Mary still doesn't have to make anything special happen to her brain have knowledge of anything else. She can still understand photosynthesis without photosynthesising.

the Kolmogorov complexity of a definition of an equivalence relation which tells us that an AND gate implemented in a MOSFET is equivalent to an AND gate implemented in a neuron is equivalent to an AND gate implemented in desert rocks

Isn't that only a problem for those who answer "functions" to question 5? Desert-rocks-AND-gate and MOSFET-AND-gate are functionally-equivalent by definition, but if you're not excluding side-effects it's obvious that they're not computationally equivalent.

Edit: zaph answered algorithms, so your counter-argument doesn't really target him well.

Not really helpful (though I don't see why it deserved a downvote). It is not that I object to the term 'qualia' because I think it is a residue of discredited worldviews. I object to the term because I have never seen a clear enough exposition of the term so that I could understand/appreciate the concept pulling any weight in an argument.

And, as I stated earlier, I particularly object when philosophers offer color qualia as paradigmatic examples of atomic, primitive qualia. Haven't philosophers ever read a science book? Color vision has been well understood for some time. Cones and rods, rods of three kinds, and all that. So color sensation is not primitive.

And moving up a level from neurons to mind, I cannot imagine how anyone might suggest that there is a higher-level "experience" of the color green which is so similar to an experience of smell-of-mothballs or an experience of A-major-chord so that all three are instances of the same thing - qualia.

Incidentally, while agreeing with your main point, I feel I ought to challenge the implications of "more evolved." This has nothing to do with Mary's position on some scale of evolution; she could be "less evolved" and have those neurons, or "more evolved" and lack them.

I can describe qualia in general as the way thing seem to us.

I don't believe so. I'll accept that you can describe them as the way things seem to you. Or define them as the way things seem to us. What I am saying is that you cannot convince me that the definition has a definiendum unless you get more specific. Certainly, your intuitions on the significance of that 'seeming' have no argumentative force on anyone else until you offer some explanation why they should know what you are talking about.

There are broadly speaking two versions of physicalism: ontological physicalism, according to which everything that exists is material, spatio-temporal, etc; and epistemological physicalism, according to which everything can be explained in physical terms. Physicalism can be challenged by the inexplicability of qualia in two ways. Firstly, qualia might be physically inexplicable because they are not physical things, which contradicts ontological physicalim. Secondly, the phsyical inexplicability of qualia might be down to their having a first-person epistemology, which contradicts epistemological physicalism. Epistemological physicalism requires that eveything be explicable in physical terms, which implies that everything is explicable in objective, descriptive, public, third-person terms. If there are some things which can only be known by acquantance, subjectively, in first person terms, then it is not the case that everything can be explained in physicalese. However, ontological physicalism could still hold.

If we agree that she learns something on stepping outside we have learnt that a version of physicalism is false.

It isn't intended to answer your question about neuroscience.It is intended to pose the philosopher's question about the limitations of physicalism. If physicalism is limited, that eventually folds back to your question, since one way of explaining the limitation of physicalism is that there are non-physical things going on.

No, the premise of the Mary argument is that Mary has all possible book-larnin' or third person knowledge. She is specifically not supposed to be pre-equipped with experiential knowledge, which means her brain is in one of the physical states of a brain that has never seen colour.

No, she is not going to be able to instantiate a red quale through her book learning: that is not what is at issue. What is at issue is why she would need to.

Third person knowledge does not essentially change on translation from book to paper to CD, and for that matter it should not essentially change when loaded into a brain. And in most cases, we think it doesn't. We don't think that the knowledge of photosyhtesis means photsynthesising in your head. You share that the qualiaphobes assumption that there is something special about knowledge of qualia that requires instantiation.

But if physicalism is correct, one could understand all that in its entirety from a third person POV, just as one can understand photosynthesis without photosynthesising. And of course, Mary is supposed to have that kind of knowledge. But you think that knowledge of how her brain works from the outside is inadequate, and she has to make changes to her brain so she can view them from the inside.