The only difference between “explaining the difference between conscious matter and non-conscious matter” and “explaining the difference between living and non-living matter” is that we don’t yet know how to do the former.
It’s impossible to express a sentence like this after having fully appreciated the nature of the Hard Problem. In fact, whether you’re a dualist or a physicalist, I think a good litmus test for whether you’ve grasped just how hard the Hard Problem is is whether you see how categorically different the vitalism case is from the dualism case. See: Chalmers, Consciousness and its Place in Nature.
Physicalism implies that the “hard problem of consciousness” is solvable; physicalism is true; therefore the hard problem of consciousness has a solution.
Physicalism, plus the unsolvability of the Hard Problem (i.e., the impossibility of successful Type-C Materialism), implies that either Type-B Materialism (‘mysterianism’) or Type-A Materialism (‘eliminativism’) is correct. Type-B Materialism despairs of a solution while for some reason keeping the physicalist faith; Type-A Materialism dissolves the problem rather than solving it on its own terms.
Basically, I think that the evidence in favor of physicalism is a lot stronger than the evidence that the hard problem of consciousness isn’t solvable
The probability of physicalism would need to approach 1 in order for that to be the case.
It’s impossible to express a sentence like this after having fully appreciated the nature of the Hard Problem. In fact, whether you’re a dualist or a physicalist, I think a good litmus test for whether you’ve grasped just how hard the Hard Problem is is whether you see how categorically different the vitalism case is from the dualism case. See: Chalmers, Consciousness and its Place in Nature.
::follows link::
Call me the Type-C Materialist subspecies of eliminativist, then. I think that a sufficient understanding of the brain will make the solution obvious; the reason we don’t have a “functional” explanation of subjective experience is not because the solution doesn’t exist, but that we don’t know how to do it.
Van Gulick (1993) suggests that conceivability arguments are question-begging, since once we have a good explanation of consciousness, zombies and the like will no longer be conceivable.
It’s impossible to express a sentence like this after having fully appreciated the nature of the Hard Problem. In fact, whether you’re a dualist or a physicalist, I think a good litmus test for whether you’ve grasped just how hard the Hard Problem is is whether you see how categorically different the vitalism case is from the dualism case. See: Chalmers, Consciousness and its Place in Nature.
Physicalism, plus the unsolvability of the Hard Problem (i.e., the impossibility of successful Type-C Materialism), implies that either Type-B Materialism (‘mysterianism’) or Type-A Materialism (‘eliminativism’) is correct. Type-B Materialism despairs of a solution while for some reason keeping the physicalist faith; Type-A Materialism dissolves the problem rather than solving it on its own terms.
The probability of physicalism would need to approach 1 in order for that to be the case.
::follows link::
Call me the Type-C Materialist subspecies of eliminativist, then. I think that a sufficient understanding of the brain will make the solution obvious; the reason we don’t have a “functional” explanation of subjective experience is not because the solution doesn’t exist, but that we don’t know how to do it.
This is where I think we’ll end up.
It’s a lot closer to 1 than a clever-sounding impossibility argument. See: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ph/can_you_prove_two_particles_are_identical/