Black-and-White Mary
A Philosophy of Mind thought experiment as experienced through my eyes.
In Galileo’s Error, Philip Goff explains three approaches to the hard problem of consciousness, using clear language. I’m reading it as I prepare to write my third novel for The Q’Zam’Ta Trilogy in November 2025. Long before 2012 — the year I enrolled in an Oxford short course on Philosophy of Mind — I’ve been interested in the “hard problem,” as the Australian philosopher David Chalmers calls the problem of consciousness. The three main approaches Goff outlines are:
Naturalistic dualism
Materialism
Panpsychism.
For this piece, I’ll focus on the second one. Materialism doesn’t, as most surmise, say the mind is an emergent feature of the brain; it asserts consciousness is the brain itself.
Goff argues against materialism, using Frank Jackson’s famous thought experiment: Black and White Mary.
In Epiphenomenal Qualia, The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 127. (Apr., 1982), pp. 127-136, Jackson wrote:
“… Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specialises in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wave-length combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. (It can hardly be denied that it is in principle possible to obtain all this physical information from black and white television, otherwise the Open University would of necessity need to use colour television.)
“What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false. Clearly the same style of Knowledge argument could be deployed for taste, hearing, the bodily sensations and generally speaking for the various mental states which are said to have (as it is variously put) raw feels, phenomenal features or qualia. The conclusion in each case is that the qualia are left out of the physicalist story. And the polemical strength of the Knowledge argument is that it is so hard to deny the central claim that one can have all the physical information without having all the information there is to have. …”
In short, Jackson’s thought experiment rests on Mary having all the possible knowledge there is about colour yet having no direct experience aka qualia or the raw feel of colour. She has only directly experienced black, white, and shades of grey.
When she’s let out of her room, she experiences colour directly for the first time in her life.
Goff writes on page 72 of the paperback:
“According to Jackson, Mary at this point learns something new: she learns what it’s like to have a yellow [any colour outside of greys] experience.”
This thought experiment, in a nutshell, distinguishes between knowledge and consciousness.
Materialism states that the brain itself is consciousness. Yet if that is so, and the brain has all this knowledge encoded in it, then when Mary experiences colour directly, she would not gain a new experience. Consciousness is this new, qualitative experience that’s outside the realm of quantitative science — that is, knowledge.
Is This Story Plausible?
Goff asserts it’s so, referring to a paper written by Knut Nordby.
“Nordby is an expert in colour vision who has achronomatopia, a rare condition in which due to the absence of retinal cones, one is unable to perceive any colours apart from black and white and shades of grey.”
Although Nordby can write about Black and White Mary, he cannot experience the last part of her story: being let out of her room.
I did.
With a different vision condition.
Eye Surgery Changes my Conscious Visual Experiences
Prior to my brain injury, after measles had injured one eye in very early childhood, I didn’t have binocular vision.
Though I thought I did.
After all, I could see all the features of three-dimensional space.
Yet I knew from my university studies that I couldn’t have binocular vision.
Knowledge vied with my consciousness, that is, my direct qualitative experience of my perception and vision. Knowledge: The facts of how we see things as I’d learnt in high school and university. And my personal facts, such as, I had poor aim (couldn’t hit a wastepaper basket); kept bumping into door frames on the side where I had no peripheral vision; and couldn’t perceive 3D puzzles or movies. Consciousness: I experienced the subjective feel of distance because I could detect it. Similarly, I perceived shapes as having volume not flat 2D; did things others could, like drive or play tennis. Yeah, I couldn’t overhand serve to save my life, but somehow I’d learnt to sink baskets.
As for colour, I never doubted for a second I saw all the colours in the rainbow.
Boy, was I wrong.
My Black-and-White-Mary Experiment Results
My brain injury radically improved my vision. My brain stopped suppressing whatever my scarred eye could sense; yet other changes pointed to retinal improvements, as well. I had to have eye surgery so that my eyes could work together. The unforeseen improvement almost stopped me cold. Literally stopped me. I was unable to move without great effort on my brain’s part. Luckily, the CNIB sent me an orientation mobility trainer who retrained me and my brain to navigate in 3D space and around moving objects like people.
For the first time since I’d had the measles, I saw in true 3D.
I’d reacquired binocular vision.
And I saw more colours than I’d seen before.
More?!
Yes, I was astounded, shocked, amazed that I saw colour nuances I hadn’t experienced directly before.
It wasn’t that I saw blue for the first time, but that I could distinguish between subtle shades. Or not-so-subtle shades like the dark grey of Toronto’s waste bins from the dark blue of the recycling bins. (What bleep-bleep-bleep staff chose a grey and blue that anyone with a colour or vision impairment couldn’t distinguish? Accessibility is just a slogan in City Council’s and Toronto staff’s view, clearly.)
While my orientation and mobility trainer waited patiently, I’d stare in awe at all the red and pink nuances in brick buildings. To this day, I’ll sometimes just stare at a ceiling fan chain’s pull, fascinated at how it comes at me with depth in its shape and distance from the ceiling.
That’s qualia, the raw feel of things.
That’s consciousness.
I had the knowledge of binocular vision. My brain had cleverly created a facsimile of perceiving 3D space and distance so that I could move around in three-dimensional space without overly bumping into things. (It’s quite nice to have peripheral vision on both sides now, though, with less bumping into things.) But once the brain injury and surgeon together restored binocular vision, I acquired direct experience of it.
Subjective experience, subjective quality, what it feels like to have binocular vision. Qualia1, the raw feel of things.
That indefinable direct subjective experience of reality is consciousness. Yet, though we know about consciousness, and all of us have direct experience of it, we don’t actually know what it is. Hence, the hard problem.
I’ve gone one step beyond Nordby and undergone the entire Black-and-White Mary experiment.
This is just one reason why I believe the mind and brain are not the same.
But I don’t believe the mind is immaterial, either.
From my 2013 blog post on gamma brainwave training: “*Qualia is a word I learnt about 13 months ago during my philosophy of mind class. I had a lot of trouble learning the word and what it meant and remembering it. I relied on the iPad and philosophy dictionary to remind me constantly. Even when I was doing my metaphysics course this past Fall, I recognized the word but had much trouble comprehending it and recalling both the word itself and its meaning. But mere minutes after my gamma training , in the moment of writing this post, there it was: the word and its definition. And I wrote it and understood it as easily as the words that came before and after it. I don’t know about you, but I’m blown away.”