Richard: Chalmers’ argument on the example of heat and his claim that Dennet’s conception of a vitalist is imaginary both appear to me to be correct responses to this style of attack on the “hard problem of consciousness”.
Unfortunately, the post “Misusing Kripke” seems to me to be horribly confused. You assert that “Nobody thinks that the ‘Twin Earth’ world Putnam describes is an impossible one. Rather, we still grant the possibility of the world itself, but merely re-assess how best to describe it.” and that “we can imagine a world where watery stuff isn’t truly water” but in fact, since I actually understand why water is watery and NH3, for instance, is not, can no more imagine a world where watery stuff isn’t H2O than I can a world in which a hand isn’t five fingers and a trunk. I can vaguely imagine being confused about either in some relevant respects if my brain was manipulated in a fine enough manner, but these sorts of confusions are really pretty much confusions about what constitutes “watery stuff”. In the Matrix I could swim in “water” that was not made of H2O, but on earth I can see “water” that turns out to be a mirage too. Both are “watery” in a sense, but not in the relevant sense of being the same sort of stuff as my body or a snowflake are made of. There are things that are “painy” in some senses but not in other senses as well. For instance, the suffering of a character in a movie, of a person’s childhood self in their false memories of satanic abuse, or of a practitioner of some sorts of masochistic acts.
Your claim above that “there’s no reason the would couldn’t have turned out that way, if the laws of nature had been different.” is, to my mind, another example of this sort of confusion. You have often pointed out that scientists don’t generally understand what philosophers do, but it seems to me that the converse is also true. Might I be so bold as to suggest that both groups are stereotyped on the basis of the different but in both cases relatively silly activities that they both engage in during the 95% or so of the time when they are not both actually doing philosophy? The vast majority of, if not all of, the “natural laws” scientists speak of are not arbitrary. It seems very likely to many prominent scientists (Einstein, Hawking, etc) that they couldn’t have been different at all, and certain that they couldn’t be changed individually while leaving the universe otherwise the same. It’s worth emphasizing that the fact that we find ourselves observing a simple and orderly world (find ourselves to be observations of an orderly world?) indicates that we are not observations selected arbitrarily from an unordered set of observations (whatever that would mean in the general case, Boltzmann Brains are a simple-to-conceptualize special case).
Richard: Chalmers’ argument on the example of heat and his claim that Dennet’s conception of a vitalist is imaginary both appear to me to be correct responses to this style of attack on the “hard problem of consciousness”.
Unfortunately, the post “Misusing Kripke” seems to me to be horribly confused. You assert that “Nobody thinks that the ‘Twin Earth’ world Putnam describes is an impossible one. Rather, we still grant the possibility of the world itself, but merely re-assess how best to describe it.” and that “we can imagine a world where watery stuff isn’t truly water” but in fact, since I actually understand why water is watery and NH3, for instance, is not, can no more imagine a world where watery stuff isn’t H2O than I can a world in which a hand isn’t five fingers and a trunk. I can vaguely imagine being confused about either in some relevant respects if my brain was manipulated in a fine enough manner, but these sorts of confusions are really pretty much confusions about what constitutes “watery stuff”. In the Matrix I could swim in “water” that was not made of H2O, but on earth I can see “water” that turns out to be a mirage too. Both are “watery” in a sense, but not in the relevant sense of being the same sort of stuff as my body or a snowflake are made of. There are things that are “painy” in some senses but not in other senses as well. For instance, the suffering of a character in a movie, of a person’s childhood self in their false memories of satanic abuse, or of a practitioner of some sorts of masochistic acts.
Your claim above that “there’s no reason the would couldn’t have turned out that way, if the laws of nature had been different.” is, to my mind, another example of this sort of confusion. You have often pointed out that scientists don’t generally understand what philosophers do, but it seems to me that the converse is also true. Might I be so bold as to suggest that both groups are stereotyped on the basis of the different but in both cases relatively silly activities that they both engage in during the 95% or so of the time when they are not both actually doing philosophy? The vast majority of, if not all of, the “natural laws” scientists speak of are not arbitrary. It seems very likely to many prominent scientists (Einstein, Hawking, etc) that they couldn’t have been different at all, and certain that they couldn’t be changed individually while leaving the universe otherwise the same. It’s worth emphasizing that the fact that we find ourselves observing a simple and orderly world (find ourselves to be observations of an orderly world?) indicates that we are not observations selected arbitrarily from an unordered set of observations (whatever that would mean in the general case, Boltzmann Brains are a simple-to-conceptualize special case).