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Thoughts on Thought

Mary Leaves Her Room

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

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.

Qualia are thought by non-materialist philosophers to be examples of states of mind which cannot be identified with, or reduced to, physical states of the brain or central nervous system. It is in this context then that philosophers of mind ask: can Mary obtain new knowledge of colour over and above her already-obtained scientific and physical knowledge, once she leaves her black and white room? Those who think that Mary’s scientific knowledge of colours obtained in her room covers everything she can know about them will say she does not learn anything new upon seeing colours for the first time. Those who think that Mary’s perceiving reds, blues, etc after leaving her room does give her new, if non-scientific, information – namely, of the nature of colour experiences – where this experience could not be explained in terms of the scientific knowledge Mary has already obtained, would answer yes, she does learn something new. So which is it?

Knowing About Colour Without Seeing Colour

It’s not difficult to imagine the black and white scenario inside Mary’s Room. Indeed, colour blindness is found in some animal species, as well as in humans experiencing rare acute colour disruption. There are documented cases of people who, due to very specific brain damage, only see in black and white. Moreover, one could easily imagine how it would be possible to come to know the pure scientific facts about colour if one were to be in this perceptual state. Mary’s perceptual knowledge would be limited to the things she came into contact with and came to name; but this would not, it seems, hamper her theoretical, scientific knowledge of all colours.

However, we can turn things around somewhat and so re-examine this thought experiment. If I can show that Mary is already in a position inside her room to understand what will be outside it, I can present a novel way of denying that Mary gains any new knowledge. To do this I will follow the lead of some of A.J. Ayer’s views put forward in The Central Questions of Philosophy (1973).

We can start by challenging two core assumptions behind the Mary’s Room thought experiment. The first is that Mary’s perception of qualia needs to be described in terms of intrinsic subjective states of mind. The second, connected, assumption, is that Mary’s perception of black and white inside her room is significantly different from any other kind of colour perception.

Does Mary Perceive Herself?

Let’s deal with the first main idea we are challenging. We need to show that it is possible to construe qualia perception as something that does not necessarily have to refer to any subjective states of mind or consciousness. Of course, Mary, the human being, is present in her room along with the black and white objects she perceives. What we are saying is that it is only necessary for us to refer to the basic ‘patterns’ of objects Mary perceives in her room detached from any reference to her mind or self. Ayer explains this point using the term ‘percept’ to designate a type of object made up from basic perceptions of qualia. He says that, “reference to a particular observer does not, and indeed cannot, occur in the primitive designation of percepts themselves.” (Central Questions, p.94, 1973). And why not? Ayer explains: “Since persons do not yet come into the picture, there is no implication that the patterns occur in the experience of any particular observer …” (p.94).

According to the above, Mary is not in a position to know the person she is when attending to her visual experience. Putting the point more generally, there’s no reason to think that Mary is thinking in speculative terms yet. So there are grounds for supposing that she also lacks the vital state of mind to imagine absent colour qualia. However, we can be pretty sure that she’s fully aware of all that she sees, hears, and touches. The point I’m making is that the type of things Mary perceives both inside and outside her room must be the same in this vital respect: namely, only things that do not require self-awareness or other abstract imagining, only sensory perception. This means that her knowledge of colours does not involve what she can imagine herself perceiving. Rather, there are only the perceptions themselves, and whatever scientific understanding of them she has.

We’re beginning to close the gap between Mary’s perceptions inside and outside her room – between the black and white things she’s already seen and the colour qualia which await her exit. We are now ready to challenge the second core idea.

Mary Sees Qualia Inside & Outside Her Room

The second main assumption of the Mary’s Room thought experiment is that the perception of black and white is significantly different from the perception of other colours. But I think it can be argued that Mary is already equipped to know what’s outside her room in the same way as she knows what’s inside it.

What is distinctive about A.J. Ayer’s visual qualia is that they are not like normal subjective ideas of things. They are instead merely descriptions of the contents of the world we see, hear or touch, etc, and they are “exemplified in anyone’s experience” (p.94). Ayer would class perceptions of black and white, as well as our perceptions of the sizes and shapes of things (which Mary also experiences), as examples of basic qualia (p.99). If so, we can say that black and white shades of visual qualia are already available for Mary to see inside her room, and can be considered among the basic building blocks of her knowledge of the world. Most philosophers see things ‘officially’ in terms of Mary actually perceiving some physical stuff inside her room but certainly not perceiving colour qualia, which she could only see in the outside world. But we can now turn this second assumption on its head. By applying Ayer’s account of what qualia are, we are now all but ready to finish closing the gap between what Mary sees inside and outside her room.

I think we can now say with some confidence that Mary’s perception of black and white and their shades is pretty much the same as her experience of any basic qualia. This means, in effect, that asking whether Mary learns anything ‘new’ concerning the chromatic qualia after leaving her room should be answered with a resounding, ‘No, she does not!’

Why? Well, I’m arguing that Mary gains full relevant knowledge of qualia inside her room, because all the essential elements of any absent qualia are already present in Mary’s experience of the black and white shades she’s already seen. So Mary cannot possibly hope to gain any significant new knowledge concerning colour.

A Final Example

We can flesh things out even further by way of an example. Let’s imagine Mary leaving her room and shouting out loud and clear after seeing red for the first time: “Eureka! I see it: I now see red!” Well, indeed; but must Mary now go on to say she knows anything new about colour? I say that Mary’s situation is more like a naturalist seeing a new species of bird, never seen before: it would still be a bird of some description. In that case, nobody would claim to be discovering some fundamentally new knowledge of a different kind of thing. The naturalist has merely seen something new comprised of the same fundamental materials as other bird species. So, to follow that analogy through, outside her room, Mary has seen another variety of colour qualia, but nothing too different from the previous qualia she’s seen inside it. There would be nothing essentially new added to her visual knowledge, in the same way that the naturalist would not claim to have found a new kind of thing.

I could flip things around in another way to make this point even clearer. Let’s switch around the inside and outside of Mary’s Room. If Mary had never seen shades of black and white, but only other colours, there would be no difference to her new knowledge gained here either. In each case she would simply lack various specimens of qualia perception amongst others – just like the naturalist’s list of birds lacked one specimen from the species. This would be the only difference for Mary. In philosophical terms, the absence of either type of qualia – the chromatic colours or the achromatic colours – would represent a contingent absence only, never a necessary absence. This means that each kind of qualia perception we have discussed could either appear or not appear in Mary’s Room without much gain or loss for Mary’s overall stores of knowledge.

Looked at from this perspective, this account of Mary’s Room represents a significant divergence from almost all attempts to account for the famous thought experiment in terms of the so-called ‘mystery’ of absent subjective qualia. But there is no mystery if only certain specific qualia are not present in Mary’s Room while others are. I shall leave it at that.

Nigel Hems is a former Lecturer in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University. He edited the Bloomsbury Companion to Kant.