I Really Don't Understand Type A Physicalists
What is going on in their brains?
When confronted with the types of arguments presented here, type a physicalists say that there’s no gap — even epistemic — between mind and matter. They think that zombies are inconceivable, for example, and that Mary learns no new facts when she sees red.
My friend Coase’s Ghost is a type a physicalist. He’s quite smart. But type a physicalism has always seemed deeply off to me — I could see myself being a particularist if I had certain different intuitions, but I couldn’t see myself being a type a physicalist.
When I theorize about consciousness, there’s this thing that I have direct awareness of called qualia. It’s synonymous with subjective experience. Other people can know some things about it, but without experiencing it, they can’t know everything about it. Theorizing about consciousness is all trying to explain how the hell we get this rich complex subjective experience from clumps of non-conscious (probably) matter.
When you talk to type a materialists, it feels like the data they want to explain is people saying things like “I’m conscious,” and reporting on being conscious. But that’s not the relevant data! The relevant data is this experience that I’m having. I know I’m having it — I have direct awareness of it. It is the thing I’m most certain of. I’m way more confident that I have consciousness than I am that I am about physics.
They’ll point out how introspection is often wrong and we’re often wrong about what we’re aware of. That is of course true. But then they use that to show that conscious experience is, in some sense, an illusion — we’re conscious, but not in the way we think we are. Instead, we’re just some complex information processing system and consciousness is nothing over and above the information processing — there’s no precise point at which matter goes from non-conscious to conscious.
But this is obviously wrong! The fact that we’re sometimes wrong about what we’re aware of doesn’t show that we’re not actually conscious. It just shows we can be wrong in our reporting of our consciousness. I know I have qualia — I experience them directly. I’m currently experiencing the qualitative feel of typing — how could it be anything else?
Either one of us is very confused or the type a physicalist is a zombie. Currently, I assign highest credence to the “type a physicalists are very confused” hypothesis. After all, lots of people are very confused about various things — and Chalmers is too smart to be confused.
They’ll claim they don’t deny consciousness. But then what they’ll say when they mean consciousness is not what I mean by consciousness. They mean some purely physical thing — but what I mean by consciousness is qualia — the thing that it’s like to be me.
It’s like you go into a doctor’s office and ask them why your head hurts, and then they deny that your head hurts. They say “oh sure, there is a tumor in your head, but there’s no hurting over and above there being a tumor and you reacting to it.” But that’s obviously crazy! I feel the headache.
Of course Mary doesn’t know what it’s like to see red! You couldn’t know what it’s like to see colors that humans can’t see just by learning all the relevant neuroscientific facts about them!
It seems to me like the type a physicalists are as badly confused as those who deny thought experiments on the grounds that they’re unrealistic, if not more so. And yet, many of them are very smart and philosophically trained? So what’s going on?
Any ideas?
I don't know how many of us you've spoken to, but my views fall within the scope of the kinds of views you're referring to. I've also written a reply to you, which you can see here:
https://www.lanceindependent.com/post/zombies-see-red
The one comment I'll make a point of drawing attention to here is this. You say:
"They’ll point out how introspection is often wrong and we’re often wrong about what we’re aware of. That is of course true. But then they use that to show that conscious experience is, in some sense, an illusion"
They do appeal to these facts, but they also appeal to other facts. You give the misleading impression that this is the only fact they appeal to. You do this again here:
"The fact that we’re sometimes wrong about what we’re aware of doesn’t show that we’re not actually conscious. "
I agree. But proponents of illusionism don't merely appeal to the fact that we're sometimes wrong about what we're aware of to argue against phenomenal consciousness. They appeal to a variety of other empirical findings and philosophical considerations. I think your remarks give the impression that illusionists think introspective error alone is sufficient. Some may think this, but stronger versions of illusionism don't.