Mary Saw Red...

An Astro-Chromatologist Scorned

[For more on the Mary’s Room philosophical thought experiment see the sources after the short story below]

“Hey, Bruce! That place you used to work at is on TV again!” Tim, the affable bartender shouted. His message had to travel accross the bar top, past the pool tables, and all the way back to the dimly lit corner with the dart board and the video gambling chairs to reach Bruce.

“Colarare Labs?” Bruce bellowed back with a swivel of his chair.

“Yeah, I guess it’s that same chick as last time, that massacre Mary” Tim said out of the side of his mouth, still eying the news report on the mounted TV.

“Oh yeah, that Mary’s nuts. What has she got herself into now?” Bruce asked as he swiveled back to his digital slots.

“Something about a cobalt bomb and a star cruiser.” Tim replied.

“Hang on… what!?” asked a voice at the end of the bar. “Someone, you call ‘massacre Mary’ has something called a ‘cobalt bomb’ on a star cruiser? Whh- what?! Somebody fill me in!”

“Oh hey, Johnny, didn’t see you come in. Hey, Bruce would ya come over here and fill the new guy in about old Mary?” Tim bellowed once more. “Bruce used to work with Mary and he’s always looking to brag about it” he said, adjusting his volume for Johnny.

Bruce finished his last spin and scurried over to the bar, plopping himself down next to Johny. “Okay, so it’s like this, I was a custodial engineer at Colarare Labs about ten years ago when it was still operational. It’s that big beige building with the smoke stacks over on the south side of town, by the river. You seen it before?”

“Yeah, it’s all abandoned looking, right?” Johnny asked.

“Right, but it used to be a cutting-edge research facility—one of the best in the world!”

“Dang, and you were an engineer there?”

“ehyeah.” Bruce coughed.

“Woah, woah, woah, hang on a second there, Bruce. You were not no engineer there.” Tim interjected. “He was a janitor!”

“Dude, I was a custodial ENGINEER. That’s still an engineer” Bruce exclaimed,  exculpating himself.

“Look man, you were a janitor. There’s no shame in it, my dad was a janitor. But you can’t tell people you were an engineer at that lab. As a matter of fact, if you had been an engineer, instead of the janitor, Mary would have surely incinerated you too!”

“You know, that’s a fair point” Bruce admitted. “Okay, so I was the janitor, but that’s still a pretty big deal, given the prestige of the facility.”

“Well what made the facility so prestigious?” Johnny asked.

“We were at the pinnacle of vision science, optics, chromatology, and experimental philosophy.” Bruce boasted.

“We?” Tim asked with a smirk.

“Shut up, dude.”

“What does all that mean?” asked Johnny.

“Well, the lab was at the cutting-edge of research on color and the human experience of color.”

“So what happened?” Johnny asked taking a sip of his white Russian.

“Marry happened.” Tim said, affecting an ominous tone.

“Hey! Who’s telling the story here, Tim?! I got it.” Bruce whined. “So, everything was going great with the research facility. Lots of funding was coming in. Lots of new lab techs, scientists, theorist, and experimenters where coming in from all over  to do their work right here in our town. But one of the experiments went horribly wrong.”

“Let me guess, Mary?”

“Yes! Mary! I was getting there, guy! Yes, great. You got it, freakin’ Mary. Would you let me tell the story? Please?”

“Okay, okay, ‘custodial engineer’” Johnny said with a smirk and winked at Tim.

“Great. So anyways, Mary was a donation baby. Like those babies that people leave at firehouses in those boxes, you know? Except we had a spot where people could leave babies to dedicate to science.”

“Yuck, dude! People were just sacrificing their kids to some color laboratory?” Johnny blurted.

“I mean, it was different times, they weren’t sacrificed… there were still laws on how the children had to be treated and stuff.”

“Yeah, that is gross bro.” Tim chimed in.

“Whatever, I don’t make the rules.”

“Wait, they didn’t let the custodial engineers write the code of conduct?” Tim chortled.

“How bout, you go get me another beer, bartender, and I’ll finish the story. Anyways, Mary came to the lab as a donation baby and this one experimental philosopher and his team set up an experiment to determine the nature of knowledge and color experience. They decided to raise her in an ersatz black and white miny environment. She had special contacts which would transmute all of her experience of her surroundings into black and white and shades of grey, but she was never able to see any other colors. Then they raised her to be world-class caliber color specialist.”

“Wait, how does that work? Asked Johnny.

“Well, she learned all the physical facts about color and neurophysiology and wavelengths of light and all that stuff. I don’t know man, like you guys keep saying, I was just the janitor. But they set it up so that she would know everything there is to know about colors except what it’s like to experience them for herself.” Bruce exclaimed with the last of his air and a reddening face.

“That’s kinda dark isn’t it? ‘Let’s deprive this poor orphan of color experiences and then make her an expert in the science of colors’’ mocked Johnny.

“Nah, it wasn’t as meanspirited as that. The experiment was meant to test whether or not Mary would learn something new once they finally let her experience color for the first time. Like, would she learn something the first time she saw a red apple even though she already knew that apples are red and she knew everything about the wavelengths of redness and all those physical facts about red stuff.”

“Well, what would that prove though?” Tim interjected finally bringing Bruce another beer.

“It’d prove that physical facts aren’t the same as experiential facts. You could know all the physical facts about a red apple but you wouldn’t know what they call ‘the phenomenal fact’ of seeing the redness of the apple. So, if the two types of facts are different, then the world is more than just physical facts. I guess that has some significance for philosophy or something.”

“But did they really need to run this experiment on that poor girl?” Johnny asked.

Tim perked up and began scratching his head, “oh, right! Like why didn’t they just think through the experiment in their heads? It doesn’t seem like they’d need to actually spend all that time and energy and money—”

“—and traumatize that poor girl!” Johnny exclaimed.

“Right, and there was no need to traumatize Mary either.” Tim said nodding in agreement.

“Okay, well I’ll tell them to make sure you two are on the ethics committee next time” Bruce said trying to restrain his frustration. “Anyways, do you want to know what happened?”

“Well, I imagine that they did let Mary finally see a red apple and she went berserker on the whole lab and that’s why Tim called her ‘Massacre Mary’”.

“Whh—yeah, that’s right, thanks for stealing my thunder, man. Mary saw a red apple for the first time and she went absolutely nuts. She grabbed an experimental low-yield neutron coupler off the prototype shelf and laid thermonuclear waste to… well, to every one of the scientists and philosophers in her vicinity.”

“Yeah, she really just saw red, am I right?” Tim said leaning in for a laugh.

“Nice, bro, make light of the worst massacre this town has ever seen. Good job.”

“Whatever, Bruce. Like you don’t love talking about it every chance you get?” Tim retorted.

“So, what happened to Mary after that?” Johnny asked.

“Well, that’s the crazy thing, they didn’t even charge her. They said because of her unusual upbringing—you know, the whole orphan brought up in a lab and all—and with the trauma of learning that she was intentionally deprived of all color experiences as part of an experiment, the state decided she needed rehabilitation rather than punishment.” 

“So, she’s in a mental institution or what?”

“Oh no, she’s was rehabilitated pretty quickly. She went on to be—get this—a color scientist!” Tim added.

“What? After all that she still wanted to do science?” asked Johnny.

“Yeah, how crazy is that?”

“Dang, that is nuts!” said Johnny “So, what’s all that about a cobalt bomb and a star cruiser?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I just caught a bit of the report before I hollered for Bruce. Let’s see what’s up” Tim said as he turned up the volume on the TV.

“…her colleague, Dr. Frank Jillson. Dr. Jillson, thanks for being with us. Can you help us make sense of this situation? What was Mary working on and what do you think she’s up to with this stolen star cruiser?”

“Well, Diane, Mary is frankly one of the best students I’ve ever had. And she graduated to become one of the brightest researchers and teammate I’ve ever had. She began her studies in Astro-Chromatology but finished off working in stellar astronomy and nuclear physics, with an emphasis in cobalt fusion…I… I’m sorry, Diane. This whole thing just has me sick.”

“That’s quite alright, dr. Jillson. Take your time. Do you have any idea what Mary intends to do with the stolen space craft? And what does she intend to do with the bomb?”

“I’m afraid I know exactly what she is up to. I put it together this morning but when I went to confront her, she had already absconded with the ship. As many of your viewers will know, the color of a star is determined by its surface temperature. Our Sun is a yellow star, but there are blue stars which burn much hotter and red stars which burn colder. I fear that Mary intends to fly her cobalt bomb into our Sun in order to enact a quantum effect known as vaccum polarization. If she’s successful then this would permanently change the fusion reactions of the Sun, thus changing its surface temperature and ultimately, its color. In short, Mary is intending to change our yellow sun into a black sun.”

“To what end, doctor?”

“As is popular knowledge now, Mary had a very troubled childhood. She was basically raised as a lab rat, completely deprived of a vast array of qualia, namely, her color experiences. She was only able to see black and white and shades of gray until she was 17 years old. I believe Mary has acquired a vast array of scientific knowledge in order to exact her own sense of retribution. If she succeeds in blackening the Sun, no earthbound human, will ever see anything other than black, white, or gray ever again.”

[see my conversation with Frank Jackson, inventor of the Mary’s Room thought experiment and former proponent of the knowledge argument against physicalism, here:

also see my conversation with Tim Crane on what the knowledge argument actually shows here:

and read this for more context on knowledge arguments and Mary’s Room:

Frank Jackson's Paper "What Mary Didn't Know"

and read the SEP article Knowledge Argument ]