This argument is not going to win over their heads and hearts. It’s clearly written for a reductionist reader, who accepts concepts such as Occam’s Razor and knowing-what-a-correct-theory-looks-like. But such a person would not have any problems with p-Zombies to begin with.
If you want to persuade someone who’s been persuaded by Chalmers, you should debunk the argument itself, not bring it to your own epistemological ground where the argument is obviously absurd. Because you, and the Chalmers-supporter are not on the same epistemological ground, and will probably never be.
Here’s how you would do that.
---- START ARGUMENT ----
Is it conceivable that the 5789312365453423234th digit of Pi is 7?
No, don’t look it up just yet. Is it conceivable to you, right now, that it’s 7?
For me, yes, it is. If I look it up, and it turns out to be 7, I would not be surprised at all. It’s a perfectly reasonable outcome, with predictable consequences. It’s not that hard for me to imagine me running a program that calculates and prints the number, and it printing out 7.
Yet, until you look it up, you don’t really know if it’s 7 or not. It could be 5. It would also be a reasonable, non-surprising and conceivable outcome.
Yet at least one of those outcomes is logically impossible. The exact value of Pi is logically determined, and, if you believe that purely logical conclusions apply universally, then one of those values of 5789312365453423234th digit of Pi is universally impossible.
And yet both are conceivable.
So logical impossibility does not imply inconceivability. This is logically equivalent to saying “conceivability does not imply logical possibility” (A->B ⇒ ~B->~A).
If conceivability does not imply logical possibility, then even if you can imagine a Zombie world, it does not mean that the Zombie world is logically possible. It may be the case that the Zombie world is logically impossible. Chalmer’s argument does not rule that out. For example, it may be the case that certain atomic configurations necessarily imply consciousness. Or it may be any other case of logical impossibility. What matters is that consciousness as an additional nonphysical entity is not implied by its conceivability.
This argument is not going to win over their heads and hearts. It’s clearly written for a reductionist reader, who accepts concepts such as Occam’s Razor and knowing-what-a-correct-theory-looks-like.
I would suggest that people who have already studied this issue in depth would have other reasons for rejecting the above blog post. However, you are right that philosophers in general don’t use Occam’s Razor as a common tool and they don’t seem to make assumptions about what a correct theory “looks like.”
If conceivability does not imply logical possibility, then even if you can imagine a Zombie world, it does not mean that the Zombie world is logically possible.
Chalmers does not claim that p-zombies are logically possible, he claims that they are metaphysically possible. Chalmers already believes that certain atomic configurations necessarily imply consciousness, by dint of psychophysical laws.
The claim that certain atomic configurations just are consciousness is what the physicalist claims, but that is what is contested by knowledge arguments: we can’t really conceive of a way for consciousness to be identical with physical states.
Chalmers does not claim that p-zombies are logically possible, he claims that they are metaphysically possible. Chalmers already believes that certain atomic configurations necessarily imply consciousness, by dint of psychophysical laws.
Okay. In that case, I peg his argument as proving too much. Imagine a cookie that is exactly like an Oreo, down to the last atom, except it’s raspberry flavored. This situation is semantically the same as a p-Zombie, so it’s exactly as metaphysically possible, whatever that means. Does it prove that raspberry flavor is an extra, nonphysical fact about cookies?
Via hypnosis it’s perfectly possible to let someone perceive the raspberry flavor when eating an Oreo. There’s no problem to say that an Oreo has a flavor that based on the person eating it (an observer).
The flavor qualia of an Oreo is not predetermined by it’s physcial makeup.
In the presence of hypnosis, hallucination, olfactory damage, etc., the different flavour qualia of the Oreo are not properties of the Oreo at all. This doesn’t seem to me at all analogous to the p-zombie or “inverted spectrum” thought experiments, where the point is that the people are the same and the qualia are unchanged.
the different flavour qualia of the Oreo are not properties of the Oreo at all.
Why isn’t how the Oreo tastes a property of the Oreo? It’s just not a physical property of it in the sense that you can investigate it by investigating the physical makeup of the Oreo.
It’s simplier to how the qualia of conscious experience that a p-zombie might lack.
Sorry, I was a little inexact. The way an Oreo tastes to someone whose tasting-system has been interfered with is a property of both the Oreo and the interference, and in some cases (e.g., someone hypnotized to think they’re eating a raspberry) it may be a property of only the interference; in any case, the differences between different such tasters’ experiences is largely a matter of the interference rather than the Oreo.
Something a bit like this is true even without interference, of course. Different people have different experiences on tasting the same foods. Very different, sometimes.
But, again, none of this is a good analogy for the p-zombie or inverted-spectrum experiments. The way the analogy is meant to work is:
Person : inverted spectrum :: Oreo : tastes of raspberries.
Inversion is a difference in the person :: raspberry taste is a difference in the Oreo.
In both cases the change is purely internal.
“Inverted spectra” pose no sort of difficulty for physicalism if what’s actually happening is that person 1 sees red and person 2 sees green because person 1 is looking at a tomato and person 2 is looking at a cabbage.
In both cases the only change is supposed to be non-physical.
Otherwise there’s no argument against physicalism here.
And timujin is suggesting that the Oreo version of this is obviously silly, and that we should apply the same intuitions to the other side of the analogy.
Your introduction of hypnosis breaks the analogy, because now (1) the change is no longer “internal”: the raspberry taste is only there if a particular person is eating the Oreo, and that person has changed; and (2) the change is no longer non-physical: hypnosis involves physical processes and so far as we know is a physical process.
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.
Chalmers doesn’t think ‘metaphysical possibility’ is a well-specified idea. He thinks p-zombies are logically possible, but that the purely physical facts in our world do not logically entail the phenomenal facts; the phenomenal facts are ‘further facts.’
This argument is not going to win over their heads and hearts. It’s clearly written for a reductionist reader, who accepts concepts such as Occam’s Razor and knowing-what-a-correct-theory-looks-like. But such a person would not have any problems with p-Zombies to begin with.
If you want to persuade someone who’s been persuaded by Chalmers, you should debunk the argument itself, not bring it to your own epistemological ground where the argument is obviously absurd. Because you, and the Chalmers-supporter are not on the same epistemological ground, and will probably never be.
Here’s how you would do that.
---- START ARGUMENT ----
Is it conceivable that the 5789312365453423234th digit of Pi is 7?
No, don’t look it up just yet. Is it conceivable to you, right now, that it’s 7?
For me, yes, it is. If I look it up, and it turns out to be 7, I would not be surprised at all. It’s a perfectly reasonable outcome, with predictable consequences. It’s not that hard for me to imagine me running a program that calculates and prints the number, and it printing out 7.
Yet, until you look it up, you don’t really know if it’s 7 or not. It could be 5. It would also be a reasonable, non-surprising and conceivable outcome.
Yet at least one of those outcomes is logically impossible. The exact value of Pi is logically determined, and, if you believe that purely logical conclusions apply universally, then one of those values of 5789312365453423234th digit of Pi is universally impossible.
And yet both are conceivable.
So logical impossibility does not imply inconceivability. This is logically equivalent to saying “conceivability does not imply logical possibility” (A->B ⇒ ~B->~A).
If conceivability does not imply logical possibility, then even if you can imagine a Zombie world, it does not mean that the Zombie world is logically possible. It may be the case that the Zombie world is logically impossible. Chalmer’s argument does not rule that out. For example, it may be the case that certain atomic configurations necessarily imply consciousness. Or it may be any other case of logical impossibility. What matters is that consciousness as an additional nonphysical entity is not implied by its conceivability.
---- END ARGUMENT ----
I would suggest that people who have already studied this issue in depth would have other reasons for rejecting the above blog post. However, you are right that philosophers in general don’t use Occam’s Razor as a common tool and they don’t seem to make assumptions about what a correct theory “looks like.”
Chalmers does not claim that p-zombies are logically possible, he claims that they are metaphysically possible. Chalmers already believes that certain atomic configurations necessarily imply consciousness, by dint of psychophysical laws.
The claim that certain atomic configurations just are consciousness is what the physicalist claims, but that is what is contested by knowledge arguments: we can’t really conceive of a way for consciousness to be identical with physical states.
Okay. In that case, I peg his argument as proving too much. Imagine a cookie that is exactly like an Oreo, down to the last atom, except it’s raspberry flavored. This situation is semantically the same as a p-Zombie, so it’s exactly as metaphysically possible, whatever that means. Does it prove that raspberry flavor is an extra, nonphysical fact about cookies?
Via hypnosis it’s perfectly possible to let someone perceive the raspberry flavor when eating an Oreo. There’s no problem to say that an Oreo has a flavor that based on the person eating it (an observer).
The flavor qualia of an Oreo is not predetermined by it’s physcial makeup.
In the presence of hypnosis, hallucination, olfactory damage, etc., the different flavour qualia of the Oreo are not properties of the Oreo at all. This doesn’t seem to me at all analogous to the p-zombie or “inverted spectrum” thought experiments, where the point is that the people are the same and the qualia are unchanged.
Why isn’t how the Oreo tastes a property of the Oreo? It’s just not a physical property of it in the sense that you can investigate it by investigating the physical makeup of the Oreo.
It’s simplier to how the qualia of conscious experience that a p-zombie might lack.
Sorry, I was a little inexact. The way an Oreo tastes to someone whose tasting-system has been interfered with is a property of both the Oreo and the interference, and in some cases (e.g., someone hypnotized to think they’re eating a raspberry) it may be a property of only the interference; in any case, the differences between different such tasters’ experiences is largely a matter of the interference rather than the Oreo.
Something a bit like this is true even without interference, of course. Different people have different experiences on tasting the same foods. Very different, sometimes.
But, again, none of this is a good analogy for the p-zombie or inverted-spectrum experiments. The way the analogy is meant to work is:
Person : inverted spectrum :: Oreo : tastes of raspberries.
Inversion is a difference in the person :: raspberry taste is a difference in the Oreo.
In both cases the change is purely internal.
“Inverted spectra” pose no sort of difficulty for physicalism if what’s actually happening is that person 1 sees red and person 2 sees green because person 1 is looking at a tomato and person 2 is looking at a cabbage.
In both cases the only change is supposed to be non-physical.
Otherwise there’s no argument against physicalism here.
And timujin is suggesting that the Oreo version of this is obviously silly, and that we should apply the same intuitions to the other side of the analogy.
Your introduction of hypnosis breaks the analogy, because now (1) the change is no longer “internal”: the raspberry taste is only there if a particular person is eating the Oreo, and that person has changed; and (2) the change is no longer non-physical: hypnosis involves physical processes and so far as we know is a physical process.
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.
Chalmers doesn’t think ‘metaphysical possibility’ is a well-specified idea. He thinks p-zombies are logically possible, but that the purely physical facts in our world do not logically entail the phenomenal facts; the phenomenal facts are ‘further facts.’