I don’t think that induction on the basis of “science has explained a lot of things therefore it will explain consciousness” is convincing.
First of all, I was making the claim “science will eventually be able to explain the observable external behavior wherein David Chalmers moves his fingers around the keyboard to type up books about consciousness”. I didn’t say anything about “explaining consciousness”, just explaining a particular observable human behavior.
Second of all, I don’t believe that above claim because of induction, i.e. “science can probably eventually explain the observable external behavior of Chalmers writing books about consciousness because hey, scientists are smart, I’m sure they’ll figure it out”. I agree that that’s a pretty weak argument. Rather I believe that claim because I think I already know every step of that explanation, at least in broad outline. (Note that I’m stating this opinion without justifying it.)
If you just got rid of consciousness, you’d get a physically different world.
OK, but then the thing you’re talking about is not related to p-zombies, right?
I thought the context was: Eliezer presented an argument against zombies, and then you / Chalmers say it’s actually not an argument against zombies but rather an argument against epiphenomenalism, and then you brought up the Casper thing to illustrate how you can have zombies without epiphenomenalism. And I thought that’s what we were talking about. But now you’re saying that, in the Casper thing, getting rid of consciousness changes the world, so I guess it’s not a zombie world?
Maybe I’m confused. Question: if you got rid of consciousness, in this scenario, does zombie-Chalmers still write books about consciousness, or not? (If not, that’s not zombie-Chalmers, right? Or if so, then isn’t it pretty weird that getting rid of consciousness makes a physically different world but not in that way? Of all things, I would think that would be the most obvious way that the world would be physically different!!)
If you only got rid of consciousness behavior would change.
Oh, I see, the word “only” here or “just” in your previous comment were throwing me off. I was talking about the following thing that you wrote:
So the idea is that even if consciousness causes things, we could still imagine a physically identical world to ‘the world where consciousness causes the things’. Instead, the things would be caused the same physical way as they are with consciousness, but there would be no consciousness.
[single quotes added to fix ambiguous parsing.]
Let’s label these two worlds:
World A (“the world where consciousness causes the things”), and
World B (the world where “the things would be caused the same physical way as they are with consciousness, but there would be no consciousness”).
Your perspective seems to be: “World A is the truth, and World B is a funny thought experiment. This proposal is type-D dualist.”
I am proposing an alternative perspective: “World B is the true causally-closed physical laws of the universe (and by the way, the laws of physics maybe look different from how we normally expect laws of physics to look, but oh well), and World A is an physically equivalent universe but where consciousness exists as an epiphenomenon. This proposal is type-E epiphenomenalist.”
Is there an error in that alternative perspective?
You might be able to explain Chalmers’ behavior, but that doesn’t capture the subjective experience.
Let’s say I write the sentence: “my wristwatch is black”. And let’s say that sentence is true. And let’s further say it wasn’t just a lucky guess. Under those assumptions, then somewhere in the chain of causation that led to my writing that sentence, you will find an actual watch, and it’s actually black, and photons bounced off of that watch and went into my eye (or someone else’s eye or a camera etc.), thus giving me that information. Agree?
By the same token: Let’s say that Chalmers writes the sentence “I have phenomenal consciousness, and it has thus-and-such properties”. And let’s say that sentence is true. And let’s further say it wasn’t just a lucky guess. Under those assumptions, then somewhere in the chain of causation that led Chalmers to write that sentence, you will find phenomenal consciousness, whatever it is (if anything), with an appropriate place in the story to allow Chalmers to successfully introspect upon it—to allow Chalmers to somehow “query” phenomenal consciousness with his brain and wind up with veridical knowledge about it, analogous to how photons bounce off the watch and carry veridical information about its optical properties into the retina and eventually into long-term memory.
I claim that, if the project I proposed here is successful (i.e. the project to get from QFT+GR to the external behavior of Chalmers writing books), and we combine that with the argument of the previous paragraph (which I understand to be Eliezer’s argument), then we get a rock-solid argument that rules out all zombies, whether type-D, type-E, or type-F. Do you see what I mean?
First of all, I was making the claim “science will eventually be able to explain the observable external behavior wherein David Chalmers moves his fingers around the keyboard to type up books about consciousness”. I didn’t say anything about “explaining consciousness”, just explaining a particular observable human behavior.
Second of all, I don’t believe that above claim because of induction, i.e. “science can probably eventually explain the observable external behavior of Chalmers writing books about consciousness because hey, scientists are smart, I’m sure they’ll figure it out”. I agree that that’s a pretty weak argument. Rather I believe that claim because I think I already know every step of that explanation, at least in broad outline. (Note that I’m stating this opinion without justifying it.)
OK, but then the thing you’re talking about is not related to p-zombies, right?
I thought the context was: Eliezer presented an argument against zombies, and then you / Chalmers say it’s actually not an argument against zombies but rather an argument against epiphenomenalism, and then you brought up the Casper thing to illustrate how you can have zombies without epiphenomenalism. And I thought that’s what we were talking about. But now you’re saying that, in the Casper thing, getting rid of consciousness changes the world, so I guess it’s not a zombie world?
Maybe I’m confused. Question: if you got rid of consciousness, in this scenario, does zombie-Chalmers still write books about consciousness, or not? (If not, that’s not zombie-Chalmers, right? Or if so, then isn’t it pretty weird that getting rid of consciousness makes a physically different world but not in that way? Of all things, I would think that would be the most obvious way that the world would be physically different!!)
If you only got rid of consciousness behavior would change.
You might be able to explain Chalmers’ behavior, but that doesn’t capture the subjective experience.
Oh, I see, the word “only” here or “just” in your previous comment were throwing me off. I was talking about the following thing that you wrote:
[single quotes added to fix ambiguous parsing.]
Let’s label these two worlds:
World A (“the world where consciousness causes the things”), and
World B (the world where “the things would be caused the same physical way as they are with consciousness, but there would be no consciousness”).
Your perspective seems to be: “World A is the truth, and World B is a funny thought experiment. This proposal is type-D dualist.”
I am proposing an alternative perspective: “World B is the true causally-closed physical laws of the universe (and by the way, the laws of physics maybe look different from how we normally expect laws of physics to look, but oh well), and World A is an physically equivalent universe but where consciousness exists as an epiphenomenon. This proposal is type-E epiphenomenalist.”
Is there an error in that alternative perspective?
Let’s say I write the sentence: “my wristwatch is black”. And let’s say that sentence is true. And let’s further say it wasn’t just a lucky guess. Under those assumptions, then somewhere in the chain of causation that led to my writing that sentence, you will find an actual watch, and it’s actually black, and photons bounced off of that watch and went into my eye (or someone else’s eye or a camera etc.), thus giving me that information. Agree?
By the same token: Let’s say that Chalmers writes the sentence “I have phenomenal consciousness, and it has thus-and-such properties”. And let’s say that sentence is true. And let’s further say it wasn’t just a lucky guess. Under those assumptions, then somewhere in the chain of causation that led Chalmers to write that sentence, you will find phenomenal consciousness, whatever it is (if anything), with an appropriate place in the story to allow Chalmers to successfully introspect upon it—to allow Chalmers to somehow “query” phenomenal consciousness with his brain and wind up with veridical knowledge about it, analogous to how photons bounce off the watch and carry veridical information about its optical properties into the retina and eventually into long-term memory.
I claim that, if the project I proposed here is successful (i.e. the project to get from QFT+GR to the external behavior of Chalmers writing books), and we combine that with the argument of the previous paragraph (which I understand to be Eliezer’s argument), then we get a rock-solid argument that rules out all zombies, whether type-D, type-E, or type-F. Do you see what I mean?
I felt like I was following the entire comment, until you asserted that it rules out zombies.