This is an excellent and fair summary of the debate. I think the one aspect it leaves out is that eliminativists differ from dualists in that they have internalized Quine’s lessons about how we can always revise our conceptual schemes. I elaborated on this long ago in this post at my old blog.
our concepts change and evolve with the growth of scientific knowledge; what is concievable now may become unconcievable later and vice-versa. Concepts are just tools for describing the world, and we can change them and reform them if we need to. This picture of science, familiar since Quine, is pressupposed by Dennett, but implicitly rejected by Chalmers.
I’m pretty confident Chalmers would disagree with this characterization. Chalmers accepts that our concepts can change, and he accepts that if zombies fall short of ideal conceivability — conceivability for a mind that perfectly understands the phenomena in question — then dualism will be refuted. That’s why the Mary’s Room thought experiment is about an ideally extrapolated reasoner. The weakness of such a thought experiment is, of course, that we may fail to accurately simulate an ideally extrapolated reasoner; but the strength is that this idealization has metaphysical significance in a way that mere failure of contemporary imagination doesn’t.
It may provide a fundamental theory or a list of them but not a list of fundamental entities the world is made of with a list of contingent laws of nature holding between them. What an entity such like the electromagnetic field is, is defined by what laws of nature it obeys and therefore by its relations with other entities.
If contemporary science’s best theory posits fundamental entities, then contemporary science posits fundamental entities. Science is not across-the-board ontologically agnostic or deflationary.
Unless I’m misunderstanding you, your claim that a physical theory is equivalent to its Ramsey sentence is a rather different topic. I think Chalmers would respond that although this may be true for physical theories at the moment, it’s a contingent, empirical truth — we happen to have discovered that we don’t need to perform any ostensive acts, for instance, in fixing the meanings of our physical terms. If science discovered an exception to this generalization, science would not perish; it would just slightly complicate the set of linguistic rituals it currently uses to clarify what it’s taking about.
But this shows that all the zombie arguments are question-begging, because to carry any force they must assume that there is something very special about consciousness that distinguishes it from other subjects for science in the first place.
This isn’t an assumption. It’s an inference from the empirical character of introspection. That is, it has a defeasible (quasi-)perceptual basis. Many eliminativists want it to be the case that dualists are question-begging when they treat introspective evidence as evidence, but introspective evidence is evidence. Chalmers does not take it as axiomatic, prior to examining the way his stream of consciousness actually looks, that there is a special class of phenomenal concepts.
I’m not a dualist, but I don’t think any of Chalmers’ arguments are question-begging. They just aren’t strong enough to refute physicalism; physicalism has too many good supporting arguments.
In the second paragraph you quote, I was not trying to make a strong statement about scientific theories being equivalent to Ramsey sentences, though I see how that is a natural interpretation of it. I meant to support my previous paragraph about the lack of a strong distinction between conceptual implications and definitions, and contingent/nomological laws. For each “fundamental law of physics”, there can be one axiomatization of physical theory where it is a contingent relation between fundamental entities, and another one where it is a definition or conceptual relation. It is central for Chalmers’ viewpoint that the relation between consciousness and functional states is irreducibly contingent, but this kind of law would be unlike any other one in physics.
This isn’t an assumption. It’s an inference from the empirical character of introspection. That is, it has a defeasible (quasi-)perceptual basis. Many eliminativists want it to be the case that dualists are question-begging when they treat introspective evidence as evidence, but introspective evidence is evidence. Chalmers does not take it as axiomatic, prior to examining the way his stream of consciousness actually looks, that there is a special class of phenomenal concepts.
I think you are mixing two things here: whether introspective evidence is evidence, which I agree to (e.g., when I “feel like I am seeing something green”, I very likely am in the state of “seeing something green”); and whether that “stuff” that when we introspect we describe with phenomenal concepts must necessarily be described with those concepts (instead of with more sophisticated and less intuitive concepts, for which the zombie/Mary’s Room/etc arguments would fail).
Yeah, Chalmers would agree that adding phenomenal consciousness would be a very profound break with the sort of theory physics currently endorses, and not just because it appears anthromorphizing.
whether that “stuff” that when we introspect we describe with phenomenal concepts must necessarily be described with those concepts (instead of with more sophisticated and less intuitive concepts, for which the zombie/Mary’s Room/etc arguments would fail).
I haven’t yet seen a concept that my phenomenal states appear to fall under, that blocks Mary’s Room or Zombie World. Not even a schematic, partly-fleshed-out concept. (And this is itself very surprising, given physicalism.)
This is an excellent and fair summary of the debate. I think the one aspect it leaves out is that eliminativists differ from dualists in that they have internalized Quine’s lessons about how we can always revise our conceptual schemes. I elaborated on this long ago in this post at my old blog.
I’m pretty confident Chalmers would disagree with this characterization. Chalmers accepts that our concepts can change, and he accepts that if zombies fall short of ideal conceivability — conceivability for a mind that perfectly understands the phenomena in question — then dualism will be refuted. That’s why the Mary’s Room thought experiment is about an ideally extrapolated reasoner. The weakness of such a thought experiment is, of course, that we may fail to accurately simulate an ideally extrapolated reasoner; but the strength is that this idealization has metaphysical significance in a way that mere failure of contemporary imagination doesn’t.
If contemporary science’s best theory posits fundamental entities, then contemporary science posits fundamental entities. Science is not across-the-board ontologically agnostic or deflationary.
Unless I’m misunderstanding you, your claim that a physical theory is equivalent to its Ramsey sentence is a rather different topic. I think Chalmers would respond that although this may be true for physical theories at the moment, it’s a contingent, empirical truth — we happen to have discovered that we don’t need to perform any ostensive acts, for instance, in fixing the meanings of our physical terms. If science discovered an exception to this generalization, science would not perish; it would just slightly complicate the set of linguistic rituals it currently uses to clarify what it’s taking about.
This isn’t an assumption. It’s an inference from the empirical character of introspection. That is, it has a defeasible (quasi-)perceptual basis. Many eliminativists want it to be the case that dualists are question-begging when they treat introspective evidence as evidence, but introspective evidence is evidence. Chalmers does not take it as axiomatic, prior to examining the way his stream of consciousness actually looks, that there is a special class of phenomenal concepts.
I’m not a dualist, but I don’t think any of Chalmers’ arguments are question-begging. They just aren’t strong enough to refute physicalism; physicalism has too many good supporting arguments.
Thanks for your comments!
In the second paragraph you quote, I was not trying to make a strong statement about scientific theories being equivalent to Ramsey sentences, though I see how that is a natural interpretation of it. I meant to support my previous paragraph about the lack of a strong distinction between conceptual implications and definitions, and contingent/nomological laws. For each “fundamental law of physics”, there can be one axiomatization of physical theory where it is a contingent relation between fundamental entities, and another one where it is a definition or conceptual relation. It is central for Chalmers’ viewpoint that the relation between consciousness and functional states is irreducibly contingent, but this kind of law would be unlike any other one in physics.
I think you are mixing two things here: whether introspective evidence is evidence, which I agree to (e.g., when I “feel like I am seeing something green”, I very likely am in the state of “seeing something green”); and whether that “stuff” that when we introspect we describe with phenomenal concepts must necessarily be described with those concepts (instead of with more sophisticated and less intuitive concepts, for which the zombie/Mary’s Room/etc arguments would fail).
Yeah, Chalmers would agree that adding phenomenal consciousness would be a very profound break with the sort of theory physics currently endorses, and not just because it appears anthromorphizing.
I haven’t yet seen a concept that my phenomenal states appear to fall under, that blocks Mary’s Room or Zombie World. Not even a schematic, partly-fleshed-out concept. (And this is itself very surprising, given physicalism.)