What Mary Didn T Know Summary

Physicalism is the view that everything in the world, including mental states, can be explained in terms of physical phenomena. Thomas Nagel argues against this view in “What is it like to be a bat?”, claiming that physicalism is unable to, given our current concepts, capture the subjective nature of mental states. Nagel says, “Fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like for that organism. We may call this the subjective character of experience” (Nagel 436). Nagel argues that as much as we may study bat biology and imagine what it is to have wings and hang upside down, we cannot have bat experiences. In our present condition, we have no way of actually inhabiting the mind of a bat, and therefore we cannot possibly understand what the experiences of a bat might be like, for the bat. This brings up an interesting point: specifically, I may know what it is like for be to be a human, but what is it like for another person to be a human? Frank Jackson and Jennan Ismael have differing responses with

Specifically, Jackson uses the case of Mary, a scientist who has lived in a black-and-white room her entire life and has had no color experiences. While inside the black-and-white room, Mary learns all the physical facts about the world, including physical facts about color. When Mary steps outside the black-and-white room, she sees a red object and thus learns what it is like to see red objects. Thus, there are facts about experience that Mary only learns after leaving the black-and-white room. Furthermore, there are facts about experience that are not physical facts. Jackson refutes physicalist explanations of experience by showing that the knowledge that Mary acquires is not knowledge of facts, but rather knowledge about what it is “like” to see