Such a Mary does not and cannot exist. QED.

(Such a room does not exist either, but conceivably it could.)

I've heard about this for a long time, and unlike a lot of philosophy, which I love, this one leaves me cold, just like the people who claim that they and I are not conscious, or Searle's Chinese Room.

What bozo possibly believes that if you read enough about the color red, then it would be equivalent to actually seeing the color red? The fact that one needs to postulate an almost omniscient being to even get started should be an indication of the weakness of this argument.

We have plenty of examples of, say, blind people gaining sight or deaf people their hearing, often as adults, and no such “just as I expected” reaction has been reported. (In fact, sadly such adults sometimes retreat into hysterical blindness or deafness because they are overwhelmed the new stimuli.)

And we know that people are reliably able to distinguish colors even if those colors have the same name in the subject's native language.

And we know that subjects get profoundly different signals into their visual cortex when they see different colors.

“Seeing the color red” is an objective phenomenon we can measure.

It is “like something” to experience things. Creating some godlike Mary and locking her in a room has no bearing on the matter.

Great article though, your work is always a good read, have some claps!