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  • Essay / Can machines think? : Can machines think? - 2051

    He postulates a girl named Mary who grows up in an entirely black and white room, but over the years learns everything there is to know about how color works from books on neurophysiology, vision and electromagnetism. If one day she was left outside and she finally saw color for the first time, would she learn anything new? A physicalist would say: “No, the mental states linked to understanding colors are already linked to the physical states of one's brain. » The physicalist would claim that he is not learning anything new because he has already fully learned the concept of color. But intuitively, most people would say Mary would learn something new. She could finally feel what it means to experience color and participate in the overwhelming qualia. A functionalist might step in and understand this as a qualia represented as a newly experienced functional state that can be related to the other functional states already created through learning from the book. If functionalism is correct in this description and there is a new state that exists outside of the brain states that already existed, then the physicalism description of type must be