From Mary to Roy Batty: The Structural Limit of Experience Under Axiomatic Completeness

The paper argues that Frank Jackson's knowledge argument (Mary in the black-and-white room) and Philip K. Dick's Blade Runner (Roy Batty as an artificial consciousness) both illustrate the same structural impossibility: phenomenal experience cannot be derived from any fully axiomatized descriptive system. Using the Theory of Axiomatic Necessity, the authors formalize a distinction between complete structural description and instantiated experience. Mary represents the static limit of epistemic closure, while Batty exposes its dynamic breakdown in a finite, embodied system with memory, suffering, and temporal self-reference. The problem is not representational but structural: completeness of description does not entail completeness of experience.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This paper proposes a structural equivalence between Frank Jackson's knowledge argument (Mary in the black-and-white room) and Philip K. Dick's Blade Runner (Roy Batty as an artificial consciousness reaching self-awareness). Contrary to traditional interpretations that treat these cases as epistemological or literary problems, we argue that both instantiate a single underlying constraint: the impossibility of deriving phenomenal experience from a fully axiomatized descriptive system. Using the Theory of Axiomatic Necessity (TNA), we formalize the distinction between complete structural description ($N_0$) and instantiated experience ($N_1$), showing that both Mary and Batty occupy different boundary conditions of the same structural gap. Mary represents the static limit of epistemic closure, while Batty exposes its dynamic breakdown in a finite, embodied system capable of memory, suffering, and temporal self-reference. We conclude that the problem is not representational, but structural: completeness of description does not entail completeness of experience