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thought experiment: what's the color of Mary's brain

There's the famous thought experiment in which a scientist named Mary is said to know everything about the color blue that can be conveyed through science.... but she has never seen the color blue (either because she lives in a black and white world or because she's color-blind)... until that blessed day when she sees blue for the first time: does she know something that she didn't know before?  Why yes.

That's the famous thought experiment.  Now here's my own variation on that theme.

Suppose someone is able to do a complete physical analysis of Mary's brain while she is either looking at or remembering blue.  Will they find any blue in there?  Why no, unless your talking about a part that was blue already.

Soooooooooooo. That thought experiment + question shows that it's just fanciful  to say that Mary has an image of blue in her brain: how can you have an image of a color that is not itself the color that it's supposed to represent? You can't!

The lack of a blue thing underscores how the material constituents of the knower need not be at all like the thing known.

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