A shot at the Mary argument

Here's my shot at the old and famous Mary the Color Researcher argument, originally presented by Frank Jackson in 1982, which has since become part and parcel of analytic philosophy of mind. Most thinkers seem to reject the argument's conclusions, and Jackson himself no longer thinks his argument attained its goal (that physicalism is false). Still, as an excercise in philosophical thinking, it's quite useful. I'm sure my reply is nothing new, nevertheless, since I found the Mary argument to be utterly unconvincing, I'll present an objection that immediately came to my mind.

Here's the original thought experiment against physicality.

Mary spends her life in a black-and-white room and has no color sensations. She watches science lectures on black-and-white television and learns everything about seeing in color that can in that way be learned. This includes mastering the completed science of human color vision. If physicalism were true, she would know all the facts about color experiences, because physicalism entails that all such facts can be expressed in the colorless language of science. But, one thinks intuitively, when she ventures into the colorful outside world and has color experiences for the first time, she learns something: she learns what it's like to see in color. Therefore, Jackson concludes, physicalism is false.

So what's wrong with it? The argument is based on a rather funny understanding about what "information" or "facts" are. It supposes that readily available raw facts about the real physical condition of the outside world is what gives us information, and it is curioulsy expected that facts - information - can substitute or replace the actual physical experience. It is assumed that the world consists of information readily available to the senses, waiting to be "learned". This is incorrect, and there's a simple reason why. Information is not even supposed to substitute physical experience. One would think this is obviously impossible. Information is encoding, it's a presentation of beliefs or facts or thoughts in a specific medium, be it language, speech or any other notational system. Information is always encoded into a specific medium that is clearly and inevitably distinct from what the information itself is about.

If I had the complete physical information about, say, an earthquake, am I now supposed to assume that because my knowledge about the subject is exhaustibly complete, this information must turn into, cause, or in fact, be an earthquake? This is plainly ridiculous. To assume that all knowledge about something is that something is false, even absurd: a complete knowledge about earthquakes is not itself an earthquake.

It seems to me that the background for this line of thinking is the objectivist account of the world, that true facts about the world are just waiting to be perceived, that in fact the world consists of information and facts. This is, in my mind, wrong. First comes the physical experience, of living in the world. From that experience, information - knowledge - is gleaned, abstracted. When Mary leaves the room, she physically experiences color for the first time. There is nothing non-physical about this. It's a real world physical experience, which abstracted, second order information cannot substitute. Knowledge does not equal the world. Knowledge is only about the world.