Avram,
I was going to say something similar in response to Greg @2 - but you beat me to it :) Yes, Frank Jackson in the Mary thought experiment was attempting to prove that physicalism isn't true, but positing that no amount of third-person data will lead to first-person knowledge of something.
One of the problems, as someone else has pointed out, is the usual thought experiment problem - you're asked to take on an absurd premise (in this case, that someone can know all there is to know about colour vision) and then try to draw some sort of common-sense conclusion from a story using that premise.
Searle's Chinese Room comes across the same problem, and indeed the sensible solution is the same one given for the Chinese Room - it's effectively the "Systems Response" to Searle. In terms of the Chinese Room, Searle is tricking us into a category error by pointing to the person in the room as the Chinese-unknower ("But look! He can respond to Chinese questions, but he still doesn't understand Chinese! QED"). The analogous entity to the human brain is the room itself (the whole system); it's the book plus communications slot, with the neural activity carried out at a snail's pace by the bloke in the room.
Mary, with her comprehensive knowledge of human colour perception, is like the bloke in the Chinese Room after he's memorised the entire book. Maybe she's a bit further ahead than him - all he has is a whole lot of incomprehensible synapse gates or something. But even so, what Mary needs to do in order to model colour perception at an experiential level is to instantiate that knowledge as a kind of mental subroutine. The knowledge has to become part of what Mary is.
Whether that's "possible" or not is a practical question, and no more absurd as a premise than asking that Mary memorise all that stuff in the first place. If she could do it, then she could indeed translate a whole lot of data into "knowing how it feels".
Searle's man in the Chinese room is actually slowly ticking over the mental activities of a completely different person - that's another trick that Searle performs, in distracting us from the fact that different people will respond differently to questions in Chinese. So what's being modeled is a complete person, not just some kind of idealised "comprehension-of-Chinese".
Mary is similarly supposed to be able to ingest "apprehension-of-colour" to the extent that when she sees a red rose she just goes "Yup, a red rose, that's what I thought it'd feel like to see one".
There's certainly something absurd going on in these thought experiments, but it's not due to the assumption of physicalism!
And by the way, thanks for the actual post, Avram! It's absolutely fascinating, and does indeed lead to some really interesting kinks in Jackson's Mary-style thought experiments, but it's anything but a win for the dualists/qualiaphiles.
Charlie would say right now that he's not some kind of a socialist - it's just that the world is fo far right that he looks a lot further left than he really is. So "liberal" might be more appropriate, despite being a more US term...
On the other hand, I'm delighted to see that as Charlie ages into a bent-backed spittle-mouthed old conservative, he will develop a slight Scottish brogue (or is that just a stereotypical "old British man" accent? I guess he didn't say "cannae" or anyhing.)
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