Mary's Room: A philosophical thought experiment - Eleanor Nelsen
View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/mary-s-room-a-philosophical-thought-experiment-eleanor-nelsen Imagine a neuroscientist who has only ever seen black and white things, but she is...
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Imagine a brilliant neuroscientist named Mary. Mary lives in a black and white room, she only reads black and white books, and her screens only display black and white. But even though she has never seen color, Mary is an expert in color vision and knows everything ever discovered about its physics and biology. She knows how different wavelengths of light stimulate three types of cone cells in the retina, and she knows how electrical signals travel down the optic nerve into the brain. There, they create patterns of neural activity that correspond to the millions of colors most humans can distinguish. Now imagine that one day, Mary's black and white screen malfunctions and an apple appears in color. For the first time, she can experience somethi...
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Imagine a brilliant neuroscientist named Mary. Mary lives in a black and white room, she only reads black and white books, and her screens only display black and white. But even though she has never seen color, Mary is an expert in color vision and knows everything ever discovered about its physics and biology. She knows how different wavelengths of light stimulate three types of cone cells in the retina, and she knows how electrical signals travel down the optic nerve into the brain. There, they create patterns of neural activity that correspond to the millions of colors most humans can distinguish. Now imagine that one day, Mary's black and white screen malfunctions and an apple appears in color. For the first time, she can experience somethi...
