I like Jed Harris’ comments. Indeed, if there is a fortuitous “natural law” that makes our inner consciousness happen to line up in exact accordance with what our external bodies do and say independent of any inner light, that law could have worked out in any number of different ways. In the zombie world, there is no such law at all, no inner light, but everything goes on as usual. Supposedly in our world, we are lucky enough that this law ensures the precise correspondence between inner experience and outer actions. Alternatively, as Jed notes, we might have the misfortune to live in a world where the law was different and the correspondence went awry, where all our statements and arguments about consciousness actually completely misrepresent our inner conscious experience! We would, as he says, feel utter embarrassment and chagrin as our bodies flagrantly ignore our conscious desires and go about their own business, making ludicrous and mistaken arguments that we, the inner selves, are powerless to correct or influence in any way. By Chalmers’ argument, such a world is every bit as possible and as imaginable as our own, and we are just lucky (I guess) that we live in a world where the correspondence lines up so well.
One thing I would add is that if we accept, per Chalmers, that our internal experience proves that this law works, the correspondence exists, and everything is in accordance at least for ourselves, Occam’s Razor would argue that the same thing probably holds for everyone else. So I would tend to reject Jed’s world where only people whose names start with C are the lucky non-zombies.
And I can’t help adding that in fact, the hypothetical world where our consciousness doesn’t quite line up with our actions, where we feel embarrassed by what our bodies do and say, where we somehow feel impotent to control our own actions and behavior, is perhaps not all that far from a correct description of what many people experience in the world! The mismatch between our elevated inner desires and beliefs, versus our crass, mundane and very fallible actions in the real world, has long been noted as a source of frustration and disappointment. So perhaps this idea is not as absurd as it sounds. OTOH that model would not explain why people are able to comment about the mismatch...
I like Jed Harris’ comments. Indeed, if there is a fortuitous “natural law” that makes our inner consciousness happen to line up in exact accordance with what our external bodies do and say independent of any inner light, that law could have worked out in any number of different ways. In the zombie world, there is no such law at all, no inner light, but everything goes on as usual. Supposedly in our world, we are lucky enough that this law ensures the precise correspondence between inner experience and outer actions. Alternatively, as Jed notes, we might have the misfortune to live in a world where the law was different and the correspondence went awry, where all our statements and arguments about consciousness actually completely misrepresent our inner conscious experience! We would, as he says, feel utter embarrassment and chagrin as our bodies flagrantly ignore our conscious desires and go about their own business, making ludicrous and mistaken arguments that we, the inner selves, are powerless to correct or influence in any way. By Chalmers’ argument, such a world is every bit as possible and as imaginable as our own, and we are just lucky (I guess) that we live in a world where the correspondence lines up so well.
One thing I would add is that if we accept, per Chalmers, that our internal experience proves that this law works, the correspondence exists, and everything is in accordance at least for ourselves, Occam’s Razor would argue that the same thing probably holds for everyone else. So I would tend to reject Jed’s world where only people whose names start with C are the lucky non-zombies.
And I can’t help adding that in fact, the hypothetical world where our consciousness doesn’t quite line up with our actions, where we feel embarrassed by what our bodies do and say, where we somehow feel impotent to control our own actions and behavior, is perhaps not all that far from a correct description of what many people experience in the world! The mismatch between our elevated inner desires and beliefs, versus our crass, mundane and very fallible actions in the real world, has long been noted as a source of frustration and disappointment. So perhaps this idea is not as absurd as it sounds. OTOH that model would not explain why people are able to comment about the mismatch...