Imagine a cookie like Oreo to the last atom, except that it’s deadly poisonous, weighs 100 tons and runs away when scared.
Well, I honestly can’t. When you tell me that, I picture a real Oreo, and then at its side a cartoonish Oreo with all those weird property, but then trying to assume the microscopic structure of the cartoonish Oreo is the same than of a real Oreo just fails.
It’s like if you tell me to imagine an equilateral triangle which is also a right triangle. Knowing non-euclidian geometry I sure can cheat around, but assuming I don’t know about non-euclidian geometry or you explicitely add the constraint of keeping it, it just fails. You can hold the two sets of properties next to each other, but not reunite them.
Or if you tell me to imagine an arrangement of 7 small stones as a rectangle which isn’t a line of 7x1. I can hold the image of 7 stones, the image of a 4x2 rectangle side-by-side, but reuniting the two just fails. Or leads to 4 stones in a line with 3 stones in a line below, which is no longer a rectangle.
When you multiply constraints to the point of being logically impossible, imagination just breaks—it holds the properties in two side-by-side sets, unable to re-conciliate them into a single coherent entity.
My impression was that this was pretty much tinujin’s point: saying “imagine something atom-for-atom identical to you but with entirely different subjective experience” is like saying “imagine something atom-for-atom identical to an Oreo except that it weighs 100 tons etc.”: it only seems imaginable as long as you aren’t thinking about it too carefully.
Flavor is distinctly a phenomenal property and a type of qualia.
It is metaphysically impossible for distinctly physical properties to differ between two objects which are physically identical. We can’t properly conceive of a cookie that is physically identical to an Oreo yet contains different chemicals, is more massive or possessive of locomotive powers. Somewhere in our mental model of such an item, there is a contradiction.
Yes, this is called qualia inversion and is another common argument against physicalism. There’s a detailed discussion of it here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/
It’s not about qualia. It’s about any arbitrary property.
Imagine a cookie like Oreo to the last atom, except that it’s deadly poisonous, weighs 100 tons and runs away when scared.
Well, I honestly can’t. When you tell me that, I picture a real Oreo, and then at its side a cartoonish Oreo with all those weird property, but then trying to assume the microscopic structure of the cartoonish Oreo is the same than of a real Oreo just fails.
It’s like if you tell me to imagine an equilateral triangle which is also a right triangle. Knowing non-euclidian geometry I sure can cheat around, but assuming I don’t know about non-euclidian geometry or you explicitely add the constraint of keeping it, it just fails. You can hold the two sets of properties next to each other, but not reunite them.
Or if you tell me to imagine an arrangement of 7 small stones as a rectangle which isn’t a line of 7x1. I can hold the image of 7 stones, the image of a 4x2 rectangle side-by-side, but reuniting the two just fails. Or leads to 4 stones in a line with 3 stones in a line below, which is no longer a rectangle.
When you multiply constraints to the point of being logically impossible, imagination just breaks—it holds the properties in two side-by-side sets, unable to re-conciliate them into a single coherent entity.
That’s what your weird Oreo or zombies do to me.
My impression was that this was pretty much tinujin’s point: saying “imagine something atom-for-atom identical to you but with entirely different subjective experience” is like saying “imagine something atom-for-atom identical to an Oreo except that it weighs 100 tons etc.”: it only seems imaginable as long as you aren’t thinking about it too carefully.
Confirm.
Flavor is distinctly a phenomenal property and a type of qualia.
It is metaphysically impossible for distinctly physical properties to differ between two objects which are physically identical. We can’t properly conceive of a cookie that is physically identical to an Oreo yet contains different chemicals, is more massive or possessive of locomotive powers. Somewhere in our mental model of such an item, there is a contradiction.