Frank Jackson's famous 'Mary's Room' Thought Experiment

Published: 04 September 2020
on channel: Jeffrey Kaplan
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This is a video lecture about Frank Jackson's Mary's Room thought experiment, which is designed as an argument against physicalism. Mary is a vision scientist who spends her whole life in a back-and-white room. It is stipulated that she knows all the correct physical information. But when she emerges from the room and sees a red object for the first time, it very much seems like she learns something new: what red looks like. So, if she learns something new, then she must not have known everything. So there must be non-physical information. So physicalism is false. That's the argument. Also, this video goes in to a discussion and explanation of Epiphenomenalism, the view that conscious mental events are byproducts of physical events that do not themselves causally act on the physical world. This is part of an introductory level philosophy course.


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