Dinesh D'Souza, author of the new book Life After Death: The Evidence, writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer about Mind Over Matter, in the course of which he relates the "Mary Problem":
In 1986, philosopher Frank Jackson broadened Nagel's argument into a refutation of all materialist attempts to explain mental states in purely physical terms. In what has come to be called the "Mary problem," Jackson envisioned a brilliant scientist named Mary who is locked in a black-and-white room from which she investigates the world by way of a black-and-white television monitor. As a specialist in the neurophysiology of vision, Mary knows everything there is to know about color. She understands how different wavelengths of light stimulate the retina, and how those are channeled to the visual areas in the brain, resulting in such statements as "The sky is blue" and "Tomatoes are red.
D'Souza has also published an excerpt from his book in the upcoming issue of Salvo magazine, which you can get by subscribing here. Also included is Denyse O'Leary's "Behavioral Problem: Evolutionary Psychology Explains . . . Itself," "Gender Benders: Is My Sexual Identity an Accident Just Waiting to Happen?" by Robin Phillips, and "Now I'm 64: Boomers in America Face the Cult of Youth" by Marcia Segelstein and much much more, including two new "fake ads."
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