In 1986 Frank Jackson published an article titled “What Mary Didn’t Know.”, Jackson’s argument in this paper was to be aligned with Physicalism; more specifically the knowledge argument. In his paper he tells us of a woman, Mary who for scientific purposes has been confined to a black and white room, and learns everything there is to know about the physical world through lectures and black and white books, she understands all the physical facts about us and our environment. This is the basic definition of physicalism and why this paper was written because to say that there is more information that Mary doesn’t understand which isn’t physical would disprove the entire existence of physicalism.
Just a few years earlier in 1982 Daniel Dennet wrote an article titled “How to How to study human consciousness
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Their thoughts beliefs and words are all pre-structured by scientists to achieve the answers that they want to be shown. The facts are delivered to the audience according to denote but the world around them is completely left out, he uses an analogy of sherlock holmes to show this. What is the difference between knowledge written down in empirical text and knowledge regarding the entire concept surrounding the individual in question is what I get from Dennet’s paper.
Furthermore, is Mary in Jacksons paper nothing more than a pre-programmed zombie? She knows only what jackson wants her to know, and when she conveniently doesn’t understand something that isn 't physical she proves jackson right. How can we effectively study consciousness when it is not left to it’s own devices; when it is placed under a scientific label; it is impossible to study something with scientific connotations when the item in question (consciousness) is barely even understood on a scientific