Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
Can we ever know everything about something we can’t experience? The Australian philosopher Frank Jackson pondered this question in a thought experiment in 1982, which imagined a neuroscientist named Mary who understood everything there was to understand about colour vision, without ever having experienced it herself. If, in an instant, her black-and-white experience of sight shifted into colour, would she glean any new insight?
Detailed with stylish, shapeshifting animation in this short from TED-Ed, Jackson’s thought experiment ponders felt subjective experience (or ‘qualia’, for all the past and current philosophy students) and its relationship to knowledge. The questions raised by ‘Mary’s Room’ – including whether anything about experience transcends physical facts – remain some of the most perennial and unsettled in philosophy, even if Jackson himself actually reversed his position, concluding that the experience of colour vision does indeed correspond to a brain state, albeit one we don’t yet fully understand.
video
Consciousness and altered states
‘I want me back’ – after a head injury, Nick struggles with his altered reality
7 minutes
video
Metaphysics
What do past, present and future mean to a philosopher of time?
55 minutes
video
Knowledge
Why it takes more than a lifetime to truly understand a single meadow
11 minutes
video
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
video
Cities
A lush, whirlwind tribute to the diversity of life in a northern English county
3 minutes
video
Metaphysics
Simple entities in universal harmony – Leibniz’s evocative perspective on reality
4 minutes
video
Values and beliefs
A Zen Buddhist priest voices the deep matters he usually ponders in silence
5 minutes
video
Film and visual culture
Stop-motion origami unfurls in a playful exploration of how senses overlap
3 minutes
video
Ecology and environmental sciences
The ancient Hawaiian myth that sparked a modern ecological breakthrough
10 minutes