Zombies Must Be Dualists: Zombies and Our Philosophy of Mind
nautil.us
nautil.us
I can postulate a universe in which my molecules and everyone else's have been precisely duplicated from this universe in physical terms. I can postulate that in that universe there is no such thing as conscious experience; no qualia or whatnot. I can imagine that universe continuing from the moment of duplication onward, proceeding as dictated by the laws of physics. My duplicate in that universe would probably not act exactly as I will, but will certainly act in some way.
Simply the act of postulating, of conceiving, of that kind of zombie universe is enough to strongly suggest that consciousness is something outside of the physical. The zombie universe doesn't have to be identical in behavior, only identical physically. Because what you've now done is to recognize that a universe in which physical objects and laws are the only elements is a universe in which mental (experiential) phenomena are unaccounted for. You can imagine that those mental phenomena magically, mysteriously re-emerge from the physical, but have given absolutely no reason why they should. Therefore you can equally imagine that they don't re-emerge. So whether zombies behave identically with real people or are merely constituted identically with real people, their conceived existence is enough to show that the mental universe—so to speak—is conceptually detached from the physical and therefore a separate domain.
Talking about consciousness is a physical action.
You're committing the same mistake putzdown is, but in the opposite direction. There's only evidence if you assume that this is a purely material world.
Or are you counting philosophical argument as "evidence"?
So, in this case we have evidence of a possible world, even if that's not the world we live in.
PS: Notice how this argument sidesteps the possibility of a 'fake' world as meaningless in this argument. So, even if say a trickster god was simply fooling you there is nothing no suggest that it's not also possible that a world running on similar rules could exist.
Edit: Alternatively, if it was simply a fake simulation for example by improve actors, then if it was a good fake then it would act like a video recording. And as such the fake actors would still say the same words even with a different internal world.
Consider for a moment the idea that God exists - that a non-material intelligence exists, and existed before the physical universe. Then there's something more than material that exists, but the material can still be real material - it doesn't have to be a simulation.
In other words, the possibility exists for a purely physical universe even if that's not the one we live in.
That is, we could work out that we think the math works for a purely physical universe. But if we don't actually live in one, then we're speculating without any experience. It would be really easy to overlook something that means that the math wouldn't work for a purely physical universe. Worse, we might never know, because we couldn't see it (we'd be philosophizing and doing math purely in the abstract), and we could never find an example to look at, because the real math would say that such a universe can't exist.
I'm really reluctant to take such philosophy + math very seriously...
These are, of course, incomplete theories. But they are all incomplete, both the material-only ones and the others.
If you wish to add something, especially something fundamental that can affect physical matter but is not detectable at the scale of human brains then the burden of proof is on you.
But second, I think you misunderstood my comment (or else I misunderstood Retric's). Retric said, " It's uncomfortable for some people to realize a purely material world can give rise to objective experience, but there is a lot of evidence that suggests this is true." I understood that to mean that 1) we live in a purely material world, and 2) we have objective experience. My reply was that those are both assumptions - that this is a purely material world, and that we have genuine objective experience.
Now, if the claim is that we have theories that explain these things, then I would say that "theories that explain" is not the same as evidence that suggests (or better, demonstrates) that this is true. A fine-sounding theory about something like consciousness (that we don't really understand) leaves me somewhat less than convinced.
I explicetly and repeatedly did not say this.
I wouldn't call that an assumption, that's the evidence based worldview at the moment. Any arguments that don't assume that have an additional burden of proof placed on them.
I don't think it is. You can conceive of a Penrose stair, but you can only believe it is physically possible if you don't understand it. We already know we don't really understand consciousness, yet, so I don't think you can draw conclusions from the possibility of imagining it to be one way or the other.
But, by definition, they do have to do exactly what real people do. If they did not then there is no argument, everyone agrees this kind of zombie is very possible. The disagreement comes when Chalmers says they could exist and be indistinguishable (including asking about their inner experiences) from normal people.
> I can postulate a universe in which my molecules and everyone else's have been precisely duplicated from this universe in physical terms. I can postulate that in that universe there is no such thing as conscious experience; no qualia or whatnot.
This is actually quite a concise definition of the dualist position, the material argument is basically that being identical physically is to have identical qualia.
By the act of postulating that kind of universe, you have defined consciousness to be something outside the physical.
However, I think the Hard Problem is a knot that can never go away. I notice physicists are willing to explain much of the properties of the universe (like time having a direction) just by saying there was a very specific initial condition, a very low entropy state that (by definition) is extraordinarily unlikely. So what about saying there's another constraint on conditions of the universe, where we have physical laws that create consciousness. Is this just an anthropic principle of some sort?
I was listening to Sean Carroll's "The Big Picture" audiobook. He argues that I can't really be sure I'm not a p-zombie. But I think I can: I'm with Descartes on this one - it's the one thing I actually _can_ be sure of. I'm sure I have an inner experience (that explains nothing scientifically to anyone else) but I can easily imagine not having it, with no change to the laws of physics.
Does anyone know of a good read that isn't full of jargon that fleshes out these ideas some more?
See Dennett's interview with Bob Wright starting at about 30 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss0aCWpNzSM
I'm just not ready to stop there, despite this all being true, I think it seems not parsimonious to believe there is nothing fundamentally mysterious about how I feel like something subjectively.
Biology doesn't introduce any explanatory power that couldn't, in principle, be done by chemistry. Likewise, chemistry and physics. But they ain't nobody as is gonna work out the mating behavior of tree frogs from quantum mechanical first principles. That was, I thought, the point of the intentional stance: if you assume consciousness, you get a good model to understand behavior; if you don't, you may, in principle, be able to get a good model but you have a much greater distance to go.
If there are elements of consciousness that are completely separate from the physical world (in that they have no effect on it), we cannot talk about them, nor even think about them.
I do find that trying to conceptualize p-zombies is a useful tool try to pull apart the strength of the effects of these qualia.
To take let's say we somehow duplicate the universe at the very instant I started writing this post, but with the potential for qualia removed. Since my brain had already done the processing, I would continue to write about an experience I would no longer have. I suspect everyone would continue to talk about qualia for quite a long time.
However, if the potential for qualia were removed prior to the formation of the earth, I think we have to image we would not be talking about it now. (Because otherwise we are talking about nothing.) I personally suspect that things would have developed very differently and the human race would have been far less successful.
My suspect that we tend to over attribute consciousness to others and to ourselves. I suspect we spend a fair amount of our lives in p-zombie mode and then project the experience of consciousness backwards onto our memories of those time.
Yet here we are, doing both, talking as well as thinking, right? If I talk about a universe where you'd never "woken up" as a subjective individual, and the present time was just like (to both of us) the previous 13.7 billion years, you know exactly the concept I mean, whether it's expressible in terms that have meaning beyond a single reader who knows (in the Cartesian sense) that their (subjective) existence is something special that only they can observe.
If there are any properties that do not have physical effects, that makes them unspeakable, unknowable, and unthinkable. We can have a conceptual category for these properties, but we can't place anything in that category, not even from our own subjective experiences.
Type A Categories (that we can place things in):
Physical Causes & Effects: Our reality.
No Physical Causes but Physical Effect: True randomness
Type B Categories (that we can talk about but not place anything in):
Physical Causes but no Physical Effects: The Afterlife, The Future, Non-physical Elements of Consciousness
Neither Physical Causes nor Physical Effects: Completely separate realities
If we say that anything from Type B categories exists, then existence becomes a meaninglessly broad category. We can be wrong about whether something is Type B (say if we discover time travel), but nothing that is Type B exists.
Here I am, a philosophical zombie. I don't have any subjective experiences, as far as I can tell. I challenge anybody to show that I am not!