1) It is pretty much impossible to reason about almost anything without giving at least some weight to common sense assumptions, even if you have some plausible error theory here (which I am doubtful of) that should lower our credences in it a little. 2) Are you genuinely sceptical that we have subjective conscious experiences? This seems more certain than that there is even an external world containing biological organisms at all
Imagine accusing others of pseudoscience and then having to concede right at the beginning that one hasn't really distinguished between strong and weak emergence, a distinction so elementary that probably even most second semester philosophy undergrads are familiar with it.
This, exactly! I couldn't for the life of me figure why this is so hard to understand. The experience of experiencing things isn't some other thing, out there. This all happens inside your head!
Consciousness could be a physical force that only acts in the brain, but this is a bad thing to hold out for. Ghosts could also be made of a fundamental force that causes ectoplasm to interact with the other fundamental forces, and it could only be active when shady ghost hunters are holding out in an abandoned building and inactive when scientists are looking for ghosts. But this is a silly thing to concern yourself with.
The conceptual gap argument against identity theory is a bad one, and furthermore you haven't independently motivated it, just asserted it. Physics concerns itself with structure, function, behavior, and physicalists think that's all consciousness is. There's no magic what it's likeness that pops up for the physicalist that isn't reducible to structure, function, and behavior. If you think the physicalist can't explain consciousness, what is your argument? Just asserting the negation of the physicalist theory isn't an argument. The physicalist can just do the same to your theory.
Could Mary learn everything about what it's like to see red in her black and white room? Yes, because she has all the physical facts, and what it's like to see red is a physical fact. Consider what would happen if you showed Mary a red banana - would she go "Ah, now I know what it's like to experience the typical color of a banana!" If you think she would, then you've failed to understand your stipulations, because in virtue of knowing all the physical facts Mary can't fail to recognize what the effects of seeing a red vs yellow banana would be on her - e.g. seeing a red quale would make her go "this object is red," and seeing a yellow quale would make her go "this object is yellow", and red bananas don't cause normal human observers to say "Ah, now I know what it's like to experience the typical color of a banana" - but yellow ones do. If you think she wouldn't, then you agree with the physicalist that there is no possibility of qualia inversion or absence because knowing the differences between an object looking red to a conscious observer and an object looking yellow is explainable in terms of the physical facts.
The zombie argument is a bad one because it only makes sense when a domain area is epistemically opaque to you. Consider your monitor and computer. Presumably you think that everything you can do on a computer is identical to the computation occurring inside your CPU. Now, is it conceivable that you can still interact with your monitor via the mouse and keyboard without a computer? Of course it is, just imagine a monitor displaying flashing lights that systematically vary according to what you're doing with your mouse and keyboard, just like when you're normally using a computer. Now, did we just prove that computation is not identical to what occurs on your monitor? No, because you're probably ignorant of the functional role your computer has in computing keyboard and mouse signals and displaying graphics. If you knew all these facts then it would be nonsense to conclude that everything happening when you use your computer isn't computation. Likewise with consciousness.
You say Newtonian physics is possible/conceivable. Can you explain to me what exactly is conceivable about 0 dimensional particles with 0 size but still having mass? This doesn't seem conceivable to me. Or what about a perfect heatsink? As far as I know, this isn't even something constructible out of other Newtonian concepts, yet it's an idealization nonetheless frequently used in Newtonian heat exchange problems. I don't think you've actually grappled with concepts in Newtonian physics, since you would've had your naive "Any concept I use in an explanation or equation is possible/conceivable" attitude challenged by now - there are all sorts of nonsensical things in Newtonian physics that are tolerated as part of the pedagogical and story-telling features of it because they don't matter too much to the calculational success people have when applying Newtonian physics. Your naive preconceptions about how science works are not in fact accurate, which is why I harass you to practice science while you're still in college with a lot of courses to sample from and people to guide you and laboratories you can visit.
I personally don’t think the Mary’s room argument is super convincing because it’s extremely difficult to imagine knowing ALL the physical facts about color.
It’s usually glossed over by saying that she would have access to some very comprehensive textbooks. But this dramatically undersells how many physical facts there are. She would have to know the positions and velocities of basically every particle, including the ones in her own brain/body. Further, she would arguably know many modal facts as well, for example, how every particle *would* behave if struck by some light. And (on the physicalist view) she knows exactly how every atom of her body will react upon seeing the color red.
When I try imagining this near-omniscient person, I don’t find it so implausible that she would know what it’s like to see red while still in her room.
> Richard Brown agrees that the zombie argument is circular. To show this, he proposes "zoombies", which are creatures nonphysically identical to people in every way and lacking phenomenal consciousness. If zoombies existed, they would refute dualism because they would show that consciousness is not nonphysical, i.e., is physical. Paralleling the argument from Chalmers: It is conceivable that zoombies exist, so it is possible they exist, so dualism is false.
Okay, let's try to be actually rigourous about it.
Axion 1: There are facts of our world. Let P* mean all facts of our world
P* ≠∅
Axiom 2: There are only "physical" and "non-physical" facts. Let P mean "physical" facts of our world, specified in whatever whay Chappell considers truly rigourous and not sloppy, NP - all "non-physical" facts of our world.
P* = P ∪ NP
Notice that, as soon as we specified P in whatever way, we automatically specified NP as P* without P. This is a mathematical necessity of our axioms.
Axiom 3: There are at least some facts about consciousness in our world.
Let Q be all facts about consciousness of our world.
Q ∈ P*
Q ≠∅
According to physicalism: consciousness is physical
Q ∈ P
According to dualism: consciousness is non-physical
Q ∈ NP
Then we can describe zombie argument as:
(P & !Q) -> Q ∉ P -> Q ∈ NP
And we can likewise describe zoombie argument as:
(NP & !Q) -> Q ∉ NP -> Q ∈ P
In both cases to "prove" the initial premise we may try to appeal to "conceivability". With zombie argument dualist may claim that
(P & !Q) is conceivable -> (P & !Q)
While physicalist may claim that
(NP & !Q) is conceivable -> (NP & !Q)
As you see, total symmetry.
Now, Chappell claims that zoombie argument doesn't actually prove a contradiction in dualism. How so? Well, according to physicalism NP = ∅, so:
(∅ & !Q) = !Q
And then Chappell claims that !Q is compatible with dualism:
> The possibility of ~Q is clearly compatible with dualism!
Annoyingly enough, he doesn't provide any explanation why he believes so. I assume it's because a world where there is no consciousness doesn't necessary contradict dualism. Indeed, when there is no facts about consciousness and Q is an empty set, then zoombie argument implication:
(NP & !Q) -> Q ∉ NP
Doesn't work, because empty set belong to every set. But this contradicts our Axiom 3, according to which Q is not empty!
In other words, dualism isn't disproven by zoombie argument if it initially assumes that we live in a world with no consciousness. The same, of course, is true for physicalism. (P & !Q) doesn't imply Q ∉ P as long as Q is an empty set. Once again, total symmetry.
So in the end we have to agree that implication from conceivability to logicall validity doesn't generally work. Which, frankly, is completely unsurprising.
Most likely if dualism is true and mental states causally influence the physical world then those effects would be observable, its just that neuroscience is not yet sufficiently advanced to observe them.
Well that sounds substantially different from believing in magic between your ears. So there is that.
But yeah, the core idea of compatibilism is an obvious in retrospect idea that "determinable" and "free" are not antonyms. I'm not sure what does it have to do with rebellion, though.
A person who is shackled is not free because shackles *remove* the ability to do the things that the person wants. If we remove the shackles, the person restores the ability to do things according to their will and, therefore, free again.
A person who lives in deterministic universe is free because they can do whatever they want to. Deterministic laws *allow* to do things the person wants and predict which actions will satisfy their values. If we somehow remove the deterministic laws, the person does not become more free, instead there is no person anymore.
Now we can say it's like some kind of Zen paradox where "existence itself is shackles", but then this seems like religion.
That was certainly… a way of addressing the Mary’s room argument lol.
It’s frustrating when people who can’t understand a two-step argument very confidently say all of philosophy is useless
It seems pretty common sense that being able to mimic what people say when they express knowledge of X does not constitute having that knowledge of X
1) It is pretty much impossible to reason about almost anything without giving at least some weight to common sense assumptions, even if you have some plausible error theory here (which I am doubtful of) that should lower our credences in it a little. 2) Are you genuinely sceptical that we have subjective conscious experiences? This seems more certain than that there is even an external world containing biological organisms at all
Imagine accusing others of pseudoscience and then having to concede right at the beginning that one hasn't really distinguished between strong and weak emergence, a distinction so elementary that probably even most second semester philosophy undergrads are familiar with it.
Lmao now I got to the Mary's room part. This is hilarious, the fact he's so arrogant makes it even funnier.
This, exactly! I couldn't for the life of me figure why this is so hard to understand. The experience of experiencing things isn't some other thing, out there. This all happens inside your head!
Consciousness could be a physical force that only acts in the brain, but this is a bad thing to hold out for. Ghosts could also be made of a fundamental force that causes ectoplasm to interact with the other fundamental forces, and it could only be active when shady ghost hunters are holding out in an abandoned building and inactive when scientists are looking for ghosts. But this is a silly thing to concern yourself with.
The conceptual gap argument against identity theory is a bad one, and furthermore you haven't independently motivated it, just asserted it. Physics concerns itself with structure, function, behavior, and physicalists think that's all consciousness is. There's no magic what it's likeness that pops up for the physicalist that isn't reducible to structure, function, and behavior. If you think the physicalist can't explain consciousness, what is your argument? Just asserting the negation of the physicalist theory isn't an argument. The physicalist can just do the same to your theory.
Could Mary learn everything about what it's like to see red in her black and white room? Yes, because she has all the physical facts, and what it's like to see red is a physical fact. Consider what would happen if you showed Mary a red banana - would she go "Ah, now I know what it's like to experience the typical color of a banana!" If you think she would, then you've failed to understand your stipulations, because in virtue of knowing all the physical facts Mary can't fail to recognize what the effects of seeing a red vs yellow banana would be on her - e.g. seeing a red quale would make her go "this object is red," and seeing a yellow quale would make her go "this object is yellow", and red bananas don't cause normal human observers to say "Ah, now I know what it's like to experience the typical color of a banana" - but yellow ones do. If you think she wouldn't, then you agree with the physicalist that there is no possibility of qualia inversion or absence because knowing the differences between an object looking red to a conscious observer and an object looking yellow is explainable in terms of the physical facts.
The zombie argument is a bad one because it only makes sense when a domain area is epistemically opaque to you. Consider your monitor and computer. Presumably you think that everything you can do on a computer is identical to the computation occurring inside your CPU. Now, is it conceivable that you can still interact with your monitor via the mouse and keyboard without a computer? Of course it is, just imagine a monitor displaying flashing lights that systematically vary according to what you're doing with your mouse and keyboard, just like when you're normally using a computer. Now, did we just prove that computation is not identical to what occurs on your monitor? No, because you're probably ignorant of the functional role your computer has in computing keyboard and mouse signals and displaying graphics. If you knew all these facts then it would be nonsense to conclude that everything happening when you use your computer isn't computation. Likewise with consciousness.
You say Newtonian physics is possible/conceivable. Can you explain to me what exactly is conceivable about 0 dimensional particles with 0 size but still having mass? This doesn't seem conceivable to me. Or what about a perfect heatsink? As far as I know, this isn't even something constructible out of other Newtonian concepts, yet it's an idealization nonetheless frequently used in Newtonian heat exchange problems. I don't think you've actually grappled with concepts in Newtonian physics, since you would've had your naive "Any concept I use in an explanation or equation is possible/conceivable" attitude challenged by now - there are all sorts of nonsensical things in Newtonian physics that are tolerated as part of the pedagogical and story-telling features of it because they don't matter too much to the calculational success people have when applying Newtonian physics. Your naive preconceptions about how science works are not in fact accurate, which is why I harass you to practice science while you're still in college with a lot of courses to sample from and people to guide you and laboratories you can visit.
I personally don’t think the Mary’s room argument is super convincing because it’s extremely difficult to imagine knowing ALL the physical facts about color.
It’s usually glossed over by saying that she would have access to some very comprehensive textbooks. But this dramatically undersells how many physical facts there are. She would have to know the positions and velocities of basically every particle, including the ones in her own brain/body. Further, she would arguably know many modal facts as well, for example, how every particle *would* behave if struck by some light. And (on the physicalist view) she knows exactly how every atom of her body will react upon seeing the color red.
When I try imagining this near-omniscient person, I don’t find it so implausible that she would know what it’s like to see red while still in her room.
"One Man's _Modus Ponens_ Is Another Man's _Modus Tollens_"
A. If zombies are possible, then physicalism is false. Zombies are possible. Therefore, physicalism is false.
B. Oh no, you're completely wrong. If zombies are possible, then physicalism is false. But zombies aren't possible. Ergo, physicalism is true.
I dont get why, but this discussion always reminds me of the debate on the ontological argument.
Obligatory quote from wikipedia:
> Richard Brown agrees that the zombie argument is circular. To show this, he proposes "zoombies", which are creatures nonphysically identical to people in every way and lacking phenomenal consciousness. If zoombies existed, they would refute dualism because they would show that consciousness is not nonphysical, i.e., is physical. Paralleling the argument from Chalmers: It is conceivable that zoombies exist, so it is possible they exist, so dualism is false.
https://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/05/understanding-zombie-conceivability_10.html
Okay, let's try to be actually rigourous about it.
Axion 1: There are facts of our world. Let P* mean all facts of our world
P* ≠∅
Axiom 2: There are only "physical" and "non-physical" facts. Let P mean "physical" facts of our world, specified in whatever whay Chappell considers truly rigourous and not sloppy, NP - all "non-physical" facts of our world.
P* = P ∪ NP
Notice that, as soon as we specified P in whatever way, we automatically specified NP as P* without P. This is a mathematical necessity of our axioms.
Axiom 3: There are at least some facts about consciousness in our world.
Let Q be all facts about consciousness of our world.
Q ∈ P*
Q ≠∅
According to physicalism: consciousness is physical
Q ∈ P
According to dualism: consciousness is non-physical
Q ∈ NP
Then we can describe zombie argument as:
(P & !Q) -> Q ∉ P -> Q ∈ NP
And we can likewise describe zoombie argument as:
(NP & !Q) -> Q ∉ NP -> Q ∈ P
In both cases to "prove" the initial premise we may try to appeal to "conceivability". With zombie argument dualist may claim that
(P & !Q) is conceivable -> (P & !Q)
While physicalist may claim that
(NP & !Q) is conceivable -> (NP & !Q)
As you see, total symmetry.
Now, Chappell claims that zoombie argument doesn't actually prove a contradiction in dualism. How so? Well, according to physicalism NP = ∅, so:
(∅ & !Q) = !Q
And then Chappell claims that !Q is compatible with dualism:
> The possibility of ~Q is clearly compatible with dualism!
Annoyingly enough, he doesn't provide any explanation why he believes so. I assume it's because a world where there is no consciousness doesn't necessary contradict dualism. Indeed, when there is no facts about consciousness and Q is an empty set, then zoombie argument implication:
(NP & !Q) -> Q ∉ NP
Doesn't work, because empty set belong to every set. But this contradicts our Axiom 3, according to which Q is not empty!
In other words, dualism isn't disproven by zoombie argument if it initially assumes that we live in a world with no consciousness. The same, of course, is true for physicalism. (P & !Q) doesn't imply Q ∉ P as long as Q is an empty set. Once again, total symmetry.
So in the end we have to agree that implication from conceivability to logicall validity doesn't generally work. Which, frankly, is completely unsurprising.
🙆♂️
Most likely if dualism is true and mental states causally influence the physical world then those effects would be observable, its just that neuroscience is not yet sufficiently advanced to observe them.
> yet to see any Free Will beliefs that do not substantially take that form
Surely you've heard about compatibilism?
Well that sounds substantially different from believing in magic between your ears. So there is that.
But yeah, the core idea of compatibilism is an obvious in retrospect idea that "determinable" and "free" are not antonyms. I'm not sure what does it have to do with rebellion, though.
This analogy doesn't make sense.
A person who is shackled is not free because shackles *remove* the ability to do the things that the person wants. If we remove the shackles, the person restores the ability to do things according to their will and, therefore, free again.
A person who lives in deterministic universe is free because they can do whatever they want to. Deterministic laws *allow* to do things the person wants and predict which actions will satisfy their values. If we somehow remove the deterministic laws, the person does not become more free, instead there is no person anymore.
Now we can say it's like some kind of Zen paradox where "existence itself is shackles", but then this seems like religion.