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selfAdjoint
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Here is a careful discussion of fiction, imagination, and what it would take to make Chalmer's zombie argument valid.
selfAdjoint said:Here is a careful discussion of fiction, imagination, and what it would take to make Chalmer's zombie argument valid.
selfAdjoint said:You have to understand Chalmer's idea of a zombie. It is something that has every characteristic of a human being, except qualia. It can, for example obey the red and green of a stoplight correctly, but it doesn't FEEL red and green. It can carry on every kind of conversation, but anything it states about feeling is a lie. You can't tell whether anyone you might meet is a zombie. But evey physical property of a normal human is also a physical property of a zombie, since they differ from us only in the unphysical qualia.
So if zombies are possible then there must be something we have that they don't. Hence physical properties per se can't completely define human beings. This contradicts the assumption of physicalism.
selfAdjoint said:You have to understand Chalmer's idea of a zombie. It is something that has every characteristic of a human being, except qualia. It can, for example obey the red and green of a stoplight correctly, but it doesn't FEEL red and green. It can carry on every kind of conversation, but anything it states about feeling is a lie. You can't tell whether anyone you might meet is a zombie. But evey physical property of a normal human is also a physical property of a zombie, since they differ from us only in the unphysical qualia.
So if zombies are possible then there must be something we have that they don't. Hence physical properties per se can't completely define human beings. This contradicts the assumption of physicalism.
Zombies, by definition, are physical duplicates of actual people with no qualia. Zombie Paul is just like actual Paul, but even if I threw the pie in his face, he wouldn't feel a thing. (Quick moral question: would it be OK to throw the pie in Zombie Paul's face? He isn't conscious, so he might not have moral standing.) It's agreed on many sides, and I'm going to accept it here, that if zombies are possible, physicalism is false.
Rader said:Would it be a correct assumption to say¨, that if I through a pie at a Zombie, it would not be angry or happy or express any emotion? It might react by logic only, thinking to itself, I should not have pie on my face, in this situation, I think I will go washup.
Rader said:This quote from the paper does not make it clear to me, if the author sees, consciousness and subjuntive exprerience, as the same thing. What does he mean when he says the Zombie will not feel a thing. Is he meaning the physical feel or the emotional fell? A Zombie hit with a pie in the face would be full conscious of the impact, he would just react totally different, than I would, If I had a pie flung in my face.
So in summary, there doesn't look like being a good way to define 'ideal' to make both premises of the zombie argument turn out true, unless one is prepared to either take on faith that opinions on matters philosophical will converge, and then use a convergence definition of ideal rationality, or one is prepared to argue that although there are normally many rational responses to arguments, for every true philosophical claim there is an argument for it to which the only one rational response is acceptance, or one is prepared to say that although logical, moral and semantic claims can be indeterminate, phenomenal claims cannot be. Given a choice between those options and physicalism, I'm still happy with physicalism.
selfAdjoint said:We can differ on whether qualia are real, and unaccounted for by physicalism, or whether they are a figment of philosophers' imagination. But it does seem that the narrower issue of Chalmers' argument has been much reduced in force.
LW Sleeth said:Until SA answers, I'd like to offer my opinion. A zombie would not actually be angry or happy, but he would physically be able to appear angry or happy. In other words, a zombie can behave exactly like a human (including mimicing emotional behavior), but has no conscious counterpart to that behavior..
It depends on how we define consciousness. There are those things that happen to us, and then there is our personal knowledge of that. The way I see a zombie is that it has things happen to it, but it has no personal knowledge anything happened; it simply reacts based on its programming.
loseyourname said:Given the degree of diversity we see in human problem solving capabilities and reactions, both emotional and reasoned, it is safe to say that there aren't any zombies out there. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of evolutionary theory would also know that the very concept is the height of obsurdity from a biological standpoint. I don't know why this is so frequently discussed. It just seems to distract from the heart of the matter.
Rader said:If what you mean is, that a Zombie, would physically be able to appear angry or happy but not have emotions, I would agree. But you confuse me when you use consciousness as if it was subjuntive emotional experience. Now understand me, as far as you or I or for that matter animals go, the physcial feel and the mental feel is the consciousness and subjuntive experience but in the Zombie exercise, the Zombie lacks the latter while acting and reacting on logical decisions only. If a Zombie could exist, we should pick up on it. I observe in me, other humans and also in animals, through behavior patterns, what appears to be "qualia".
Rader said:Now this is again interesting, how you explain this, because I can not understand it that way. For a Zombie to react to a situation the same as we would, it would have to use its intellect based on logic, for it would not have any emotions to play a factor in its decisions. How can it not know what it is doing and make decisions, if it does not use its intellect, based on logic instead of emotions. All programs are based on logic. A program knows its basic function, which is to find the most suitable answer. A program knows what it is capable of, simply by the results it gives. Now I think I went off the deep end trying to explain what I think you meant. Are you comparing a Zombie to a computer?
I think that may be back to front. The possibility of zombies is usually used to support physicalism, and their impossibility to deny physicalism.metacristi said:I have never really understood why this term,used by the supporters of the zombies argument,namely the so called 'metaphysical' possibility of zombies,really put a pressure on physicalism.
Chalmer's argues that you should not just accept that the concept of zombies is possible. The idea of zombies was introduced in order to support the idea of epiphenominalism, the idea that consciousness is a waste product of the brain, and that it has no purpose. Chalmer's and others have argued that in fcat they are logically impossible, because there is more to human behaviour than can be explained computationally.I accept that the concept of 'zombies' is logically possible but I do not think we are also entitled to leap directly to their physical possibility in 'other physical worlds'.
metacristi said:I accept that the concept of 'zombies' is logically possible but I do not think we are also entitled to leap directly to their physical possibility in 'other physical worlds'
Canute said:I think that may be back to front. The possibility of zombies is usually used to support physicalism, and their impossibility to deny physicalism.
Chalmer's argues that you should not just accept that the concept of zombies is possible. The idea of zombies was introduced in order to support the idea of epiphenominalism, the idea that consciousness is a waste product of the brain, and that it has no purpose. Chalmer's and others have argued that in fcat they are logically impossible, because there is more to human behaviour than can be explained computationally.
You may not agree with him but I wouldn't be too quick to decide. If you accept the possibility of zombies then you also accept the idea that consciousness is purposeless and that it evolved by accident. That's quite a difficult position to defend, although I must admit you have Daniel Dennett on your side.
The argument over zombies looks a bit stupid in a way, but in fact it is an argument over whether we are zombies or not, so it's quite important to know whether or not they are logically possible. If they are not possible then we are not zombies, if they are then we probably are.
Can zombies be strongly conceived, i.e. imagined? It seems not. I can't imagine something as complex as Paul's brain. I can't even imagine a 1000-game baseball season, and that's way less complicated than Paul's brain. Zombies can be weakly conceived. We can imagine a creature that looks and acts like Paul, and has no conscious states, and then make it fictional that the creature we are imagining is a physical duplicate of Paul. But we don't thereby imagine a physical duplicate of Paul - that would be too complex for our weak imagination.
So premise 1 of the zombie argument can say at most that zombies are ideally positively weakly conceivable. So premise 2 has to say that whatever is ideally positively weakly conceivable is possible. And that will be much harder than arguing that whatever is ideally positively strongly conceivable is possible for at least two reasons. First, we saw in Sylvan's Box that fictions are much more weakly constrained by possibility than are imaginings. Second, it seems at least plausible that there are no constraints whatsoever on what can be true in a fiction, because it's also a strong default assumption about stories that if p is crucial to the story being told, then p is true in the story. It's crucial to the zombie story that there are zombies, so in that story there are zombies. But that reasoning obviously tells us nothing about what is actually possible.
There is no question that experience is closely associated with physical processes in systems such as brains. It seems that physical processes give rise to experience, at least in the sense that producing a physical system (such as a brain) with the right physical properties inevitably yields corresponding states of experience. But how and why do physical processes give rise to experience? Why do not these processes take place "in the dark," without any accompanying states of experience? This is the central mystery of consciousness.
What makes the easy problems easy? For these problems, the task is to explain certain behavioral or cognitive functions: that is, to explain how some causal role is played in the cognitive system, ultimately in the production of behavior. To explain the performance of such a function, one need only specify a mechanism that plays the relevant role. And there is good reason to believe that neural or computational mechanisms can play those roles.
What makes the hard problem hard? Here, the task is not to explain behavioral and cognitive functions: even once one has an explanation of all the relevant functions in the vicinity of consciousness — discrimination, integration, access, report, control — there may still remain a further question: why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? Because of this, the hard problem seems to be a different sort of problem, requiring a different sort of solution.
A solution to the hard problem would involve an account of the relation between physical processes and consciousness, explaining on the basis of natural principles how and why it is that physical processes are associated with states of experience. A reductive explanation of consciousness will explain this wholly on the basis of physical principles that do not themselves make any appeal to consciousness.[*] A materialist (or physicalist) solution will be a solution on which consciousness is itself seen as a physical process. A nonmaterialist (or nonphysicalist) solution will be a solution on which consciousness is seen as nonphysical (even if closely associated with physical processes). A nonreductive solution will be one on which consciousness (or principles involving consciousness) is admitted as a basic part of the explanation.
It is natural to hope that there will be a materialist solution to the hard problem and a reductive explanation of consciousness, just as there have been reductive explanations of many other phenomena in many other domains. But consciousness seems to resist materialist explanation in a way that other phenomena do not. This resistance can be encapsulated in three related arguments against materialism, summarized in what follows.
3 Arguments against Materialism
3.1 The Explanatory Argument
The first argument is grounded in the difference between the easy problems and the hard problem, as characterized above: the easy problems concern the explanation of behavioral and cognitive functions, but the hard problem does not. One can argue that by the character of physical explanation, physical accounts explain only structure and function, where the relevant structures are spatiotemporal structures, and the relevant functions are causal roles in the production of a system's behavior. And one can argue as above that explaining structures and functions does not suffice to explain consciousness. If so, no physical account can explain consciousness.
We can call this the explanatory argument:
(1) Physical accounts explain at most structure and function.
(2) Explaining structure and function does not suffice to explain consciousness; so
—
(3) No physical account can explain consciousness.
If this is right, then while physical accounts can solve the easy problems (which involve only explaining functions), something more is needed to solve the hard problem. It would seem that no reductive explanation of consciousness could succeed. And if we add the premise that what cannot be physically explained is not itself physical (this can be considered an additional final step of the explanatory argument), then materialism about consciousness is false, and the natural world contains more than the physical world.
Yes there is a distinction between these two things but I think Chalmers deals with both in his 3 separate arguments.metacristi said:From my understanding of the zombies argument it is the latter approach [there will always be a gap in our understanding of consciousness,qualia at least] which is at the heart of the argument;
These three sorts of argument are closely related. They all start by establishing an epistemic gap between the physical and phenomenal domains. Each denies a certain sort of close epistemic relation between the domains: a relation involving what we can know, or conceive, or explain. In particular, each of them denies a certain sort of epistemic entailment from physical truths P to the phenomenal truths Q: deducibility of Q from P, or explainability of Q in terms of P, or conceiving of Q upon reflective conceiving of P.
Perhaps the most basic sort of epistemic entailment is a priori entailment, or implication. On this notion, P implies Q when the material conditional 'P⊃Q' is a priori; that is, when a subject can know that if P is the case then Q is the case, with justification independent of experience. All of the three arguments above can be seen as making a case against an a priori entailment of Q by P. If a subject who knows only P cannot deduce that Q (as the knowledge argument suggests), or if one can rationally conceive of P without Q (as the conceivability argument suggests), then it seems that P does not imply Q. The explanatory argument can be seen as turning on the claim that an implication from P to Q would require a functional analysis of consciousness, and that the concept of consciousness is not a functional concept.
After establishing an epistemic gap, these arguments proceed by inferring an ontological gap, where ontology concerns the nature of things in the world. The conceivability argument infers from conceivability to metaphysical possibility; the knowledge argument infers from failure of deducibility to difference in facts; and the explanatory argument infers from failure of physical explanation to nonphysicality. One might say that these arguments infer from a failure of epistemic entailment to a failure of ontological entailment. The paradigmatic sort of ontological entailment is necessitation: P necessitates Q when the material conditional 'P⊃Q' is metaphysically necessary, or when it is metaphysically impossible for P to hold without Q holding. It is widely agreed that materialism requires that P necessitates all truths (perhaps with minor qualifications). So if there are phenomenal truths Q that P does not necessitate, then materialism is false.
We might call of these arguments epistemic arguments against materialism. Epistemic arguments arguably descend from Descartes' arguments against materialism (although these have a slightly different form), and are given their first thorough airing in Broad's book, which contains elements of all three arguments above.[*] The general form of an epistemic argument against materialism is as follows:
hypnagogue said:The notion of logical possibility is a much broader one than that of nomological possibility. Nomological possibility is a subset of logical possibility; it has all the restrictions of logical possibility, plus the added constraints of contingent properties. Contingent properties are properties that obtain in our universe but could have been otherwise, eg, they are true in virtue of circumstance rather than logical necessity.
Fliption said:what makes a zombie conceivable is a lack of knowledge as to why it is not conceivable
Whether that knowledge can ever be gained is a different issue.
confutatis said:There's another, more mundane reason: what makes zombies conceivable is the fact that you can conceive of them. But not everyone can. I can't, and I don't seem to be alone.
It's not a matter of knowledge. I can't conceive of an empty box with a statue of an elephant inside, and I think anyone who claims to be able to conceive of such a thing is confused, or simply lying. The situation with Chalmers zombies is not different; no matter how well-constructed those arguments might seem to be from a semantical pointo f view, to me and to a lot of other people they sound like arguments for the existence of an empty box that has something inside.
Trouble is, just because people can say "it's possible for an empty box with something inside to exist", they think the statement of the possibility alone bears any significance. It doesn't. Anyone can say whatever they want, but that doesn't mean everything they say must have meaning. Most of the time, it's just empty words.
Fliption said:I'm talking about what is conceivable according to Chalmers.
You continue to make these statemernts because you haven't yet grasped the point of the thought exercise.
You still seem to think it is saying something about reality as opposed to our knowledge of it.
An empty box with something inside is hardly a good analogy.
Explain to everyone reading here why it was absolutely impossible for you to have evolved processing the external world like cameras and microphones do, as opposed to processing it with qualia
LW Sleeth said:You are wrong to say a program "knows" its functions or what it is capable of. Consider a computer. It performs functions and behaves according to what it is capable of, but it is utterly clueless that it is doing so.
The point is that "physicalism" cannot conceive of a reason that zombies cannot exists.
hypnagogue said:Originally Posted by metacristi
I accept that the concept of 'zombies' is logically possible but I do not think we are also entitled to leap directly to their physical possibility in 'other physical worlds'
If you accept that a C-zombie is logically possible, it automatically follows that they can exist in a metaphysical world physically identical to our own. These are two equivalent statements.
Rader said:Using the word knows not "knows", in the sence, that a 16mm wrench knows that it fits a 16mm nut. A computer program knows how its function works, cause its results compute. A Zombie knows the same things as a non-Zombie cause, he works the same, we can not tell the difference. But there is nothing that has been found yet, in physical properties, that substantiate, the existence of subjuntive experiences in a wrench, computer programs or Zombies. Now this Zombie analogy is an exercise to try and understand a specific point of view.To me this physicality exercise neither negates nor substanciates, what can have a subjuntive experience.
Could be. I'm just clarifying what his meaning is so that this can be decided intelligently.confutatis said:What is conceivable according to Chalmers could just be nonsense.
I "seem to think" Chalmers' argument is inconsistent with facts about reality. But who knows, maybe Chalmers is right and reality is wrong.
A zombie is just like an empty box filled with lots of things. You look outside and the box seems full; you look inside and the box is empty. The analogy is perfect.
I don't know what you are talking about. When you explain to me what you mean by "qualia" and why you are so sure cameras and microphones don't have it, then I'll give you my explanation.
Fliption said:It's easier to claim it as nonsense when you don't understand it.
I don't understand how you can claim that zombies are not conceivable when you don't know what qualia is.
How can you possibly make a determination about the conceivability of a being with no qualia if you don't know what it is that is being referred to by qualia?
And cameras and microphones having qualia is not really relevant.
Let's assume that cameras and microphones do have qualia. Now explain to me why it is inconceivable that they could not have an existence without qualia. Zombie cameras aren't conceivable?
confutatis said:It's not conceivable that two things which have everything in common except "nothing" could possibly be different. That's the bit you don't get.
Fliption said:Ok, then you don't have an issue with the zombie argument. You have an issue with the hard problem itself.
As Hypnagogue said in one of his last posts, if you don't believe in subjective experience to begin with then you already think we are zombies and there's nothing to talk about.
The zombie argument isn't designed to convince you there is something that needs explaining.
If you don't see that before then you won't see it after. I'd say this thread isn't for people like you.
Yes I know you've said this. All I'm saying is that it's very difficult for you to enter into an argument of whether a car is red or green if you don't believe in cars.confutatis said:I can't remember how many times I said I think this hard problem is nonsense - there is no hard problem.
If you think qualia is nonsense then we are zombies since they are defined as beings with no qualia.I don't think we are zombies!
The zombie argument is designed to convince people of whatever it is they are already sure about. Like yourself. You are sure you have "qualia"; no argument can possibly convince you that the definition of "qualia" is nonsense. The hard problem is the problem of convincing a stubborn person that "qualia" is nonsense. Come to think of it, it's really a hard problem.
How old are you anyway? From stuff like that, I'd give you no more than sixteen. A brilliant teenager, but still a teenager.