Mary’s Room: A philosophical thought experiment
There are so many things in the world that are beyond our explanation and thoughts. We often think that all the theories can be explained through the physical theories.
Many philosophers and scientists have often argued about knowledge argument which states that a person can study more than what has experienced but many often say say that people don’t really get more information by experiencing a known fact through studying or the people already have enough knowledge about it.
This argument was started by a person who suggested the Mary’s room thought. Mary’ s room is a philosophical thought in which a women named Mary is considered.
Mary is a person who lives in a place where it is completely black and white patterns and also her books and her surroundings undergo similar pattern i.e, black and white. Her screen also shows black and white patterns. This allows Mary to only view black and white colors.
But suddenly due to some changes in her system, she happens to see an apple which is bright red in color. So the question of the knowledge argument is whether Mary does get anything new to learn from the image or not because of her previous knowledge about the colors and their physicalities.
The philosophers have argued about this topic and still a proper solution for this question is not proposed.
Some of the philosophers believe that Mary does not get anything new to learn because of her previous knowledge about colors and their wavelengths and physical nature. But some of the philosophers suggest that the knowledge about the physicalities of the color will give the entire knowledge about and believe that viewing the image for the first time will give her a new experience. This experiment is done to understand about the various concepts which are present in this universe but are beyond our explanation and increase the knowledge of the people.
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