Wow, that's an impressive account of your intellectual development up to now! It's rare to hear someone so open to revise their views as life goes on and one learns and exposed to new reasonings and logic. Congratulations on affirming belief in God; it's not easy to do this in many circles. I'm not sure my kind of belief in God "counts" as I could be "classified" as a "scientific pantheist / Spinozist", if I must be put into a box. Traditional believers will say "That's not what we mean by God" while traditional atheists will say "You're trying to have it both ways". But I hear both those objections, ponder them, and they fail to make a dent in my variety of "belief".... I enjoy your great blog.
One thing I have noticed as I've gotten older (45 now) is that my philosophical beliefs earlier in life often seamed downstream from my physiology. I think that is part of the reason why some many teenage boys become atheist libertarians (myself included). It's a belief that makes perfect sense at the phase of your life when you are super individualistic and tend toward moral certainty. I don't think that brain (or body) development directly leads to specific beliefs, but rather that we became more attached to certain ways of thinking at different phases in our lives, which inevitably leads us intellectually curious people to explore and then adopt certain philosophical beliefs. This is probably the reason that people tend to become more conservative with age, as their modes of thinking change and progressive ideologies seem less believable.
> Chris leans towards epiphenomenalism. When I chatted with him about consciousness, he discussed finding the zombie and explanatory gap arguments convincing. When I repeated Eliezer’s worries about the zombie argument, he explained to me the error Eliezer made. Once my confusion had been cleared up, after a lengthy round of thinking, I became a dualist and have remained one to this day.
In the linked post by "error Eliezer made", you mean that he was arguing specifically against epiphenomenalism, instead of arguing against all kinds of dualism. But how could a person leaning towards epiphenomenalism dismiss Eliezer critique based on that?
For a substance dualist zombie argument doesn't have any extra weight beyond vague intuitive feeling that mind and matter are of a different kind. The whole strength of the argument is based on the epiphenomenalist premise that a universe with exact same physics but where people are non-conscious is logically possible.
No, it's not an epiphenomenalist premise. Even if you think consciousness is causally efficacious, you can think that zombies are possible, as I explain. Eliezer's critique doesn't actually address the zombie argument because it misstates it and incorrectly claims it's just a straightforwardly question begging argument for epiphenomenalism.
You are saying that the laws accomodating for the abscence of consciousness and providing the required causal effects can be non-physical, therefore both zombie-world and our world can technically have the same physics, same events and yet zombie-world lack consciousness.
This is a clever semantic trick, but it misses the point of what physics is, reducing it to an arbitrary category border around some laws and not the others. You claim that this division is not arbitrary, but do not justify it by anything except belief that some things are non physical. This seems to be circular and proving too much - its possible to use the same method to prove that literally anything isn't physical.
Imagine I believe that electrons are non-physical. And to prove my point I construct a zombie-argument, claiming, that a world where physics is exactly the same, but there are no electrons, is logically possible. How could it be? Surely if there were no electrons, the universe would be completely different, unless electrons have no causal effect in our universe, which is clearly not the case. Well, you see, it's not the only possibility. There can be some other non-physical laws that compensate for the lack of electrons in the zombie-universe so that the universe behaves exactly the same as if it had electorns. Therefore physics of both universe is exactly the same, events are the same, but one universe doesn't have electrons, therefore electrons are non-physical! QED.
To be able to use zombie argument with substance-dualism you need to provide some principled reason how laws of the universe can be distinguished between physical and non-physical, which would allow us to deduce that electrons are physical while consciousness is not. Also some kind of solution to "ghost in the machine" problem is required. Epiphenomenalism deals with these issues by proclaiming consciousness causally inert - therefore we have a rule according to which to classify things: everything non-inert is physical, everything inert is not, while ghost in machine problem is solved by non-physical bridging laws. But this path is closed for substance dualism.
why were you 8 at your bar mitzvah
Wow, that's an impressive account of your intellectual development up to now! It's rare to hear someone so open to revise their views as life goes on and one learns and exposed to new reasonings and logic. Congratulations on affirming belief in God; it's not easy to do this in many circles. I'm not sure my kind of belief in God "counts" as I could be "classified" as a "scientific pantheist / Spinozist", if I must be put into a box. Traditional believers will say "That's not what we mean by God" while traditional atheists will say "You're trying to have it both ways". But I hear both those objections, ponder them, and they fail to make a dent in my variety of "belief".... I enjoy your great blog.
One thing I have noticed as I've gotten older (45 now) is that my philosophical beliefs earlier in life often seamed downstream from my physiology. I think that is part of the reason why some many teenage boys become atheist libertarians (myself included). It's a belief that makes perfect sense at the phase of your life when you are super individualistic and tend toward moral certainty. I don't think that brain (or body) development directly leads to specific beliefs, but rather that we became more attached to certain ways of thinking at different phases in our lives, which inevitably leads us intellectually curious people to explore and then adopt certain philosophical beliefs. This is probably the reason that people tend to become more conservative with age, as their modes of thinking change and progressive ideologies seem less believable.
Even though it’s a bit naval gazy, I think you’ll really enjoy looking back on this in a few decades
> Chris leans towards epiphenomenalism. When I chatted with him about consciousness, he discussed finding the zombie and explanatory gap arguments convincing. When I repeated Eliezer’s worries about the zombie argument, he explained to me the error Eliezer made. Once my confusion had been cleared up, after a lengthy round of thinking, I became a dualist and have remained one to this day.
In the linked post by "error Eliezer made", you mean that he was arguing specifically against epiphenomenalism, instead of arguing against all kinds of dualism. But how could a person leaning towards epiphenomenalism dismiss Eliezer critique based on that?
For a substance dualist zombie argument doesn't have any extra weight beyond vague intuitive feeling that mind and matter are of a different kind. The whole strength of the argument is based on the epiphenomenalist premise that a universe with exact same physics but where people are non-conscious is logically possible.
No, it's not an epiphenomenalist premise. Even if you think consciousness is causally efficacious, you can think that zombies are possible, as I explain. Eliezer's critique doesn't actually address the zombie argument because it misstates it and incorrectly claims it's just a straightforwardly question begging argument for epiphenomenalism.
> No, it's not an epiphenomenalist premise.
It is. As you write yourself, the laws of the zombie-universe has to be different to account for the lack of consciousness and its causal effects.
But if the laws are different then the symmetry between the two worlds is broken and the argument looses all power.
See the long section where I explain why it’s not
You are saying that the laws accomodating for the abscence of consciousness and providing the required causal effects can be non-physical, therefore both zombie-world and our world can technically have the same physics, same events and yet zombie-world lack consciousness.
This is a clever semantic trick, but it misses the point of what physics is, reducing it to an arbitrary category border around some laws and not the others. You claim that this division is not arbitrary, but do not justify it by anything except belief that some things are non physical. This seems to be circular and proving too much - its possible to use the same method to prove that literally anything isn't physical.
Imagine I believe that electrons are non-physical. And to prove my point I construct a zombie-argument, claiming, that a world where physics is exactly the same, but there are no electrons, is logically possible. How could it be? Surely if there were no electrons, the universe would be completely different, unless electrons have no causal effect in our universe, which is clearly not the case. Well, you see, it's not the only possibility. There can be some other non-physical laws that compensate for the lack of electrons in the zombie-universe so that the universe behaves exactly the same as if it had electorns. Therefore physics of both universe is exactly the same, events are the same, but one universe doesn't have electrons, therefore electrons are non-physical! QED.
To be able to use zombie argument with substance-dualism you need to provide some principled reason how laws of the universe can be distinguished between physical and non-physical, which would allow us to deduce that electrons are physical while consciousness is not. Also some kind of solution to "ghost in the machine" problem is required. Epiphenomenalism deals with these issues by proclaiming consciousness causally inert - therefore we have a rule according to which to classify things: everything non-inert is physical, everything inert is not, while ghost in machine problem is solved by non-physical bridging laws. But this path is closed for substance dualism.
What exactly do you disagree with libertarians about?
I support a welfare system, think it's not obvious whether the minimum wage is good or bad, and am maybe a bit more interventionist in foreign policy.
have your views about foreign policy changed 12th grade? if so what made them change?
Hard to point to a concrete thing, just seems like foreign policy is hard to figure out, so I'm a bit more Burkean about it.