The knowledge argument

This seems to be more about a limitation of language than a problem with the logic. Using "knowledge" in both premises looks clumsy. But looking at it purely conceptually, where Mary would intellectually understand the complete theory in the B&W room, and then gain new experiential insight when leaving the room, it seems to at least prove that experiential knowledge is inherently different than theoretical knowledge.

That's more what confuses me about the structure of this argument, though - I would take the experiential insight to be more "physical". So I still don't understand what they mean by physicalism.

To everyone insisting that the argument is silly: while in this particular case I do disagree with the conclusion, I'd encourage you to pause for a moment before dismissing it. I often find that when I approach philosophical theories with too critical a mindset, I dismiss it too quickly, and, if I spend the time afterwrd, find the issue more complicated than it appeared at first. It's something like being posed a coding problem, going "Oh, that's simple!", and then discovering later that the problem, is, in fact, quite complex.

On the topic of philosophy, in general, though, Bertrand Russell says it better than I can: "Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came to seem true. This exercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking, and helps us to realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind."

Mary's Room is a thought experiment that attempts to establish that there are non-physical properties and attainable knowledge that can be discovered only through conscious experience.

From the beginning the argument pre-supposes there is objective knowledge that can learnt. As we know from relativity and quantum theory, there is no objective truth. The location of every atom, cell or neuron is unique to every observer.

Reading the RGB encoding of a photo, one number at a time, compared to seeing the photo with your own eyes, are different experiences. Imagine if each of our senses are different dimensions of perception, different ways of learning knowledge (reading about color through a book vs experiencing color with eyes) are orthogonal to each other. You can only connect those experiences and imagine colours after you've experienced it with your own eyes - your brain can "fake" perceptions, but only after having experienced the same kind of perception previously.

This blind man regained vision at 68:

When he went to the corner store with his sister, he handed the cashier a $10 bill when he really should have handed a $5 bill...The idea of remembering things visually is hard as well, and he still resorts to touching and feeling the world around him to store those memories. Of course while blind he'd been able to differentiate between $5 and a $10, but once he's regained his vision the touch-knowledge isn't connected to his vision-knowledge immediately. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2382619/Canadian-man...

Knowing how neurone in our brains work is different to having those neurons interacting with each other.

I argue "knowledge", if exists, can be interpreted only through the filter of qualia. No human knows anything without experience. Even reading a page of C code can only be done through our eyes and our mind and compared through previous experience in reading the same. Our minds are qualia, period.

As this was a philosophical argument I'll post a poem from a philosopher.

    Thus Something and Nothing produce each other; 
    The difficult and the easy complement each other; 
    The long and the short off-set each other; 
    The high and the low incline towards each other; 
    Note and sound harmonize with each other; 
    Before and after follow each other.

http://wengu.tartarie.com/wg/wengu.php?m=NOzh&l=Daodejing&no...

With your babel fish you listen to an alien recording "A tall being and a short being once stood here". You wonder, having never met or seen any sign of aliens besides this audio recording, how tall and how short were those beings?

Let's take the claim "experience is information" to be true (I've yet to find a reasonable definition of "information", so I agree).

Jackson's point here is specifically to show that there are at least two kinds of information: physical information, and information that is not physical. Bearing that in mind, what do you mean by: > "Either she has all of the information about it, or she doesn't."

If Mary is never allowed to actually see the colour of objects in her room, she is being deprived of a physical fact regarding colour vision, and premise 1 doesn't stand. Put another way, how is Mary's later epiphany to be induced in her but by physical means? She must physically experience (photons in eyeballs) colour.