Musing about Mary

I like humans but they are strange. One of the strange things humans do is take pictures of me. The male human does funny things with these photos using things called 'filters'. Sometimes this makes everything look black and white, like this:

I do not mind this, because I think that black and white are the best colours.

But thinking about this I started wondering: what if a very clever puppy grew up in a house where everything was black and white, like in the human photos? This puppy is so clever that it learns all the facts about other colours (for example red, the colour of one of my coats). It comes to know about light, and about how dogs' eyes receive light and how dogs' brains process the information they get from the eyes.

One day this very clever puppy is allowed out of the house. It is a lucky puppy because the first thing it sees is me walking down the street in my nice red coat. Remember that the puppy knows all the facts about the colour red, but this is the first time the puppy has seen the colour. I asked myself, does the puppy learn something new?

I enjoyed thinking about this, although I was annoyed when I learned that a human philosopher had stolen my idea.

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