There are facts about experiences (such as the fact that some people have perfect pitch), and Mary can learn those facts from a book. It is a premise of this th

There are facts about experiences (such as the fact that some people have perfect pitch), and Mary can learn those facts from a book. It is a premise of this thought experiment, however, that you cannot learn things such as what it is like to see colors (or to have perfect pitch ourselves, for that matter) from books. The notion that this presents some sort of challenge to materialism comes from a) the way we use "to know" polysemously (at least in English), to refer both to having both factual information and memories of sensory input and emotions, and b) the misdirection of limiting what Mary studies to physics, as if this limitation on what you can learn from book studies was particular to the physical sciences. The argument is ultimately trivial, as its conclusion does not go beyond its tacit premise.