to someone. Also I would like to make a little experiment with you people, just imagine that you have to explain by only words and nothing else to a blind child what is let's say donut shape. He doesn't have knowledge of any shape and you can't use any of his other senses just words. Try it here.
I think you can glean an idea of whether or not she would learn anything new by what colorblind people learn when they put on the glasses that make them see color. They know what the color is supposed to look like, how it has been described, what items are supposed to be that color, yet when they put on those glasses they all express the knowledge of something new. Statements of I never knew it could be so vivid, or wow there is so much contrast now. They are learning something new just by seeing the new colors.
I think a lot of this actually comes down to the weaknesses of language, both scientific and traditional. Nothing can be perfectly described. Hearing about an experience is very different from experiencing it
I think the scenario implied that the language limit is just not taken into the account. Even though which language describes a certain concept matters a lot, since different cultures put their thoughts into words differently. But assume that everything there is to know about color, Mary knows it. But what Im thinking is, hearing or reading about color, thinking about color, and seeing and experiencing color, are all different processes that involve different parts of our brain. Even though all of them are supposed to contain the same information about a specific phenomenon, which exists outside of our perception. The way we take it in matters, naturally. Not necessarily in hard data we can extract from that happening, but also our personal experience in perceiving it.
@@leonguide93 That's a pretty huge thing to just be implied, though you may be right. But even laying aside questions of communication, our brains are hugely organized by language, so if somehow a piece of knowledge that would be poorly described by language was transplanted into Mary's brain,bit would be hard for her even to organize and think of it, without language to do so, and there the weakness of language comes in again
Learning everything through reading or hearing doesn't necessarily mean you have actually learned everything.
As you say, language is imprecise. Who hasn't struggled with finding the right words to accurately describe a thought or feeling?
troublesgrippin Arabic is the epitome of spoken language, google some of its miraculous sentence/word structure. It simply is unmatched, every word has a root word that aligns with the annunciation of its roots. So a word like writing, library, he wrote (which is one word in Arabic), he’s writing, the writer, written word, the writers, all come from an amalgamation of the same three letters of ك ت ب. There’s literally a science to it, unlike English which is a patwa of different Romance language. Arabic is unexplainable.
@@Bettereveryday003 .....and that is important to what she said because? Now, I don't know Arabic, but I'm sure you have a word for red. So how would you describe how red actually looks? Not the wavelengths, not the threshold energy....just "red". I don't think you can describe a color in any language.
Reminds me of the quote
“Experience is knowledge. Everything else is just information”
What a silly quote.
@@CupOvTee Why is that silly? This experiment is itself a proof of that. If your parents say not to touch the fire, it's just an information for you. You'll never know how it will be until you touch it for yourself. Only then is becomes knowledge. Memory is not knowledge. So Google is knowledgeable that you? Why Google, even a traditional calculator is knowledgeable than you? Memory or information is not knowledge. Information obtained through experience or an information that is experienced is knowledge.
What a beautiful quote
Srikanth R.R thank you 🙏
Tony Stark thank you 🙏
On seeing colour, Mary's retinal cones would be stimulated for the first time, producing changes in her physiology.
@@sokunine I still don't see why this is even a useful or interesting question. Of course we can't know what it's like to be a bat. We can study and understand every single detail about how a bat lives and how its brain works, but unless you can turn yourself into one you'll never know what the subjective experience of being a bat is like.
You don't even need to go as far as being a bat. There is literally no way you can ever know what the subjective experience of being your mother or some friend of yours is like.
Knowledge and experience seem to be distinct things that can influence each other but it doesn't seem even slightly controversial to say that Mary experiences or learns something new when she first sees color.
@Punished Aniquin There's obviously a value to philosophy; it's the basis of our entire scientific and logic system.
But yeah, so much of it seems like pointless drivel for the sake of pointless drivel.
@@isaiahphillip4112 It is controversial because it implies that qualia can’t be explained by physical processes.
@@davidbarroso1960 we can map average neural activation onto qualia, though, which makes me think there’s some sort of complex but ultimately semi-reductionist way of describing sensation and feeling
@@tomaskresina5782 Correlation is not causation. Just because certain feelings are mapped to certain areas of the brain does not mean that these areas of the brain cause these feelings. It could be that the brain is a conduit, a transmitter for consciousness, and not its producer.
Kinda reminds me of how I studied grief and loss from both a psychological and physical perspective but didn’t truly understand it until I lost my dad nothing could ever prepare you until you actually feel it for yourself, nothing will ever top personal experience
This!! I feel this on a whole other level. I also kind of make that connection to a spiritual awakening. There are often events that trigger a spiritual awakening. Some have heard and read about it, but when you go through something to trigger that new state of thinking and being, it's a whole new experience that catapults you into a new way of life. Others may thing its cosmic woo-woo, but only the person who has gone through that transformation can really appreciate and understand it. I'm also sorry for the loss of your dad. Sending much love.
Next time someone asks me how I am, I will say that my pain is qualia
It's quale
futilerify *qualia
How are you?
@@skydude7682 my pain is qualia
Uh oh...
why don't they start teaching philosophy at a younger grade level. seems to me that this shit is important.
Percy Tremblett Why is it important? I don't think it's important.
Why would school teach us anything important? In younger grades they just give a big "fuck you" and 50% of the things you learn will in no way correspond with what you become. While yes it would be nice, its never gonna happen
Percy Tremblett This video demonstrated how pathetic academic philosophy is. Teach physics and mathematics instead.
Hassenboy Philosophy is, at its core, pure logic applied to everything. The important part is not learning about this thought experiment, but the logic behind the arguments.
RasRas342 I have nothing against philosophy. What astounds me is how renowned professional philosophers can't tackle such a trivial problem as the Mary's Room. The academic world is filled with psychologists, theologians, anthropologists, philosophers etc. who gets stuck in thought experiments, while the natural scientists progresses with concepts that are beyond the apprehension of these fools.
As a student of physics, I can't discuss physics at the same low level as the average person. My knowledge of the physical world is so much more refined that it isn't possible to have a discussion that is intriguing for me. They can't teach me anything. As a student of computational neuroscience, I percieve these academic philosophers as one small step above the competence level of the average person. They haven't taught me anything in years. It is a pity they won't progress, but that is the way of pure philosophy.
Mary's room is simmalair to traveling. You can read and maybe know all about it. But experience it, is a whole other thing.
Very well said
You learn resolution, determination and purpose, when finally getting to experience a complete solutions outcome. like you can do all the work to make a rocket fly, and imagine it, make models, etc but to see it actually fly with all the effort, work, and knowledge put into it, you finally realize purpose. You may see thing clearly when the data is in front of you, but there is an extra amount of clarity that comes from seeing it's purpose.
Your point is fine, I believe you misunderstand the video
Mary's room is similar to anything that you have read about but I've never experienced.
This is what I thought.
I love hearing that he reversed his own position on the thought. According to Kierkegaard, arriving at a paradoxical thought, to ones original position, is the highest point one can attain in philosophizing.
Every knowledge is an experience, every experience is a knowledge.
I agree with his final position. In experiencing the color he is learning about himself… the human, the consciousness experience, not really learning something new about the color but something about how his own brain interprets it.
If Mary was shown a red and a blue Apple at the same time and she had never seen color before, could she say which color was which? If so then she learned nothing new because she knows enough to tell them apart. If she can not determine which color is which then her seeing color for the first time mean she is learning something
I really appreciated this idea. In this case, she would have to just distinguish colors or she would have to know which is red and which is blue? I think she wouldn't know which one is the red
@@eliseuantonio6652 she knows. Se can measurment by the temprature of the colour, the level of energy, etc
That is the question of this experiment.
Is it merry learn something new?
The answer of this question is important.
Because in the future, human will deal with cloning cell, or AI super computer
This is the best comment.
Nonsense.
Let me present an analogy: Mary knows all there is about math. However, the books she has learned from do not contain numerical symbols. They only refer to numbers by a unique name for each. One day, she is presented with the image of 1 and 2. Can she tell which is which? No, their meaning is arbitrary. She will need to be told that 1 is "one" and 2 is "two".
1 and 2, like red and blue, are arbitrary interfaces between communication and intelligence. Where mankind created the symbols of 1 and 2, evolution has linked specific combinations of inputs from our eyes to very small parts of our brain, so that we associate this input with this concept. Since Mary knows all about colors, does she know that apples are always red, yellow, or green? If so, Mary knows that the color she sees, although she cannot name it, must be somewhere along the color spectrum between red and green.
Show her a standard American traffic light instead, and you'll find that she knows exactly which color each light most likely is. She slots this interpretation of light wavelength by her unconscious mind into her bank of all knowledge. Has she learned something new? Yes, but it has no meaning.
what if I say comparison is a distortion of reality and our sensory organs a part of that the way 5 sense organs percieve something aren't grasp whole damn thing like you can see your hand just one side you can't see both sides at the same time...
I completely agree with the counterargument that language is to blame. If there was a way in which we could describe what seeing felt like to a blind person than perhaps they wouldn't "learn" anything if they suddenly started seeing. Since our speech is limited when it comes to describing experiences and emotions, we can't do this. Mary knew everything about vision except what it felt like, and that's important. Someone else in the comment section summarized it perfectly, knowledge does not equal understanding.
Joshua Begin is it even possible to completely describe something such as that? I don't think it is possible to convey an idea to someone since the idea has to be learned as a concept in their head before you can do that. For them to learn a concept they have to experience it.
+Flying Swordfish
We can describe how the colour physically works and how It goes to the brain, but not how the brain " *see* " it, how it *feels*.... Is like telling someone how it is to be in rain when this person never gets wet on its entire life or never touched water
Exactly. I too have been thinking about that. The fact that language is always used describing scientific enquiry, even mathematics is a language of symbols and logic so it is not fundamentally different from all languages (only that it is far more rigorous to prevent ambiguity, but in the end it still is described and interpreted by humans). This means that science in fact does have a limit, or rather, the scientific thought process (as described by Karl Popper) has a limit, and that limit lies in our ability to ask questions. "How, why, what, is.." these are the questions that we can ask today about any object, observation, causal link, etc.
Gustavo de Camargo I know, that's not what my question asked.
The original comment says that "if there was a way in which we described what seeing felt like... then perhaps they wouldn't learn anything if they started seeing", and that "language is to blame".
My question asked whether this was possible using language, because I don't think it is. My comment asked the exact same question as Mr John Hunter's.
Joshua Begin I think that this would be like imagining 4 dimensions. Something we as humans cant do and I dont think it is limited by language
conclusion: knowledge is not equal to understanding
Exactly!
weichun wong
How true!
Oh it's not some fundamental flaw in our language. It's the fact that any string of words you can read in a reasonable period of time is going to be a simplification of the sheer amount of data your senses take in. It's not that you can't fully understand the facts of something. It's that descriptions aren't made for the purpose of granting full understanding. They're labels.
knowledge is not equal to experiences.
Does it really require this simplification?
Was she surviving on oreos and milk the whole time?
lmao
Genius
Lol
Wow
She must be eating rice
Isn’t it funny how Jackson probably spent a lifetime to come to conclusions and compare them to form the final question, while we are presented into the topic through a 3 min video..
Internet itself it’s such a privilege, big thanks to Ted education
This comment is so wholesome and underrated
hearing and accepting a conclusion is different from exploring and arriving at that conclusion..so our experience is different from Jacksons and that my friend is the major drawback of knowledge acquired from internet, and hence can be argued as how internet ruined us ;P
It is because we're so close to its inception generationally, we can appreciate the before and after more profoundly. From a knowledge creation standpoint, however, it's not much that different than wearing clothes. I imagine we feel similarly about the internet as our first ancestors did when marveling at the ease of use of the recent technology, "a fur to cover oneself with," conceived by the smartest of the cave durdlers.
@@malakaicarlsen whatever u r saying is right with respect to evolution..but i wonder if a philosophical thought experiment has any relevance in evolution, or rather the evolution of the human mind..just because one has accepted a sophisticated concept seldom means they hav really understood it..like fire or matter or energy.. the relevance here should be for that "understanding", and hence a thought experiment
alvsiaz o very true!!!!
I think I fall in the "her knowledge wasn't complete to begin with" group.
She may have known the wavelengths of colors, what causes them etc. but I dont think she would've fully understand what the colors are supposed to look like exactly.
I don't think you can describe a color to someone without referencing another color or object.
She probably wouldve had an idea but not an exact one
That's just my thought tho
I think you have a point there; you could make another parallel to someone being born deaf. You don't know sound, but as you grow up, your learn language references like sign language. You learn how to read. You see people open their mouths, make incomplete hand gestures, and yet see that they understand what they are saying. You might even learn to read lips from the references you already have to sign language and reading. You haven't heard sound, but you know of it's importance in context and communication. Then imagine you have the chance to get a cochlea implant, a device that will allow you to hear for the first time. Your parents go with you so the doctor can turn it on after you have recovered from surgery. What do you learn, considering all the references to language and sound you know? You learn the sound of your mother's voice. We are all of us inherently informed by emotional attachments, references and contexts, and we always learn something new by them.
@@bozieduble8541 yes, if the deaf person had studied sound waves or something he would know his mother’s voice would sound “high” it “low” but he doesn’t know what high and low sounds like so he is learning something
In fact, you could lie to Mary. When showing her the red apple for the first time, tell her it is blue, and she will have to believe it. She may know the wavelengths of blue and red, but if she has never seen the red and blue colours, the first time she sees one of them she won't know which one it is. If it is red and is told it is blue, she can only find out she's been lied to when measuring wavelength of the red colour she's been told is blue.
@@chusty93 I don't think it would work. I'm sure knowing everything about color she would definitely know that apples are red based on molecular structure of apple peel. What she never saw is actually the color itself, but she knows everything about the color and objects that emmit this color.
BTW in my opinion knowing how exactly color looks for humans is not necessary any sort of useful knowledge. We know a lot about universe because our knowledge of infrared, ultraviolet and x-rays even that we don't see them.
In a way we already live in the Mary's room where everything we see is in visible spectrum for human eye. I don't think that we have a gap in our understanding of the world simply because we don't see outside of the visible spectrum.
@@belnick "I don't think it would work. I'm sure knowing everything about color she would definitely know that apples are red based on molecular structure of apple peel. "
Remember that the thought experiment is through images, not the objects themselves. You show Mary a coloured image of an apple for the first time and tell her it's blue. Or you can edit the image so the apple looks blue, and tell her that the apple is red. She has no way to know what is red or blue. But in any way, even knowing the molecular structure of an apple peel and that it would imply a red colour, if she has never actually seen it, if you show her the edited image of an apple that looks blue, she will be fooled, she must conclude "so that's how the red colour that comes from such molecular structure looks like", even if you're showing her a blue apple image.
"BTW in my opinion knowing how exactly color looks for humans is not necessary any sort of useful knowledge. We know a lot about universe because our knowledge of infrared, ultraviolet and x-rays even that we don't see them. "
No, certainly not. Knowing how something looks like is not key to building knowledge. Knowledge depends on language in the end. We both "know" that apples are red, not because we see the same, but because we claim the same. You measure wavelength of the apple colour and say a number, and I measure the wavelength too and claim the same number as you, and thus we conclude we see the same colour in the apple, red. But the thing is, I technically only know that you claim the same measurement that I do, I cannot know if what I perceive as red is what you perceive as red through your eyes, maybe we measure the same but in my consciousness I see red but your mind colours the apple blue, not red, but I will never be able to see through your eyes, to be in your mind, and know that we in fact see the same. It's a purely epistemological problem. In the same way operates measuring infrared or uv, except that in this case neither of us can see it apparently, but we claim to measure the same thing.
"In a way we already live in the Mary's room where everything we see is in visible spectrum for human eye. I don't think that we have a gap in our understanding of the world simply because we don't see outside of the visible spectrum."
There is no gap in understanding the world, but certainly in knowing it. We know how the visible spectrum looks like, but not how the infrared looks like, or the UV. In a similar way, a colourblind person has a gap in comparison to the rest of people, since he doesn't know how green looks like. A colourblind person can understand fully how the green colour works, what produces it, etc, but he cannot know how it looks like. Understanding how something is, is different from knowing how it looks like. It's a different type of knowledge.
why does this give me a feeling that I'll experience something completely new when I die
'you' won't experience anything new, but the particles you were composed of will.
That's deep
same
Wow
@@ArtfMyles Well, I think if our body cells or the particles experience something new , then normally ' we', our conscience will also feel something new.
I thought of this as trying to comprehend the 4th dimension, we can explain what it is and how it works, but our brains can't comprehend it.
The question is not if we can comorehend it, if you could see the 4th dimension would you learn something new?
@@Tom-vx7xm its the same thing, comprehending
@@Tom-vx7xm learning something new is comprehending, it asks if we can comprehend it without experiencing it
@@zravena-1309 learning something new =/= comprehend
The fourth dimension is time ;)
I think I know the answer. Mary WOULD learn something: her own reaction to seeing red, or what red feels like for her.
Then the discussion turns to what value we place on subjective experience.
Lella Lytle all experience is subjective. This means that although what she learned is subjective it was still new
And if it is new, then she didn’t know everything
A Z I didn’t say subjective experience didn’t have value, just that this is naturally the discussion’s next turn.
So if she learned everything about experiencing new experiences, could she learn something from experiencing something new that she already knows everything about?
Mary did not know what color looked like because that cannot be explained in words. Imagine if she had never felt pain. It would definitely be a new learning experience. She did not know, then she did. She learned.
Agreed
I agree with his final position. In experiencing the color he is learning about himself… the human, the consciousness experience, not really learning something new about the color but something about how his own brain interprets it.
Pain is different than color. If we define color as a wavelength it is a physical attribute. Pain however is not a physical attribute. It’s the consequence of a physical activity so things like heat or pressure can cause pain. So to learn about pain you must experience it because that is what it is.
If we define color as the experience triggered by the electrical-magnetic waves then I agree it is like pain and you must experience it to know it but the description of knowing color (wavelengths, propagation etc.) is referring to process of detecting and interpreting it so it’s the physical aspect.
In practice though we are humans so we want to know how the physical affects is physically, biologically and mentally so we generally would consider knowing the feeling as part of knowing about whatever entity generates that felling.
It’s like he lady in Top Gun who knows all about the jets (the government sees to it that she does) but not the experience of actually flying them. As a human she is missing out on the best part.
Bro that's deep💀
Knowing the road is different than walking the road -morphius
But do I need to walk the road?
Knowing the PATH.....
@Edwin Thomas but walking along the path is fun. Would you have truly ever known that to be correct or incorrect for you?
oh my god so true matrix !
It's possible that Mary knows all the facts, yet actually seeing the color of the apple managed to bring together all of the necessary facts.
You can have all the ingredients in the pantry, but you don't necessarily know how to bake a cake.
You can have all the ingredients, the recipe, be the best baker in the world, know everything there's to know about cakes, how they look, how they smell, how they sound like when you cut them, the texture of the cooked dough, know how they taste like, know that cake tastes good, even know that the brain releases endorphins when you eat it, but you never actually put a piece of cake in your mouth. Would eating it actually provide new information?
@Ivan That would mean her knowledge was incomplete before she had the experience.
In other words, if she had complete knowledge, that would include how to fit all the pieces of knowledge together.
Ivan Ooze I think a better explanation is that seeing a color is not a piece of information but a skill, comparable to knowing how to play a sport. Mary can study tennis games all she wants in her little lab, but unless she hits the court herself and trains her body, don’t expect her to play worth a plugged nickel.
I think it is just that knowing about neurons and seeing colors activate different parts of the brain. They are just two different things, so they feel different.
A teacher I had in our Local Language (Filipino) once made us do this. We needed to write a poem about the environment within the session. While other teachers made their classes write a poem based on what they see from their chair to the window and all they see are the trees and don't really feel it, our teacher made us walk around the campus (our campus is quite big and we had mini forests) to experience the whole thing and actually feel how it was to be like. And as he said it, you cannot write about something without experiencing it. I think that the same goes for this experiment. You cannot fully know something if you don't experience it. But aside from that, this is good to reflect about.
Jerome Cortez ayuz
as if you lived your whole life in a campus
Just because you know what something is, it doesn’t mean you know how it feels.
How touching
That’s the experiment
Vaginas
@@AloeHahh We all thought it tbh
@@AloeHahh lol
This is something I've thought about with my schizophrenia. When I'm talking to doctors about it that have studied it for a long time theres still a huge barrier. No matter how much I've been talking about my experiences and feelings, there has never been a satisfying outlet for me to communicate them. And even now that I'm a lot better I can still feel that in my chest that I've been alone in my experience.
As a man I will never comprehend what it is like to give birth.
You can...shove a baby doll up your bunghole then try to push it out and you will know how the pain of childbirth is.
@@desirelabelle2199 A baby doll will change his hormones? Bloated feet and mood swings? Cravings and contractions?
Saskia Den Boer Exactly. Thank you. A man will never comprehend what it is like to have a period, or what it is like to carry a child around for 9 months and then have to give birth. The emotions, the changing body, the pain, the fluids, the doctor appointments, the cravings etc.
@@audreybenton8856 But it is all physical. It happens in our bodies and minds, whoever is not experiencing it can't comprehend the qualia involved, the feeling itself, but we can still describe it with science and understand *why* we fell this and that.
a trans man might
There is a difference between knowing and experiencing. Mary knows all about the colour red but she hasn't seen it. So seeing the colour red would give her an experiential knowledge about it. Now She would be able to tell the difference between Red and Black just by looking. Mary has now acquired a higher knowledge about the colour Red than what she had learned from all the facts about the colour Red.
Entropy 5 argument isn't that she learned everything about color red but that she learned everything about seeing red yet she learnt something new about *seeing * red which shows that there is more to seeing red than its complete physical description. It means that subjective expierence is irreducible.
Adam Wiśniewski could you explain what you meant by "something new" ?
The only difference is the amount of knowledge. If she hadn't seen it then she didn't know everything about it to begin with.
Michael and Brytany Jordan is it the same with someone who studies about let's say depression but the person doesn't actually know what depression is until maybe he/she experienced it later then he/she would learn sth new? but I'm curious about this 'new' thing? what kind of new thing?
isn't it also important that one will be able to acquire the knowledge of which objects have similar colors and which don't only after experiencing/seeing them in color? Things that have (dis-)similar colors will change your perception/understanding of the world around you. e.g. a fruit is raw or ripe; some foods being poisonous vs non-poisonous
Before I went on vacation to Mexico, I read about this cave of water I would be going to on a trip outside the resort. It sounded so amazing so that's why I bought a ticket to go. When I read about it, it talked about how clear and blue and the water was and how it was life changing. Reading about it was absolutely nothing like experiencing it. It was a totally different concept.
That's not the point the video is trying to make. Imagine you were told exactly how the cave of water was, including everything about its properties. How would you feel then upon seeing it? Obviously people can be sold faulty information
@V S I want to know that too
Isn't the experience in itself new knowledge?
BlueBerryKing congratulations now you know the main question of this video
Its called *experienception*
im not sure
BlueBerryKing For humans.
I dont think so
I agree that Mary would learn something new, in that she would experience something she had never experienced, actually perceiving color. Neurotransmitters in her brain would be produced that had never been produced, connecting to receptors that correspond with colors. This would have never happened despite her studying this process. Yet, this thought experiment does not pertain to physicalism. This purely goes to show that someone can't convey an experience through physical descriptions, and have you know what it is like to have this experience. Physicalism is indisputably correct, and the knowledge argument doesn't even contradict this, just states something already known.
Not entirely, your cones are still activated by white light because the wavelength they respond to is in the white light already.
PerplexusProductions i agree and i feel it would be similar to trying vr for the first time.
PerplexusProductions -- There is a flaw in your reasoning.
Let's clarify one thing. Mary's knowledge, in respect to what she can actually learn, given the conditions precised in the thought experiment, is absolute. Mary cannot forget, Mary cannot misuse her judgment. Mary is impartial, she cannot be fooled by statements that don't accurately describe reality. She's read everything the people that came before her found and has then extended her knowledge accordingly, to a point where nothing else she can know remains a mystery. She knows everything observing the physical phenomenons that follow any motion the consciousness of a subject makes can allow her to know. If she can know something, then she knows it.
Then you say that Mary, in experiencing color, would learn what it is to see color. But if such is the case, knowing what it is to see color would have been out of her reach, while she was learning the theory of it all. Then, observing the physical phenomenons that follow any motion the consciousness of a subject makes cannot allow her to know everything about reality. Then physicalism cannot be true.
Kassidar
That's actually a good point I have never heard before, although I always took the thought experiment to imply "black and white" to be greyscale, the way our night vision works, rather then perfect white light of varying intensities
alazrabed
Procedural knowledge cannot be learned declaratively. It's the same as expecting someone with perfect "knowledge" of riding a bike, or playing a sport, to be able do this as soon as they leave the room. Vision is slightly different due to the palpability of the qualia, but in principle is not different
Mary's knowledge of color without having experienced it is abstract, like learning a language that nobody else speaks, understands, or writes in.
Agreed.
We know from seeing colourblind people's reactions to seeing the full colour spectrum through specialised glasses that there is more to the experience than facts: the emotional. Thought experiments rarely work because they try to place humans in non-human situations, ignoring the emotional or realistic outcomes in the name of arbitration.
Yes, but Mary here knows absolutely everything about colour theoretically, every single fact and knowledge about it, which makes her different from how normal colourblind people would/do feel when they experience colour. The argument that she would've already created the mental state of how it feels from her knowledge and her seeing it in real life would just make it click in place can be made (although I don't agree with it).
@@riyak.7393 Humans cannot imagine something not based on experience. We reshape the same information, like creating new neural pathways.
The neural pathway she made, allows her to build on what she knows and what she is told, but never activates the sight part of her brain with new information, it activates the creativity part of her brain which only causes a stimulus to her mind ,not her eyes.
The sight can be reconstructed with chemicals without the appropiate stimuli but it is still a subconcious process (eg; synthenesia). Her eyes were stimulated by the subconcious' naturally made neural sight pathways that the neural pathways built on learning from text cannot.
She can see different colours and learn to distinguish them but the specific pathway being built is through her eyes and her sight part of her brain than in her memory which stores a link to the already formed visual information in the sight part of her brain that she physically cannot recreate.
This kind of makes me cry. The beauty and simplicity of the apple in comparison to the meaning behind it is just really emotional to me for some reason.
I mean once she sees the apple, she would probably be like, "I understand what this is doing to my brain; my eyes are seeing it and sending neural impulses and everything, but I didn't know that it actually _looked like this specifically_."
~:~
And also, the emotional effect it has on each individual person is different and can't be taught in a book.
~:~
True. Not to mention the shade of colour that you would see is vastly different to what can be described to. i.e. difference between 'red' and 'magenta'
I believe her firsts thought was, "Wait a second, I thought I owned a Dell !"
Natalie Harshman very well put, Mx. Harshman
Disagree. She would be like, "Yeah, that's what I expected. Nothing new there". You see, she knows *everything* about colour that can be known, up to and including what it would look like should she ever see it.
That's like being a physicist, studying gravity but never having went to space. He will feel different in space for the first time
I thought of this too dude
@@timothygiles3737 yes you could infact you would know everything it would do but it would feel different
The whole point was about that “feel”. A robot can be programmed/trained to exclaim that it feels something when experiencing something new but it wouldn’t feel anything like you with your first person experience would.
@@xtaticsr2041 but how can we know that some of us are just robots?
@@faisalbantog4704 I assume reasonably I think that any life brought on by evolution is similar to me in having subjective experiences. Maybe at least ones with nerve cells. So if you are biological and not a robot with a Turing machine inside, I assume you are not an unfeeling automaton. It is really up to you and what you make of your consciousness.
Mary learned many things. The most overlooked of these is that...
She needs a new monitor.
Hahaha
And get a life
Or maybe it just started working properly? 😉
Frank Jackson wants to know your location.
What about applying this idea to psychiatry? A psychiatrist knows everything about mental diseases, but has probably never experienced one. Let's say, the psychiatrist might have experienced sorrow and some sort of depression, but never experienced schizophrenia, paranoia, and other hardcore mental diseases. I mean this in general, there might be some exceptions of course. Does this fact make psychiatrists a little bit "ignorant" or "unaware" about their specialty? Are they missing the "personal experience" to understand their patients in a better way?
Olga Garcia I think in this case, since psychiatrist can observe other people with such behaviours still can make some good judgments based off all the previous experiments. The more experienced is the psychiatrist the better understanding will have..
The case of Mary's room for a psychiatrist, would be explaining all these depression, schizophrenia and etc. without actually having her/him to observe anyone with those problems.
MultiAtieh Yeah, but observing people isn't enough because it doesn't mean they know what the patients think, see or feel. It's not the same to observe a patient with paranoia and suicidal tendencies, than to experience it. So, basically their knowledge is purely theoretical. Maybe, if psichiatrists have had some sort of personal experience regarding mental diseases, they could be more sensitive or better at what they are doing. They could see the disease and patient in a more holistic way. I am just wondering 🤔🤔🤔...
Look into borderline personality disorder and DBT sometime -- basically bpd was considered almost untreatable with an extremely poor prognosis for decades, until an actual bpd sufferer developed a new form of therapy for it, which turned out to be extremely effective. So yeah, I'd say a neurotypical psychiatrist will always have some barrier to understanding there that a fellow sufferer of any given illness won't.
It does make them "unaware", but that is why experiences psychiatrists are better. When you see others experiencing something, I feel like we can live their realities to an extent with empathy and mutual understanding
I believe that it is in the doctor's ability to empathise with the patient. The more the empathy, the more the doctor understands how the patients feel. Doctors without the empathy tend to not understand the patients. Experience teaches the doctors empathy.
I fully appreciate and am in awe of the fact that a simple 5 minute video can have such a profound impact on our thoughts and lead to deeply illuminating discussions.
OK, so just sharing my opinion here, but what if instead of Mary the expert neurologist, we had a deaf and mute person who knew everything about the physics, biology, chemistry and linguistics of sound and speech, was well-versed in sign language and lip reading. Then, one day he is given a hearing aid which enables him to experience sound. Here the situation is really different. Most of us would now readily say that he couldn't have known before how sound "feels". Even though he knew everything about sound, he didn't "know" sound. This can also be seen as an argument that he didn't know everything about sound, since he didn't know what was his specific reaction to vibrational stimuli. But even then, he couldn't know what was being said, since before he didn't have access to how "t" or "a" or "sound" really sounded. So experience definitely matters. There is a lot to be said here.
Maybe she could determine the colour's emission's physical properties, but isn't that what our eyes do? They have a certain pre-determined reaction to the wavelength, which we interpret as the sensation of colour. Now, imagine if she was shown a red apple(on the left) and a fake blue apple(on the right). How could she be sure which was a real apple? But her knowledge of the physical properties wouldn't change anything she experienced intuitively, would it? She was externally be informed that the apple on the left was red, while the apple on the right was blue. Perhaps we need a real life experiment to determine this.
Ultimately, it all boils down to the simple question whether experience imparts knowledge, or merely assumes the shape of pre-existing information. This is what we need to answer.
Good analogy...it reminds me of thinking about how a blind person dreams...dreams in this context offer the opportunity to consciously experience sensory information...I think dreaming is tied to consciousness. It is all very interesting.
“There are no facts, only interpretations” -Nietzsche. The essence of Mary’s knowledge have changed. Maybe at first, Mary interpreted the color red (for example) as those specific nerve impulses that trigger specific areas in the brain etc... however when she saw the color her interpretation definitely may have changed into interpreting the color red relative to the memory of the experience itself (that picture of red) which involved her seeing the actual color. Basically at first, Mary had a learned interpretation about the color, after seeing the color she can now relate her interpretation of the color to an experience she saw and not to books or any source of knowledge. nonetheless, colors are colors because they are meant to be seen...aren’t they? :)
Also there are feelings associated with every color. Those feelings aren’t triggered until the experience happens. We can say that the interpretation became the experience.
kk
@@Null1423rr i know this is from a while back, but then my question is what is it that makes Mary's experience innately different than others? If there were two of these neuroscientists, would their new experience yield different interpretations? I would think so, but why? You could attribute it to former experiences in life and such, but I think there's something fundamentally different there. Like Nietzsche's quote implies, everyone interprets experiences differently. I don't know if that's relevant, but I think it might be something you would enjoy thinking about. :)
@@josha1349 you mean “would they interpret the color red, upon seeing it, differently from others? Regarding that they’ve studied it thoroughly”? Maybe yeah…but I think if the neurons for the specific color activated then that’s something new for them and they can perceive “red” for example the same way everyone else does and not only by theory. Given that neither one of them is color blind :p
I think theoretical studies are quite different from practical studies and would yield different yet connected results. I hope I haven’t misunderstood you 😅
@@Null1423rr I'm a bit late to join this discussion.
But I've a couple of discussion points that I want to leave here for the greater audience.
Let's say - the colour red of an apple invokes chemical reactions in certain parts of the brain, which will not be otherwise done, then that is a new sensation. But given the fact, those states are already documented, and recreated in the human psyche artificially, then we will not have a new experience, though the event we are exposed to, is first of its kind.
Thinking from a perspective of information theory, knowledge is defined as new information gained through an event - if we can triangulate the order, delay and the overall structure of neurons getting excited in our brain due to a certain stimulus, we should ideally recreate the kind of effect that stimulus is supposed to have.
I think this experiment is bounded by one's ability to know things in completeness and not interpretation of mental states into physical variables.
This reminds me of 'The Giver' Colored apple, anyone?
Mailee Phan right!!!!
+Mailee Phan OMG you're right!
Mailee Phan yaaas
Mailee Phan I was looking for a comment like this.
What if she sees a red apple?
Well, then she'd be in The Giver
Mailee Phan omg!!!! Same!!!
Can't we test this now? These days they have glasses that fix color blindness? So study a color blind person, before and after they have the glasses? I'm not sure if that would work or not, but it seems like a good way to test it??
Emack B I think Mary having learned "everything" about the physical side of colors is hypothetical, i.e. you probably can't really learn everything about a color
so what would you do/say/ask after you gave someone color blind the glasses and they put them on?
Thats exactly what i thought, despite of the theoritical side, experiencing it wud have an impact on our emotional side. I have seen that video about that glasses and see how different it is for a color blind person to experience color on the emotional way.
This experiment is actually a simplification for understanding the universe thru science and other larger issues, and of course its different if we assume that issue it solely color issue.
You can make a parallel analogy with people who were born deaf* and receive and in-brain hearing aid. You could look into that.
you misunderstand how to glasses work. they are purely corrective in a way that fixes a color blinds person's vision by "equalizing" colors. it does not allow a black white color blind person to see color. it's complicated to explain, but let me try:
the kind of colorblindness that can be corrected is a red-green kind, so they have fewer red or green (dont remember which) cone cells, so the colors look similar. the glasses block more light from the wavelengths that they can see just fine, so the proportions are the same for what they see and what a normal person sees.
I dont think that this kind of difference would correspond with any kind of measurable difference, but I don't know for certain.
I experienced a small version of this a few years ago. I was reading a scifi novel, Childhood's End. Without getting to into it, or spoilers, a big reveal half-way through the book is what the aliens that humans have been talking to look like (the aliens have refused to "reveal themselves". As soon as they were described I remembered a book I'd had as a child (and long forgotten about) with artists' renderings of what famous scifi aliens looked like, and I remembered exactly what these aliens looked like. So I had this instant moment of clarity where something (the alien's appearance) was a complete surprise that I didn't know a split second ago, but also I knew exactly and had known since I was a child. It was an incredibly weird experience that is hard to describe. I know it's not exactly the same, but I can definitely see parallels to Mary's Room.
If you've ever heard somebody say "I'm at a loss for words", I wonder if it has to do with a person's lack of vocabulary, or that there's a gap between an experience and the words in a language which can explain the experience.
I think language is inherently limited. No matter how many words we come up with to describe color, hearing about it will never compare to experiencing it firsthand.
that’s actually so true, some experiences are just inexplicable. sometimes words don’t do them any justice. maybe that’s meant to be? what is the point of “experiencing” when all about it is already known?
People use this expression different ways. Typically, it's used when they don't know what they should say, not because they literally can't come up with language that describes how they perceived something. Personally, I use it to acknowledge somebody who told me something complicated when I fear my immediate verbal reaction would be useless or counterproductive towards helping them.
I think the simplest answer is that experiencing is continuous and vocabulary used to describe that experiencing is discrete -- no matter how eloquent you are.
Often that is all someone nonplussed with another's audacity (or perhaps generosity) might at first be able to manage to say. They are having a hard time wrapping their head around an occurrence or situation, like they aren't even yet sure what it is that is happening or if they are reading it right, if this is actual reality or some "pinch myself" dream. Once they grasp, the words come. Usually.
This made me think about this theory if it was applied to death.
Ok stop that
Maybe that's why near-death experiences are a thing. They've been as close it gets without going all the way. They've felt that like probably not many have
this theory can also apply to hallucinations. Is it qualia?
You might think that after death, it's the same as before birth
@@julien.2573 Similar to this, yeah. I try not to overthink it cause I freak myself out.
Kids in my high school used to ask this blind girl what her favorite color was.
thats awful
michael cook that just hurts inside
That's horrible!
michael cook lol how did she respond to that? I mean that's horrible.
What colour was it?
makes me think about that experiment where a formerly blind person who had had their vision restored was asked to identify a sphere by sight, having held and touched one when blind. they couldn’t do it. the real experience transcends each fact you might know about something
Mary: *I have never seen color,*
*but I know color*
Me: *I've never seen snow*
Also me: *but I know snow*
Not as well as Mary knows colors
Knowing snow is not the same as the experience of building a snowman.
@@jowbloe3673 yeah, just a joke
That is NOT true. I've seen a couple of grown people experience snow for the first time. They all clearly knew what snow was and had knowledge about snow. But, when they experienced it they were always amazed. They all discovered an understanding of it after the experience. Knowledge is not wisdom.
Anyways, I know all of y'all have a point, just wanted to make a joke so r/woosh
She will see red once every month.
Rahul Gill wait... what about her skin? Or nails? Those have different colors too....
Someone had to make that comment, lmao
Anonymous519131 If she were very pale the lighting in the room could definitely be bright enough for her not to be able to perceive the colors
Ya... But she doesn't have to
it's called a "thought experiment" for a reason
You can't explain to someone who's blind since birth what red looks like.
neither to a colorblind person who sees other colors (except red) and know that red is real only because everybody says so...
You can’t explain red to anyone. All you can do is reference things with “red” properties. What you subjectively experience as “red” may be what I experience as “blue” but we both call it “red”.
@@jessereeves3120 That is called the "inverted spectrum" thought experiment. Look it up.
@@9Ballr Yup. I minored in philosophy. Just tryna explain the qualia problem w/o jargon.
but Mary is different, she has complete and all future knowledge about the physical facts of colour, we cannot begin to comprehend what Mary actually knows
I would hands down rather expierance something then be taught about it
Today class, our lesson is on torture methods in the medieval era
PapaKay that's pretty funny but not the kind of experience were talking about
We just finished a unit in class about WWI
Michael Tab! Nobody gives a fuck about what you prefer
Michael Tab! Be careful what u wish for
Language is an amazing thing, what I like the most about reading is how someone else understands things and put it into words. It fascinates me.
Guys - the thought experiment is not called "Marys Room". It s in Jacksons Text "Ephiphenomenal Qualia" and is known as "the knowledge Argument"
More thought experiments please!
This immediately reminds me of the time I couldn't imagine anything after learning about the 4th dimension.
please elaborate
Just watched a video about that last night
Philosophy is the most underrated subject. I think these things are ought to be taught in school..
School should focus on teaching more important subjects such as Economics. Philosophy is not essential, and should just be left to university level education.
upsweep Completely disagree. Thinking about the world and others- and your relation to them, and how you effect it- is VITALLY important. Quite frankly we need more children learning to think- sooner than at 18. To know WHY you do something is more important. Otherwise we are mere machines with no imagination. The human race succeeds when we talk to each other and work things out. Just like we are doing now.
@@googleminus1442 Economics is not essential. Philosophy is because it includes topics such as how we know what is true as well as logical fallacies and reasoning. It is literally the basis of all of knowledge and reasoning.
@@Taladar2003 Economics is not essential? Lol. Economics is one hundred percent more essential to a modern society compared to philosophy. Can you make the argument that VERY basic philosophy is essential? Maybe, it is after all, taught in many university programs including economics, but that is only one course for one semester. Is it the basis of knowledge or reasoning? Maybe, but then in return I ask you how so many great minds that influence how we live today are not specifically students of philosophy? And yet if philosophy is what you claimed in your comment, "how we know what is true" or "reasoning" then surely those thinkers were already engaging in philosophy in one way or the other. Either basic philosophy, the essential part of philosophy, is not so essential, or people learn it on their own while studying other subjects which means it doesn't need to be specifically taught.
@@rachelhorwitz9086 You don't need philosophy, at least philosophy that has to be taught, to know WHY you do something. Kids need to understand at least basic economics as when they reach voting age, who they vote for is going to impact their life in many ways. You don't need philosophy (at least to the level that needs to be taught) to understand this representative's economic policies and how it will impact your life.
This makes me think of the Grand Canyon. You can see pictures and videos of it, read about its history, know its dimensions etc. And yet it is an absolutely jaw-dropping experience when you actually visit it for the first time.
How seeing the Grand Canyon affects you is not the same thing as what seeing the Grand Canyon looks like.
Wouldn't her skin be in color in her room?
*thought experiment.
Ignore all practicalities. Extract the essence
Qwert _ Well the room isn't so much like a physical thing in the story its more like a lense within glasses or a metaphor if you will for color blindness
Replace white-grey color with only red colored light. If all the light is red then she can't see blue/green/white/yellow. Not much is achieved thinking about it though.
asking the real questions here
Blue Hearthstone, If she only saw black and white the apple would look like everything else in her life.
4:30 Newton watch out!!
i cant stop laughing xD
@@Lime-qf9de yeah then gravity is qualia
Hahahah nice
Dark Justin Gravity was always a thing he just proved it
Or something like that I’m too tired to.
reminds me of the book i read "THE GIVER"
same
Yes. A dystopian world without colors.
I remember the book in 6 grade and I loved it. It kinda does remind me of "The Giver" as well.
yess! thats what i was thinking.
Most definitely.
This reminds me of the giver. When Jonas first sees color for the first time in an apple, and can’t explain it.
You're right! I haven't heard of that book in ages
I loved reading that
Mary will DEFINITELY learn whether or not she likes the color red when she sees that apple, and that's not something that can be gleaned through studying the physical processes of vision alone.
So, point for the knowledge argument?
But would she be able to determine that the apple itself was the color "red"? And would she be able to determine that without reading that apples were red? You can know "facts" but can you apply them? Because liking a color isn't the same as knowing what that color is
colors can't be visualized from learning.Birds can see U.V colors but we can't.
just leaning about U.V light and its properties won't give us experience of seeing it.
Of course we can invent some technological aids to detect it's presence
Drawing with Noel how do we know that birds can see them?
Aug24th because they have cells in their eyes that respond to UV light
Now that you mention that, I think that not even with a gadget to see U.V light we would be able to perceive it the same way as that of a bird, because our brains are simply not evolved to detect it, our gadget is giving us an interpretation of it by showing colors that our brains can detect, not the real thing. A bird's sight with U.V light included may not be close at all at what we see through technology, because it doesn't mimic their eye structure and functions nor their brain areas stimulated, it just adapts it for ours.
She may not learn anything new about the Apple but she can experience an emotion upon seeing color for the first time and that's what's not talked about in this video.
This is about determining wether the universe is describable by physics only or if there is something else to it. Emotions she feels are totally out of purpose and irrelevant here.
Besides we already know emotions are describable by phisics only, we're just bags of electrical wires and people feeling they are special doesn't change anything to it.
@@prenomnom2574
I actually feel like the nuance of the whole situation here depends of the emotions she might feel upon seeing the color for the first time. Sure, the emotions are just a bunch of molecules interacting with each other and triggering certain receptors but we cannot know in advance what emotion is gonna be triggered by the experience because this is purely personal. In the case of emotions, being able to describe them doesn't mean knowing in advance what they are gonna be triggered by (even though we can always assume based on strong and similar patterns between individuals).
Your feelings and emotions upon seeing something depend of quite a lot of factors like your past experiences, your physiology or even your culture just to name a few and that's what makes it an experience at the end of the day, and not mere knowledge anymore. That's why we say that experiences are personal in the first place. So Mary may know everything that there is to know about red but there is still a whole side of the story missing that she will never know in advance.
I apologize for any mistake, english is not my first language. Thank you for reading.
@@Alex-up9dj I think I could agree with you on the fact that it's really hard to compute what emotions she's going to feel, but that's not the point I wanted to make.
To me the real important and interesting matter which is tackled by these thought experiments is whether the world is computable and can be summed up by data behaving according to clear, without random, laws, or if there is something more to it (magic ? emotions ? deity ?).
And the fact that all the physical knowledge Mary can own don't allow her to fully understand what color feels like is proposed as an argument in favor of "physics not being all there is to the world".
So I don't have a clear answer to this problem (is world only physics?) as I am not a genie and many argument go for and against, but what I can tell is that the aspect of the emotions she would feel seeing color is not relevant here as it's only one other feeling she could go through and this feeling, as the one of seeing color, could be explained physically by science (electricity going through her head). This feeling is also something about which we can wonder if it is new data that she couldn't have discovered through science, but that's just complicating our exemple for nothing.
To be clear what I'm trying to say is : "feeling when she sees color" is similar to "feeling of the emotions she has while seeing color", thus "not useful to focus on it" if we want to solve the problem of "is our world computable?".
@@prenomnom2574 Totally agree. And another discuss which follow your thought is if we will be able one day to exactly predict our society behaviour thanks to this "laws of emotions"
Not "emotion", "qualia"
For example: We all have seen beautiful sunrise, mountains, rivers in photos to the extent that we got bored of it. But when we see it in real life, even a clean blue sky in city looks so beautiful that we keep staring at it for hours.
This is the same as General Relativity predicting gravitational waves exist and LIGO detecting them.
We did not learn anything new about gravitational waves at LIGO (strictly speaking about 'learning' in the context of this video. I know people spent years at LIGO and learnt a great deal of things on how to build such tools). What was done at LIGO is an 'assertion' of our 'understanding' of gravity. The colourful apple popping on Mary's screen is an assertion of her understanding of color. This lets her conclude that her understanding is 'correct' based upon which she can now build new understandings.
On the other hand, if the colourful apple never pops on her screen ever and she never ever 'sees' (read 'asserts' or 'proves to herself') colour, she cannot answer the question 'Does colour exist?' even though she knows everything about colour.
Wouldn't she have seen her own skin though?
NO
Why such a dominant "NO"?
Isramations BECAUSE NO
Kory Mann true... *EXPLAIN THAT TED-ED!*
+Space Unicorn It's a thought experiment.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”
^This right here^
That is my favourite quote of all time!
My first thought was “well, looks like we need to put someone in a room like this.” Then I remembered skin...
Well first of all there's the language barrier. No matter how hard you try, you cannot describe a color to a blind person, therefore you cannot write down the experience of seeing it. You can know how it functions, but experiencing it wold be VERY different from plainly understanding how it works. There are many colors outside of our color spectrum, yet even tho we know they exist we cannot see nor can we describe or even truly understand them. There are sounds our human ears can't detect, but they still exist, and if you go even further - even though we know about the existence of a fourth dimension (time), our human brain and senses cannot comprehend its existence. So no matter how hard you try, you cannot truly know something without experiencing it yourself. Here's a simpler example: a person could learn everything that one can learn about skydiving. He could know the physics of it and the reasons behind every little detail, he could listen to countless people describe their own experiences. But even with all this knowledge, he cannot truly understand the feeling (the physical, not the sentimental) of the wind or the speed in which you're falling.
I think a very good example of difference between mental state and physical state is mental illnesses. It is very hard to describe what someone may be feeling, and all the textbooks may give you signs, and symptoms, but these differ from person to person.
Whatever I understand out of the video... The outro music makes everything perfectly smooth...
Nothing can be entirely explained by physical facts. We are emotional creatures. Feeling is just as important.
Feelings and emotions are a product of our physical state. The brain controls it all.
@@llddau How does a physical state produce an experience that we can understand?
Emotions are made of facts too. Everything is.
This reminds me of a thought experiment called Psilocybin mushrooms
trippy when you think about it
Well the experience she gets is that her coloreceptors were estimulated in a next level for the first time, so is not the same an all circunstances. You can't say you don't know how a blackhole works becouse you weren't destroyed by one. Even that we don't know.
She knew how, but she never felt how. Feeling/experience is a type of learning.
A drama movie about qualia and experiencing things for the first time ever is actually a great concept. Its like the movie Room
When I was in deep meditation, I saw a colour named 'inorsium' which is between the UV rays and X-ray in electromagnetic waves spectrum, the light particles produced some signals in my eye cells,..... See? I could give all the theories about it but others would not understand it until he/she experiences it.
yo shutup bro
@@Bandsbabatunde It was just a fictious example. Hope you understand.
yo shutup bro
@@architmukherjee9938 exactly
I'm only 13 and I could be entirely wrong, but Mary would definitely learn that red looks like that. You can know everything about food, but if you don't eat it, you don't know how it tastes. So Mary learns that red looks like that, red is not blue, and stuff like that.
22MinecraftGamer please don't start your comments/assertions with "I'm only 13." It makes you seem doubtful and completely destroys the ethos of your argument
Broderick Bunnell They do. They just don't actually know the words for them.
There's a lot of things children intuitively know and understand, but they don't actually know the terms, definitions and formulae behind them.
They know what an argument that appeals to emotions, logic, the rules, etc. are. They know that if you throw a ball up, the ball stops for a split second at its highest before coming back down. They know that the further away from the middle of a seesaw you both sit, the easier it is and the faster you both rock up and down than if you sat closer to the middle.
Just because you don't know the formalities of a certain thing doesn't mean that the thing, in and of itself, is so foreign to them that they wouldn't recognize it.
You are controdicting yourself. You said if you learn about food but dont eat it you cant know what it tastes like. Therefore you learn about colour but if you dont see it you dont know what it looks like. She could know the fact that red is not blue. But she does not know what ether red nor blue look like. Even if mary was colour blind and could see all colours exept red she still would know what red looks like. Lets pretend on my colour spectrum i see one extra colour that you do not and i explain what it looks like lets call this colour nana. The sea is actually the colour nana but only the dar sort of sea not the light see through ones. Nana is not blue. Nana looks nothing like blue. But just like colour blind people see grass as brown although its green. You see the nana sea as blue but its not. Its nana. Nana is typically a bright colour. But nothing like yellow or green or red. So this colour exists and I know because I see it. And you know its not blue or red or green or yellow so do you then know what nana looks like?
If you start another comment with "I'm only _____ .", im gonna kick you in the face.
Broderick Bunnell I actually learned that in sixth grade lol
This is exactly like my workplace. New engineers arrive full of confidence with all they've learned from books. However, they soon realize what you read in a book isn't always applicable in real life scenarios.
coolest animation I've ever seen
I know someone who actually can't see colour, so this was an interesting thing to discuss
Of course she would learn something new. She has never been able to link the facts with the actual color.
But the point of the thought experiment is that the actual color, according to a physicalist's perspective, would be completely understood solely by the facts, since the physical facts are supposedly all that exists
If she learns something new that just means she didn’t really have all the facts or the ability to consciously process all the facts
This is the problem. Idk if it’s with this video or the experiment or the fact that people simply don’t pay attention to details. But mary did not learn anything new about color. She is having a new experience that is changing how she sees the world. How she sees herself. How she sees everything that she’s ever learned. Almost like a traumatic experience like her soul transformed. Like she was a caterpillar who transformed into a butterfly. The caterpillar hatched from its larva and immediately consumes a bunch of plant matter(knowledge/facts/education) and then will shed its skin a few times in between. Then once that is down it will create its cocoon and nest itself into a transformation. For the caterpillar the only thing that changes is that it grows wings. It does not have a mirror or an instruction Manuel with observation notes about itself from Greek philosophers! Lol that experience and transformation of the butterfly did not need any instruction or guidance or assistance from anything other then access the an energy source to grow WITHIN to, and not from
out of or out to. It’s transformation is only impactful when the spirit and consciousness of man is a witness to its nature. That is when man becomes inspired and starts to create a SOUL. Man can now observe and sense and interact with a part of itself it never knew before and now growing within that experience. Very much like the butterfly itself, in fact they are one in the same. If Mary were to have that experience with a butterfly from beginning to end. She isn’t learning something because that is when you have someone explain to you what are you supposed to be experiencing and then creating. Very much like a formula Input = output. But the colors mary sees on the butterfly and the fact she had the life cycle of the butterfly explained to her, did not stop the consciousness between mary and the butterfly from connecting DIRECTLY and that direct one on one sensory experience is expressed in the perception of color. And that cannot be described..
@@camerontaylor7471 Idk if Im right or wrong but just wanted to throw this out. What if she is learning how her consiouness represents the activation of certain color cones in her eyes?
She learned something new because of the "physical" fact that her nerve and brain were stimulated when she actually saw "colors", which she's never experienced before.
Umm ACTUALLY Mary can look at her body, which most likely has color
I thought of this, too. It is true - unless Mary is completely colourblind - and I mean COMPLETELY so: all rods, no working cones. In which case seeing the redness of the apple is impossible (so she learns nothing) unless the science was incomplete or wrong (in which case she has learned unfathomable things.)
I've heard a response to this, which suggests that Mary was born completely color blind and then a cure was created for that, allowing her to see red. So Mary's Room isn't really possible but some experience with the same implications is.
@@curranfrank2854 I bet she got the cure when her screen malfunctioned, happened to explode, sending shards of glass into her eye that somehow did a corrective surgery that fixed her colorblindness, while at the same time causing the screen to show color for the first time
@@aaroniousairlines9949 Yes that seems like the most plausible scenario
I can relate to this.
I observe people and their behaviors all the time and think I have life figured it out, but when I experience those things, turns out it's totally different then what I thought.
Ex Machina? ...anyone???
Dann Santos un that movie Mary experieced all colors at once
But Domhnall Gleeson used this thought experiment to describe knowledge vs.experience. You could argue that this thought experiment taught her that she needed to get out in the world -- in other words, it was her driving force.
Dann Santos So strange, watched the movie this evening and then this showed up on my recommended...
😆😆😆
Taryn Elise woah.... same... watched it yesterday... then clicked this video and thought .... I've heard this before ..... yesterday
This is a fantastic video; amazing job explaining Mary's room so succinctly. However, there is one main problem. You defined physicalism as the belief that all knowledge can be obtained via physical facts. This is the epistemological form of physicalism, but physicalism also has a metaphysical component, that being that the universe itself is purely physical/material, and that no part of it is composed of spiritual, mental, or otherwise non-physical substance. This thought experiment was designed to disprove both the epistemological AND metaphysical arguments for physicalism.
In my opinion, Mary's room makes a good case for the arguments against epistemological physicalism; however, I think it is completely flawed when discussing metaphysical physicalism, as one could easily just say that some knowledge comes in the form of qualia, but is still produced by physical processes in the world. There are many much more effective arguments both against this type of physicalism and for substance dualism. But that's just my two cents.
Plot twist: This was all an elaborate prank by Mary so that she could confuse us all
It is like snow, you can know everything there is about it and you maybe have some feelings for it. But it will still blow your mind, when you experience it the first time.
After seeing this, I went and changed my computer setting so that my screen would be on a greyscale, and I can say, the apples Mary knew before discovering color are nothing like the bright red apple she sees one day on her screen.
"The whole is more than the sum of its parts"
The problem with this scenario is that by construction you've stated that she learned everything that there was to know about color vision and then contradicted that by removing an important aspect of learning about color vision: the experience of it. You've assumed contradictory axioms so the principle of explosion applies and you can conclude anything.
Gordon Clay well i mean you dont have to experience cancer to learn everything about it.
@Drinker_Of_Milk exactly. thank you
@@BB-xm6hy read my comment if you want to
@@emiliosereni1864 where?
She knew what red was, but she didn't know what red looked like. A single photo is often superior to complex description. Until she saw the color, she didn't know the color red in her mind's eye. It's like how know one knows what ultraviolet looks like, we can only understand in relation to other colors, and know its physical properties.
Your brain can create images by thinking about everything in the image. If she knew everything about color vision, she could already be seeing her monochromatic room as a colorful one.
Shanka DaWanka you can't describe something you haven't seen. if we could, we would know what black holes look like
But she's never seen colour before
well i mean she learned what the color looked like
+
Thanks
😂😂
Here's an easy way to figure this out..... Look at colorblind people and their reactions to seeing proper colors for the first time, they always say "It's more colorful than I had imagined".
this remind me of that film Arrival
Interesting comment, but what does that have to do with colors?
Nicolino Will , maybe our languages are the limiting factor when it comes to sharing an experience with others by using just words...
I am unable to recall exactly but in the movie Arrival, those aliens had some special features(circular pattern to represent the time factor) in their language which humans still don't have which makes us unable to comprehend their language
I agree language is very limiting in describing an experience
It's just like knowing the ingredients of a pizza but not having to eat one.
Apples have made great contribution throughout history.
Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head.
Mary's room helped change our understanding on psychology
The Apple company contributed significantly in technology.
Reply if you know anymore contributions made by the mighty apple.
"An apple a day keeps the doctor away"
Garden of Eden. Seems like the apple is an appropriate symbol of wisdom
Apple pie!
Apple Records
I am so glad we had to watch this for my philosophy classes...I completely agree with the statement that you can learn everything there is to know about something, but you will never fully know or understand until it is first-hand experience. I also agree that we do not have proper language to describe this sort of thing and that's why it is so confusing for us to understand/
Great video! But at 3:55 ,I have a feeling philosophers and physicists/physicians will be
"seeing red" over experience verses expression till the end of time! 😀
What about this :
She is smart, she builds a simulation like matrix, a colorful one.
Is there any different perceiving, especially colors?
Well in my opinion she has to learn something new, because she just knows how she is able to see that color, if she never saw it she doesn't know how the color looks like, so she will learn that. It is the same question as "can a blind man know and/or imagin how it is to see". He cannot, he can just understand it to some degree. But that just means that his and also Marry's knowledge isn't complete. So both teorys are true, you can't explain emotion or mental state or even filling to the point that other person know how it fills, but it is just because of inability to have or transfer 100% of informations to someone. Also I would like to make a little experiment with you people, just imagine that you have to explain by only words and nothing else to a blind child what is let's say donut shape. He doesn't have knowledge of any shape and you can't use any of his other senses just words. Try it here.
Veljko you're not - people just are desperate to deny qualia
I think you can glean an idea of whether or not she would learn anything new by what colorblind people learn when they put on the glasses that make them see color. They know what the color is supposed to look like, how it has been described, what items are supposed to be that color, yet when they put on those glasses they all express the knowledge of something new. Statements of I never knew it could be so vivid, or wow there is so much contrast now. They are learning something new just by seeing the new colors.