I'm sure this will be noted all over the philosophical regions of the blogosphere, but in the latest issue of the New Yorker, there is an example of a real person who basically fits Frank Jackson's famous example of Mary the neuroscientist -- though in this case, it is not color vision, but stereoscopic vision, that the person gains. The person is named Sue Barry, and she actually is a neurobiologist. Unfortunately, the article is not online.
(For those unfamiliar with Frank Jackson's thought-experiment, Mary is a neuroscientist of color who knows all the neuroscientific theories associated with color vision (even those theories that have not yet been discovered and formulated) -- but she is raised in a completely monochrome/ black-and-white environment. If Mary suddenly sees colors one day, does she have a fundamentally new experience? Does she learn anything? A recent book, There's Something about Mary (publisher's page, review in NDPR), is entirely devoted to issues involving this thought-experiment.)
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