The Human Question

Daniel Dennett has an interesting rebuttal to Frank Jackson's argument for qualia.  Jackson's argument takes the form of a story about Mary, who--although she has lived in an environment devoid of color since her earliest days--has nevertheless become the world's foremost scientific expert on color, studying the outside world through a black and white monitor. Once Mary leaves the confines of her achromatic environment for the normal, colorful world, she will finally get to see blue things.  And, Jackson tells us, she will discover something that she hadn't previously known through her scientific studies.  If that is so, then there is more to color than what science can measure and report, and that something more is called qualia. Dennett counters in Consciousness Explained  that if Mary knows absolutely everything there is to know about this color and our perception thereof, then she already knows, in terms of physics, how blue differs from yellow even before...