Artemov, Dmitry: Mary’s New Task: Rethinking Mary’s Room, the Knowledge Argument, and the Boundaries of Experience

Mary’s room is usually understood as one of the most influential arguments against physicalism: a scientist who has never seen colors allegedly knows all physical facts about color perception, yet upon encountering color for the first time she seems to learn something new. However, the force of this argument depends on two terms that remain insufficiently clarified in the original setup: “physical” and “everything.” The first presupposes an already available boundary between the physical and the