How would you explain the color green to a blind child?
Many philosophers would say that you couldn't. This relates to Jackson's famous Mary case (previously discussed here - and originally laid out in Jackson's article "Epiphenomenal Qualia." ) Jackson asks us to suppose that Mary is a color scientist who has spent her entire life in a black and white room. Though she has learned all the physical science relating to color, she has never experienced color herself. Now imagine that one day she is let out of the room and shown a ripe tomato. Jackson supposes that we would have the intuition that she has now learned something new about color. "Aha," she might say to herself, "So that's what the color red looks like." In other words, despite knowing all the physical facts about color, Mary did not know what it is like to experience the color red. If you buy this argument, then it would seem to follow that even if you were to teach the blind child (who, I'm assuming, is blind from birth) all the physical science about the color green, you still...
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