Mary Leaves Her Room

Nigel Hems asks, does Mary see colours differently outside her room?

- Nigel Hem

The ‘Mary’s Room’ thought experiment devised by Frank Jackson goes something like this. Mary is raised from birth in a black and white room, never seeing anything of any other colour. Coloured objects are all carefully excluded. She always wears white gloves and there are no mirrors. Mary is given a normal education as far as is possible in the circumstances. She has all the information available to her to understand a full scientific account of colour, and in fact she eventually becomes a brilliant scientist specialising in colour perception. The question is, does Mary learn something new about colour, over and above the physical and scientific knowledge she has amassed, once she’s finally let out of her room and sees an expanse of bright red flowers for the first time? The idea is, if she does learn something new, there must be something about colour experience above and beyond any scientific description of it. Well, I think it can be denied that she learns something new; but not in the way most materialist philosophers might think.

For most philosophers of mind, the Mary’s Room thought experiment (originally presented in ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’, The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol 32, Issue 127, 1982) is viewed in terms of one crucial factor: the idea that what Mary is seeing inside her black and white room is not a species of real colour experience. I will contest this idea later.

Pre-linguistic experiences have come to be known as qualia by philosophers of mind (quale is the singular). They’re the kinds of immediate subjective experiences we have as a result, originally, of sensation: when feeling a twinge, seeing a red apple, or tasting a piece of chocolate. They’re the qualities we’re intimately connected with when we experience the world.