Mary's room
On the axis: The enigma of consciousness · a lived experience
A scientist knows everything physics can say about colour, without ever having seen any: the day she sees red, does she learn something? If she does, lived experience would be one more fact, which objective knowledge did not contain; if not, one must say what she gains while learning nothing.
This problem is brought out by the thought experiment Mary's room:
Mary is a brilliant vision scientist: shut all her life in a black-and-white room, she has nonetheless learned, on a monochrome screen, everything physical science can say about color. Every wavelength, every cell of the retina, every circuit of the brain: no part of the mechanism escapes her. One day she is let out, and for the first time she sees a red rose. Does she then learn something? If she does, then a complete knowledge of the still left a remainder: what it is, for a living being, to see red.
Frank Jackson, "Epiphenomenal Qualia" (1982)
On seeing red for the first time, does Mary learn something that science had not given her?
Your choice above is recorded in your profile. See my profile →
Justification
Dennett rejects as the tradition conceives them: intrinsic, ineffable, private and infallible properties, given to introspection. What exists are brain states and the real patterns to which our reports attach; introspection is not a gaze upon an inner stage but a source of reports, often confabulated, which his method, heterophenomenology, treats as data to be explained rather than as established facts. Consciousness is therefore not denied: it is the appearance of an inner glow that itself becomes the effect to be explained.
Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.Consciousness Explained (1991), ch. 1, opening sentence
"Quining Qualia" (1988) · Consciousness Explained (1991)
Anchors: Jackson · Dennett
leads to: Place of science (What only lived experience gives)