Eliezer—“Your inability to imagine something is just a computational fact about what your brain can or can’t imagine.”
Who ever suggested otherwise? Again, see the ‘epistemology’ section of my ‘Arguing with Eliezer: Part I’. What I take as evidence is not “I have an intuition that P”, but simply P itself. You might undermine my argument from P to Q by showing some flaw in the thought process that led me to the premise P, but I don’t see that you’ve done this yet (as opposed to merely explaining why you might expect me to have such a belief). Merely pointing out that thoughts occur in my head certainly isn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know!
“And you can imagine philosophers who criticize ‘eliminative fingerists’...”
Of course, it’s logically impossible to have the fingers and all without a hand. All that we mean by ‘hand’ is the collection of fingers + palm, etc. There’s no sense to be made of the idea of the finger world which lacks the appropriate bridging laws to give rise to hands. Merely understanding the terms suffices to make this clear.
On the other hand, (we have every reason to believe that) it’s logically possible to have neurons fire without this being accompanied by any phenomenal consciousness. We certainly don’t just mean a certain kind of physical or behavioural/functional role by our term ‘consciousness’. And we can easily make sense of how the world would be different if it lacked the natural laws that give rise to consciousness. Conceptually competent philosophers can understand the so-called “zombie world” just fine.
So there’s simply no analogy here. Needless to say, the mere fact that you can “imagine” stupid philosophers is not any sort of counterargument to the actual philosophers you pretend to respond to. I mean, I can imagine a world where you actually engage with opposing arguments rather than merely mocking them; alas, my imagining does not make it so...
Eliezer—“Your inability to imagine something is just a computational fact about what your brain can or can’t imagine.”
Who ever suggested otherwise? Again, see the ‘epistemology’ section of my ‘Arguing with Eliezer: Part I’. What I take as evidence is not “I have an intuition that P”, but simply P itself. You might undermine my argument from P to Q by showing some flaw in the thought process that led me to the premise P, but I don’t see that you’ve done this yet (as opposed to merely explaining why you might expect me to have such a belief). Merely pointing out that thoughts occur in my head certainly isn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know!
“And you can imagine philosophers who criticize ‘eliminative fingerists’...”
Of course, it’s logically impossible to have the fingers and all without a hand. All that we mean by ‘hand’ is the collection of fingers + palm, etc. There’s no sense to be made of the idea of the finger world which lacks the appropriate bridging laws to give rise to hands. Merely understanding the terms suffices to make this clear.
On the other hand, (we have every reason to believe that) it’s logically possible to have neurons fire without this being accompanied by any phenomenal consciousness. We certainly don’t just mean a certain kind of physical or behavioural/functional role by our term ‘consciousness’. And we can easily make sense of how the world would be different if it lacked the natural laws that give rise to consciousness. Conceptually competent philosophers can understand the so-called “zombie world” just fine.
So there’s simply no analogy here. Needless to say, the mere fact that you can “imagine” stupid philosophers is not any sort of counterargument to the actual philosophers you pretend to respond to. I mean, I can imagine a world where you actually engage with opposing arguments rather than merely mocking them; alas, my imagining does not make it so...