Mary's room

[Fin666]

Will mary learn anything?

• Yes
• No

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. […] What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? [1]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary%27s_room

To me this is a great question. It really gets to grips with an important issue. What i think the question really gets at is. Can a description so matter how scietificly rigarous ever completely describe experience.

To me the answer to this question is yes. But I think it is important to note that by the nature of the problem we could never explain why yes. If we can comunicate what she learns then she could surely already be aware of this. It is what we can not communicate, what is unexpressable that is beyond the scope of science.