But, how do we know that anything we value won’t similarly dissolve under sufficiently thorough deconstruction?
Experience.
I was once a theist. I believed that people were ontologically fundamental, and that there was a true morality written in the sky, and an omniscient deity would tell you what to do if you asked. Now I don’t. My values did change a little, in that they’re no longer based on what other people tell me is good so I don’t think homosexuality is bad and stuff like that, but it wasn’t a significant change.
The only part that I think did change because of that was just that I no longer believed that certain people were a good authority on ethics. Had I not believed God would tell us what’s right, I’m not sure there’d have been any change at all.
Learning more physics is a comparatively small change, and I’d expect it to correspond to a tiny change in values.
In regards to your Bob example, if I had his values, I’d expect that after learning that someone in the past is by definition not a future evolution of me, I’d change my definition to something closer to the “naive” definition, and ignore any jumps in time so long as the people stay the same when deciding of someone is a future evolution of me. If I then learn about timeless quantum physics and realize there’s no such thing as the past anyway, and certainly not pasts that lead to particular futures, I’d settle for a world with a lower entropy, in which a relatively high number of Feynman paths reach here.
If I then learn about timeless quantum physics and realize there’s no such thing as the past anyway, and certainly not pasts that lead to particular futures, I’d settle for a world with a lower entropy, in which a relatively high number of Feynman paths reach here.
Funny you should say that. I, for one, have the terminal value of continued personal existence (a.k.a. being alive). On LW I’m learning that continuity, personhood, and existence might well be illusions. If that is the case, my efforts to find ways to survive amount to extending something that isn’t there in the first place
Of course there’s the high probability that we’re doing the philosophical equivalent of dividing by zero somewhere among our many nested extrapolations.
But let’s say consciousness really is an illusion. Maybe the take-home lesson is that our goals all live at a much more superficial level than we are capable of probing. Not that reductionism “robs” us of our values or anything like that… but it may mean that cannot exist an instrumentally rational course of action that is also perfectly epistemically rational. That being less wrong past some threshold will not help us set better goals for ourselves, only get better at pursuing goals we pre-committed to pursuing.
What do you mean when you say consciousness may be an illusion? It’s happening to you, isn’t it? What other proof do you need? What would a world look like where consciousness is an illusion, vs. one where it isn’t?
Identical. Therefore consciousness adds complexity without actually being necessary for explaining anything. Therefore, the presumption is that we are all philosophical zombies (but think we’re not).
Okay, so what creates the feeling of consciousness in those philosophical zombies? Can we generate more of those circumstances which naturally create that feeling?
If my life is “ultimately” an illusion, how can I make this illusion last as long as possible?
[I]n a discussion of the current state of evidence for whether the universe is spatially finite or spatially infinite,[...] James D. Miller chided Robin Hanson: ‘Robin, you are suffering from overconfidence bias in assuming that the universe exists. Surely there is some chance that the universe is of size zero.’
To which I replied: ‘James, if the universe doesn’t exist, it would still be nice to know whether it’s an infinite or a finite universe that doesn’t exist.’
Ha! You think pulling that old ‘universe doesn’t exist’ trick will stop me? It won’t even slow me down!
It’s not that I’m ruling out the possibility that the universe doesn’t exist. It’s just that, even if nothing exists, I still want to understand the nothing as best I can. My curiosity doesn’t suddenly go away just because there’s no reality, you know!
We are all philosophical zombies, but think we’re not? We’re all X, but think we’re Y? What’s the difference between X and Y? What would our subjective experience look like if we were actually Y, instead of just thinking we’re Y? Unless you can point to something, then we can safely conclude that you’re talking without a meaning.
I’m trying to think of what kind of zombies there could be besides philosophical ones.
Epistemological zombie: My brain has exactly the same state, all the neurons in all the same places, and likewise the rest of the universe, but my map doesn’t possess any ‘truth’ or ‘accuracy’.
Ontological zombie: All the atoms are in all the same places but they don’t exist.
Existential zombie: All the atoms are in all the same places but they don’t mean anything.
Causal zombie: So far as anyone can tell, my brain is doing exactly the same things, but only by coincidence and not because it follows from the laws of physics.
Mathematical zombie: Just like me only it doesn’t run on math.
Logical zombie: I got nothin’.
Conceivability zombie: It’s exactly like me but it lacks the property of conceivability.
Löwenheim–Skolem zombie: Makes statements that are word-for-word identical to the ones that you make about uncountable sets, and for the same causal reasons (namely, because you both implement the inference rules of ZF in the same way), but its statements aren’t about actually uncountable sets, because it lives in a countable model of ZF.
Existential zombie: All the atoms are in all the same places but they don’t mean anything.
Causal zombie: So far as anyone can tell, my brain is doing exactly the same things, but only by coincidence and not because it follows from the laws of physics.
Oddly enough, the other day I ran into someone who appears to literally believe a combination of these two.
The eliminativist responds: The world would look the same to me (a complex brain process) if dualism were true. But it would not look the same to the immaterial ghost possessing me, and we could write a computer program that simulates an epiphenomenal universe, i.e., one where every brain causally produces a ghost that has no effects of its own. So dualism is meaningful and false, not meaningless.
The dualist responds in turn: I agree that those two scenarios make sense. However, I disagree about which of those possible worlds the evidence suggests is our world. And I disagree about what sort of agent we are — experience reveals us to be phenomenal consciousnesses learning about whether there’s also a physical world, not brains investigating whether there’s also an invisible epiphenomenal spirit-world. The mental has epistemic priority over the physical.
We do have good reason to think we are epiphenomenal ghosts: Our moment-to-moment experience of things like that (ostending a patch of redness in my visual field) indicates that there is something within experience that is not strictly entailed by the physical facts. This category of experiential ‘thats’ I assign the label ‘phenomenal consciousness’ as a useful shorthand, but the evidence for this category is a perception-like introspective acquaintance, not an inference from other items of knowledge.
You and I agree, eliminativist, that we can ostend something about our moment-to-moment introspective data. For instance, we can gesture at optical illusions. I simply insist that one of those somethings is epistemically impossible given physicalism; we couldn’t have such qualitatively specific experiences as mere arrangements of atoms, though I certainly agree we could have unconscious mental states that causally suffice for my judgments to that effect.
Eliminativist: Aren’t you giving up the game the moment you concede that your judgments are just as well predicted by my interpretation of the data as by yours? If your judgments are equally probable given eliminativism as given dualism, then eliminativism wins purely on grounds of parsimony.
Dualist: But the datum, the explanandum, isn’t my judgment. I don’t go ‘Oh, I seem to be judging that I’m experiencing redness; I’ll conclude that I am in fact experiencing redness’. Rather, I go ‘Oh, I seem to be experiencing redness; I’ll conclude that I am in fact experiencing redness’. This initial seeming is a perception-like access to a subjective field of vision, not something propositional or otherwise linguistically structured. And this seeming really does include phenomenal redness, over and above any disposition to linguistically judge (or behave at all!) in any specific way.
Eliminativist: But even those judgments are predicted by my theory as well. How can you trust in judgments of yours that are causally uncorrelated with the truth? If you know that in most possible worlds where you arrive at your current state of overall belief, you’re wrong about X, then you should conclude that you are in fact wrong about X. (And there are more possible worlds where your brain exists than where your brain and epiphenomenal ghost exist.)
Dualist: Our disagreement is that I don’t see my epistemic status as purely causal. On your view, knowledge and the object known are metaphysically distinct, with the object known causing our state of knowledge. You conclude that epistemic states are only reliable when they are correlated with the right extrinsic state of the world.
I agree with you that knowledge and the object known are generally distinct, but we should expect an exception to that rule when knowledge turns upon itself, i.e., when the thing we’re aware of is the very fact of awareness. In that case, my knowledge is not causally, spatially, or temporally separated from its object — at this very moment, without any need to appeal to a past or present at all, I can know that I am having this particular experience of a text box. I can be wrong in my inferences, wrong in my speculations about the world outside my experience; and I can be wrong in my subvocalized judgments about my experience; but my experience can’t be wrong about itself. You can design a map in such a way that it differs from (i.e., misrepresents) a territory, but you can’t design a map in such a way that it differs from itself; the relation of a map to itself is one of identity, not of representation or causality, and it is the nature of my map, as revealed by itself (and to itself!), that we’re discussing here.
Eliminativist: I just don’t think that model of introspection is tenable, given the history of science. Maybe your introspection gives you some evidence that physicalism is false, but the frequency with which we’ve turned out to be wrong about other aspects of our experience has to do a great deal to undermine your confidence in your map of the nature of your epistemic access to maps. I’m not having an argument with your visual field; I’m having an argument with a linguistic reasoner that has formed certain judgments about that visual field, and it’s always possible that the reasoner is wrong about its own internal states, no matter how obvious, manifest, self-evident, etc. those states appear.
Dualist: A fair point. And I can appreciate the force of your argument in the abstract, when I think about an arbitrary reasoner from the third person. Yet when I attend once more to my own stream of consciousness, I become just as confused all over again. Your philosophical position’s appeal is insufficient to overcome the perceptual obviousness of my own consciousness — and that obviousness includes the perceptual obviousness of irreducibility. I can’t make myself pretend to not believe in something that seems to me so self-evident.
Eliminativist: Then you aren’t trying hard enough. For I share your intuitions when I reflect on my immediate experiences, yet I’ve successfully deferred to science and philosophy in a way that blocks these semblances before they can mutate into beliefs. It can be done.
Dualist: It can be done. But should it? From my perspective, you’ve talked yourself into a lunatic position by reasoning only in impersonal, third-person terms. You’ve forgotten that the empirical evidence includes not only the history of science, but also your own conscious states. To me it appears that you’ve fallen into the error of the behaviorists, denying a mental state (phenomenal consciousness) just because it doesn’t fit neatly into a specific invented set of epistemological social standards. No matter how much I’d love to join you in asserting a theory as elegant and simple as physicalism, I can’t bring myself to do so when it comes at the cost of denying the manifest.
… and the discussion continues from there. I don’t think either position is meaningless. Claims like ‘nothing exists’ aren’t meaningless just because agents like us couldn’t confirm them if they were true; they’re meaningful and false. And it’s certainly conceivable that if the above discussion continued long enough, a consensus could be reached, simply by continuing to debate the extent to which science undermines phenomenology.
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.)
continuity, personhood, and existence might well be illusions. If that is the case, my efforts to find ways to survive amount to extending something that isn’t there in the first place
Can you say more about how you get from “X is an illusion” to “X isn’t there in the first place”?
To clarify that question a little… suppose I’m thirsty in the desert, and am pursuing an image of water, and I eventually conclude to my disappointment that it is just a mirage. I’m doing two things here:
I’m correcting an earlier false belief about the world—my observation is not of water, but of a particular kind of light-distorting system of heated air.
I’m making an implicit value judgment: I want water, I don’t want a mirage, which is why I’m disappointed. The world is worse than I thought it was.
Those are importantly different. If I were, instead, a non-thirsty student of optics, I would still correct my belief but I might not make the same value judgment: I might be delighted to discover that what I’d previously thought was a mere oasis is instead an interesting mirage!
In the same spirit, suppose I discover that continuity, personhood, and existence are illusions, when I had previously thought they were something else (what that “something else” is, I don’t really know). So, OK, I correct my earlier false belief about the world.
There’s still a value judgment left to make though… am I disappointed to realize I’m pursuing a mere illusion rather than the “something else” I actually wanted? Or am I delighted to discover that I’m pursuing a genuine illusion rather than an ill-defined “something else”?
Your way of speaking seems to take the former for granted. Why is that?
being less wrong past some threshold will not help us set better goals for ourselves
Well, it will, and it won’t. But in the sense I think you mean it, yes, that’s right… it won’t.
Our values are what they are. Being less wrong improves our ability to implement those values, and our ability to articulate those values, which may in turn cause the values we’re aware of and pursuing to become more consistent, but it doesn’t somehow replace our values with superior values.
I, for one, have the terminal value of continued personal existence (a.k.a. being alive). On LW I’m learning that continuity, personhood, and existence might well be illusions. If that is the case, my efforts to find ways to survive amount to extending something that isn’t there in the first place
I am confused about this as well. I think the right thing to do here is to recognize that there is a lot we don’t know about, e.g. personhood, and that there is a lot we can do to clarify our thinking on personhood. When we aren’t confused about this stuff anymore, we can look over it and decide what parts we really valued; our intuitive idea of personhood clearly describes something, even recognizing that a lot of the ideas of the past are wrong. Note also that we don’t gain anything by remaining ignorant (I’m not sure if you’ve realized this yet).
Experience.
I was once a theist. I believed that people were ontologically fundamental, and that there was a true morality written in the sky, and an omniscient deity would tell you what to do if you asked. Now I don’t. My values did change a little, in that they’re no longer based on what other people tell me is good so I don’t think homosexuality is bad and stuff like that, but it wasn’t a significant change.
The only part that I think did change because of that was just that I no longer believed that certain people were a good authority on ethics. Had I not believed God would tell us what’s right, I’m not sure there’d have been any change at all.
Learning more physics is a comparatively small change, and I’d expect it to correspond to a tiny change in values.
In regards to your Bob example, if I had his values, I’d expect that after learning that someone in the past is by definition not a future evolution of me, I’d change my definition to something closer to the “naive” definition, and ignore any jumps in time so long as the people stay the same when deciding of someone is a future evolution of me. If I then learn about timeless quantum physics and realize there’s no such thing as the past anyway, and certainly not pasts that lead to particular futures, I’d settle for a world with a lower entropy, in which a relatively high number of Feynman paths reach here.
Funny you should say that. I, for one, have the terminal value of continued personal existence (a.k.a. being alive). On LW I’m learning that continuity, personhood, and existence might well be illusions. If that is the case, my efforts to find ways to survive amount to extending something that isn’t there in the first place
Of course there’s the high probability that we’re doing the philosophical equivalent of dividing by zero somewhere among our many nested extrapolations.
But let’s say consciousness really is an illusion. Maybe the take-home lesson is that our goals all live at a much more superficial level than we are capable of probing. Not that reductionism “robs” us of our values or anything like that… but it may mean that cannot exist an instrumentally rational course of action that is also perfectly epistemically rational. That being less wrong past some threshold will not help us set better goals for ourselves, only get better at pursuing goals we pre-committed to pursuing.
What do you mean when you say consciousness may be an illusion? It’s happening to you, isn’t it? What other proof do you need? What would a world look like where consciousness is an illusion, vs. one where it isn’t?
Identical. Therefore consciousness adds complexity without actually being necessary for explaining anything. Therefore, the presumption is that we are all philosophical zombies (but think we’re not).
Okay, so what creates the feeling of consciousness in those philosophical zombies? Can we generate more of those circumstances which naturally create that feeling?
If my life is “ultimately” an illusion, how can I make this illusion last as long as possible?
Eliezer:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/p2/hand_vs_fingers/
We are all philosophical zombies, but think we’re not? We’re all X, but think we’re Y? What’s the difference between X and Y? What would our subjective experience look like if we were actually Y, instead of just thinking we’re Y? Unless you can point to something, then we can safely conclude that you’re talking without a meaning.
I’m trying to think of what kind of zombies there could be besides philosophical ones.
Epistemological zombie: My brain has exactly the same state, all the neurons in all the same places, and likewise the rest of the universe, but my map doesn’t possess any ‘truth’ or ‘accuracy’.
Ontological zombie: All the atoms are in all the same places but they don’t exist.
Existential zombie: All the atoms are in all the same places but they don’t mean anything.
Causal zombie: So far as anyone can tell, my brain is doing exactly the same things, but only by coincidence and not because it follows from the laws of physics.
Mathematical zombie: Just like me only it doesn’t run on math.
Logical zombie: I got nothin’.
Conceivability zombie: It’s exactly like me but it lacks the property of conceivability.
Löwenheim–Skolem zombie: Makes statements that are word-for-word identical to the ones that you make about uncountable sets, and for the same causal reasons (namely, because you both implement the inference rules of ZF in the same way), but its statements aren’t about actually uncountable sets, because it lives in a countable model of ZF.
Your causal zombie reminds me of Leibniz’s pre-established harmony.
Oddly enough, the other day I ran into someone who appears to literally believe a combination of these two.
The eliminativist responds: The world would look the same to me (a complex brain process) if dualism were true. But it would not look the same to the immaterial ghost possessing me, and we could write a computer program that simulates an epiphenomenal universe, i.e., one where every brain causally produces a ghost that has no effects of its own. So dualism is meaningful and false, not meaningless.
The dualist responds in turn: I agree that those two scenarios make sense. However, I disagree about which of those possible worlds the evidence suggests is our world. And I disagree about what sort of agent we are — experience reveals us to be phenomenal consciousnesses learning about whether there’s also a physical world, not brains investigating whether there’s also an invisible epiphenomenal spirit-world. The mental has epistemic priority over the physical.
We do have good reason to think we are epiphenomenal ghosts: Our moment-to-moment experience of things like that (ostending a patch of redness in my visual field) indicates that there is something within experience that is not strictly entailed by the physical facts. This category of experiential ‘thats’ I assign the label ‘phenomenal consciousness’ as a useful shorthand, but the evidence for this category is a perception-like introspective acquaintance, not an inference from other items of knowledge.
You and I agree, eliminativist, that we can ostend something about our moment-to-moment introspective data. For instance, we can gesture at optical illusions. I simply insist that one of those somethings is epistemically impossible given physicalism; we couldn’t have such qualitatively specific experiences as mere arrangements of atoms, though I certainly agree we could have unconscious mental states that causally suffice for my judgments to that effect.
Eliminativist: Aren’t you giving up the game the moment you concede that your judgments are just as well predicted by my interpretation of the data as by yours? If your judgments are equally probable given eliminativism as given dualism, then eliminativism wins purely on grounds of parsimony.
Dualist: But the datum, the explanandum, isn’t my judgment. I don’t go ‘Oh, I seem to be judging that I’m experiencing redness; I’ll conclude that I am in fact experiencing redness’. Rather, I go ‘Oh, I seem to be experiencing redness; I’ll conclude that I am in fact experiencing redness’. This initial seeming is a perception-like access to a subjective field of vision, not something propositional or otherwise linguistically structured. And this seeming really does include phenomenal redness, over and above any disposition to linguistically judge (or behave at all!) in any specific way.
Eliminativist: But even those judgments are predicted by my theory as well. How can you trust in judgments of yours that are causally uncorrelated with the truth? If you know that in most possible worlds where you arrive at your current state of overall belief, you’re wrong about X, then you should conclude that you are in fact wrong about X. (And there are more possible worlds where your brain exists than where your brain and epiphenomenal ghost exist.)
Dualist: Our disagreement is that I don’t see my epistemic status as purely causal. On your view, knowledge and the object known are metaphysically distinct, with the object known causing our state of knowledge. You conclude that epistemic states are only reliable when they are correlated with the right extrinsic state of the world.
I agree with you that knowledge and the object known are generally distinct, but we should expect an exception to that rule when knowledge turns upon itself, i.e., when the thing we’re aware of is the very fact of awareness. In that case, my knowledge is not causally, spatially, or temporally separated from its object — at this very moment, without any need to appeal to a past or present at all, I can know that I am having this particular experience of a text box. I can be wrong in my inferences, wrong in my speculations about the world outside my experience; and I can be wrong in my subvocalized judgments about my experience; but my experience can’t be wrong about itself. You can design a map in such a way that it differs from (i.e., misrepresents) a territory, but you can’t design a map in such a way that it differs from itself; the relation of a map to itself is one of identity, not of representation or causality, and it is the nature of my map, as revealed by itself (and to itself!), that we’re discussing here.
Eliminativist: I just don’t think that model of introspection is tenable, given the history of science. Maybe your introspection gives you some evidence that physicalism is false, but the frequency with which we’ve turned out to be wrong about other aspects of our experience has to do a great deal to undermine your confidence in your map of the nature of your epistemic access to maps. I’m not having an argument with your visual field; I’m having an argument with a linguistic reasoner that has formed certain judgments about that visual field, and it’s always possible that the reasoner is wrong about its own internal states, no matter how obvious, manifest, self-evident, etc. those states appear.
Dualist: A fair point. And I can appreciate the force of your argument in the abstract, when I think about an arbitrary reasoner from the third person. Yet when I attend once more to my own stream of consciousness, I become just as confused all over again. Your philosophical position’s appeal is insufficient to overcome the perceptual obviousness of my own consciousness — and that obviousness includes the perceptual obviousness of irreducibility. I can’t make myself pretend to not believe in something that seems to me so self-evident.
Eliminativist: Then you aren’t trying hard enough. For I share your intuitions when I reflect on my immediate experiences, yet I’ve successfully deferred to science and philosophy in a way that blocks these semblances before they can mutate into beliefs. It can be done.
Dualist: It can be done. But should it? From my perspective, you’ve talked yourself into a lunatic position by reasoning only in impersonal, third-person terms. You’ve forgotten that the empirical evidence includes not only the history of science, but also your own conscious states. To me it appears that you’ve fallen into the error of the behaviorists, denying a mental state (phenomenal consciousness) just because it doesn’t fit neatly into a specific invented set of epistemological social standards. No matter how much I’d love to join you in asserting a theory as elegant and simple as physicalism, I can’t bring myself to do so when it comes at the cost of denying the manifest.
… and the discussion continues from there. I don’t think either position is meaningless. Claims like ‘nothing exists’ aren’t meaningless just because agents like us couldn’t confirm them if they were true; they’re meaningful and false. And it’s certainly conceivable that if the above discussion continued long enough, a consensus could be reached, simply by continuing to debate the extent to which science undermines phenomenology.
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.)
Can you say more about how you get from “X is an illusion” to “X isn’t there in the first place”?
To clarify that question a little… suppose I’m thirsty in the desert, and am pursuing an image of water, and I eventually conclude to my disappointment that it is just a mirage.
I’m doing two things here:
I’m correcting an earlier false belief about the world—my observation is not of water, but of a particular kind of light-distorting system of heated air.
I’m making an implicit value judgment: I want water, I don’t want a mirage, which is why I’m disappointed. The world is worse than I thought it was.
Those are importantly different. If I were, instead, a non-thirsty student of optics, I would still correct my belief but I might not make the same value judgment: I might be delighted to discover that what I’d previously thought was a mere oasis is instead an interesting mirage!
In the same spirit, suppose I discover that continuity, personhood, and existence are illusions, when I had previously thought they were something else (what that “something else” is, I don’t really know). So, OK, I correct my earlier false belief about the world.
There’s still a value judgment left to make though… am I disappointed to realize I’m pursuing a mere illusion rather than the “something else” I actually wanted? Or am I delighted to discover that I’m pursuing a genuine illusion rather than an ill-defined “something else”?
Your way of speaking seems to take the former for granted. Why is that?
Well, it will, and it won’t. But in the sense I think you mean it, yes, that’s right… it won’t.
Our values are what they are. Being less wrong improves our ability to implement those values, and our ability to articulate those values, which may in turn cause the values we’re aware of and pursuing to become more consistent, but it doesn’t somehow replace our values with superior values.
I am confused about this as well. I think the right thing to do here is to recognize that there is a lot we don’t know about, e.g. personhood, and that there is a lot we can do to clarify our thinking on personhood. When we aren’t confused about this stuff anymore, we can look over it and decide what parts we really valued; our intuitive idea of personhood clearly describes something, even recognizing that a lot of the ideas of the past are wrong. Note also that we don’t gain anything by remaining ignorant (I’m not sure if you’ve realized this yet).