The element of surprise

Type-B physicalists have provided an array of stories to explain how Mary, the omniscient scientist raised in a black-and-white room, could still learn something upon release. But these stories—whether they appeal to know-how, knowledge by acquaintance, or fine-grained phenomenal beliefs—have been repeatedly criticized for failing to do justice to the significance of what Mary learns. Call this the Significance Challenge to type-B physicalism. The paper’s ultimate goal is to provide a type-B physicalism response to this Challenge by focusing on surprise—assuming, rather intuitively, that surprise can be used as a proxy for significance. The paper considers three accounts of surprise drawn from the philosophy and psychology literatures: violation-of-expectation accounts, explanation accounts, and Baras and Na’aman’s (Philos Phenomenol Res 105(1):195–215, 2022) Significance Account. The discussion of these accounts provides us with a two-pronged answer to the Challenge. First: it makes clear that though it is often assumed that anti-physicalists have a straightforward way to account for Mary’s surprise—she acquires a new coarse-grained belief about a brand-new nonphysical property—that assumption is mistaken. Second: it uncovers specific (and physicalist-friendly) mechanisms that would explain Mary’s surprise. I conclude that type-B physicalists can satisfactorily deal with the Significance Challenge.