Richard4

Karma: 98

Richard4 Mar 30, 2008, 9:53 PM
0 points
on: Hand vs. Fingers
“Please explain what it means for something to be genuinely conceivable, as opposed to just being conceivable to some particular person.”

Conceivable on ideal rational reflection, i.e. without logical error, implicit contradiction, or conceptual ignorance (e.g. failing to realize that hand just means fingers etc.)

“I’m not sure how I’m supposed to react to this paragraph, frankly.”

You’re supposed to show that my premise is false. We have good reasons for thinking that there are no Martians in my nose. But is there any such reason to think that the zombie scenario is incoherent? Show us the contradiction...

Richard4 Mar 30, 2008, 8:59 PM
0 points
on: Hand vs. Fingers
Eliezer—all your last comment says is that if I’m suffering from a misunderstanding, then my conclusions won’t follow. Well, duh. (See also my response to Robin above.) This doesn’t advance the dialectic one iota, unless you can also support the antecedent claim.

Note that my fundamental premise is not, “I think the zombie world is coherently conceivable.” Nothing of interest follows from the fact that I have an opinion, since the opinion might be baseless (as you’ve repeatedly pointed out). Instead, my basic premise is that the zombie world is coherently conceivable (i.e. without the sort of finger-hand misunderstanding that might make a scenario seem conceivable when in fact it’s incoherent). You haven’t said a word that bears on the truth of this premise. All you’ve said is that ignorance might lead one to believe it even if it were false. But that is no reason to think that it is false.

Poke—there’s no “fallacy” involved in inferring that philosophy isn’t nonsense from the fact that the denial of this claim is self-defeating. Proof by contradiction is a straightforwardly valid inference. Now, I might grant you that one doesn’t need to reason well to communicate. But philosophy = reasoning, so one does need to philosophize to reason well.

Caledonian—I addressed all that in my linked posts (see esp. ‘Why do you think you’re conscious?’). Please read my arguments before accusing me of incoherence.

Tiiba—the dispute is whether it’s logically coherent to have a world physically identical to ours but lacking consciousness, or whether the physical facts strictly entail the phenomenal facts.

Dan—We have different projects; I’m not trying to “fix the counterintuitiveness of consciousness.” I’m interested in whether it is in principle susceptible to physical reduction. (We can answer these sorts of questions by understanding alone. I don’t need to do science in order to appreciate the conditional that if physical investigation reveals particles that play such-and-such a role, then objects such as hands will be reducible to said arrangements of particles. There is no coherently conceivable ‘hand-zombie’ world, analogous to the phenomenal-zombie world, that is identical to ours in all matters of fundamental physics, but somehow lacking in hands.)

Incidentally, I agree that the human brain is capable of amazing computational feats. There are many aspects of its physical functioning that I don’t yet understand, though I’m confident future science will make further progress here. None of that is relevant to the present discussion.

Paul: Sure, most fundamental questions—in philosophy and physics alike—do not speak to the practical concerns of folk living everyday lives. (I think this says more about the boringness of the folk than of the fundamental questions, but your tastes may differ...)

Richard4 Mar 30, 2008, 6:00 PM
−2 points
on: Hand vs. Fingers
Caledonian—the addition of p-consciousness has no physical consequences. To infer that it has “absolutely no consequences of any kind” is obviously question-begging against those of us who hold that there are non-physical facts (e.g. what it is like, subjectively, to be in such-and-such a physical state). The zombie world is appreciably different from ours in these other respects.

Incidentally, the principle you depend upon is self-defeating. Consider:

(Scientism): A claim is coherent only if it has scientific implications.

What are the scientific implications of this principle? What empirical test would show whether Scientism is true or false? It is incoherent by its own lights.

Richard4 Mar 30, 2008, 4:23 PM
0 points
on: Hand vs. Fingers
Robin - ‘I’m always amazed at what philosophers think they can see merely by “understanding the terms.” Such analysis may well tell us a lot about what we often assume, but I am skeptical that it can tell us as much as philosophers think about what is actually possible vs. only apparently possible.’

What kind of possibility are you talking about? Philosophers will grant that reason/understanding alone can’t tell us what’s physically possible. That’s the domain of science. But logical possibility is simply defined as what can be coherently understood, i.e. without implicit self-contradiction, so I’m not sure how your objection could possibly work here. Unless, perhaps, you meant to express skepticism that philosophers really understand the terms they claim to understand? (If it turns out that all our claims are really based on misunderstandings, then they wouldn’t even establish logical possibility. But that’s precisely because we—like Eliezer’s imagined nutcase philosopher who doesn’t understand that hands are logically reducible to fingers etc. -- would be lacking the prerequisite understanding to justify our conclusions.)

Dan—I don’t know what “emergent property” or “complex system” are supposed to mean, but Unknown got “bridging law” just right. Granted, it’s one thing to assert there’s a bridging law, and another to actually provide one. Eliezer grants the same point with regards to reductions. The difference between our views is that he thinks the reduction is logically necessary; that there is no sense to be made of the idea of a ‘zombie’ world physically identical to ours but lacking consciousness. I think that’s plainly false. There’s nothing incoherent about the idea of zombies. So the admitted link between the physical and phenomenal facts is merely contingent (taking the form of a natural law, rather than a reductive analysis).

P.S. You’ve been reading too many straw men. I certainly don’t think “there’s a soul floating around communing with the brain”. Follow the links in my earlier comment.

Richard4 Mar 30, 2008, 5:16 AM
0 points
on: Hand vs. Fingers
Eliezer—“Your inability to imagine something is just a computational fact about what your brain can or can’t imagine.”

Who ever suggested otherwise? Again, see the ‘epistemology’ section of my ‘Arguing with Eliezer: Part I’. What I take as evidence is not “I have an intuition that P”, but simply P itself. You might undermine my argument from P to Q by showing some flaw in the thought process that led me to the premise P, but I don’t see that you’ve done this yet (as opposed to merely explaining why you might expect me to have such a belief). Merely pointing out that thoughts occur in my head certainly isn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know!

“And you can imagine philosophers who criticize ‘eliminative fingerists’...”

Of course, it’s logically impossible to have the fingers and all without a hand. All that we mean by ‘hand’ is the collection of fingers + palm, etc. There’s no sense to be made of the idea of the finger world which lacks the appropriate bridging laws to give rise to hands. Merely understanding the terms suffices to make this clear.

On the other hand, (we have every reason to believe that) it’s logically possible to have neurons fire without this being accompanied by any phenomenal consciousness. We certainly don’t just mean a certain kind of physical or behavioural/functional role by our term ‘consciousness’. And we can easily make sense of how the world would be different if it lacked the natural laws that give rise to consciousness. Conceptually competent philosophers can understand the so-called “zombie world” just fine.

So there’s simply no analogy here. Needless to say, the mere fact that you can “imagine” stupid philosophers is not any sort of counterargument to the actual philosophers you pretend to respond to. I mean, I can imagine a world where you actually engage with opposing arguments rather than merely mocking them; alas, my imagining does not make it so...

Richard4 Mar 25, 2008, 9:09 PM
0 points
on: New York OB Meetup (ad-hoc) on Monday, Mar 24, @6pm
Hi Eliezer—it was great meeting you on Sunday. I’ve tried to summarize and clarify some of our main philosophical disagreements, here.

[I originally posted this to a thread that has since been deleted. So I thought I should re-post, in case you missed it.]

Richard4 Mar 13, 2008, 3:02 PM
8 points
1
on: The Quotation is not the Referent
Yes, like John O, I think this post misdiagnoses the problem.

John and Mary have beliefs about the evening star, not ‘the evening star’. Their beliefs are about the world, not about the words. Neither of them believes that ‘the evening star’ is the god Venus. Who ever thought that the god Venus was a string of three words!?

Further—though more contentiously—we might even deny that Mary has any beliefs about the evening star (that very thing, i.e. the planet). She takes the world to be a certain way, such that a god Venus appears in the evening sky, etc. But given that our term ‘the evening star’ actually denotes a planet, perhaps we misdescribe Mary’s belief by employing this term. She might attempt to use the term herself in describing her belief, but this is because she doesn’t really know what it means, so she doesn’t realize that linguistic error is causing her to misdescribe her belief contents.

For further explanation, see: Belief Content and Linguistic Error.

Richard4 Oct 11, 2007, 3:38 AM
0 points
on: A Priori
Nick T. - yes, I accept the causal closure of the physical. (And thus epiphenomenalism. I discuss the epistemic consequences in my post ‘Why do you think you’re conscious?’)

On the broader issue—to expand on my response to James above—see my post on the explanatory power of dualism.

Richard4 Oct 11, 2007, 3:18 AM
0 points
on: A Priori
Sorry, my second sentence to NH is unclear. The psychological fact could be taken as a kind of indirect evidence, as noted in my postscript. But it is not what I take my evidence to be, when I am reasoning according to a #1-style argument. We could say the evidence of my thought [vehicle] is not the evidence in my thought [content].

Richard4 Oct 11, 2007, 3:10 AM
2 points
on: A Priori
g—there’s no possible world that’s physically identical to ours but where the Boeing’s don’t fly. There is a possible world that’s physically identical to ours that lacks consciousness. That’s the difference. It shows that physics suffices for flight but not fully-fledged mentality. (N.B. the interesting case here is not minds without brains, but brains without minds.)

Nick Hay—Thanks for bringing this back to the key issue. In fact I do not “consider having successfully determined a conclusion from pure thought evidence that that thought is correct”. I take my evidence to be something beyond myself: whatever premises guided my reasoning, not the mere psychological fact of my concluding as I did. (This is why I brought up the content/vehicle distinction in my original comment.) Granted, reasoning presupposes that one’s thought processes are reliable, and a subjectively convincing line of thought may be undermined by showing that the thinker was rationally incapacitated at the time (due to a deceptive drug, say). But presuppositions are not premises.

Compare: (1) P, therefore Q (2) If I were to think about it, I would conclude that Q. Therefore Q.

These are different arguments! If I come to believe Q via #2, my evidence is the (hypothetical) brain process you talk about. But in the first case, my evidence is simply P, and not any fact about me at all.

P.S. Nobody denies that a priori justifiable claims may also be justified empirically, say by the testimony of a reliable thinker, or by observing a reliable brain or other computational engine. But it’s a different kind of justification. And of course the mere fact that there is a second argument for a conclusion does nothing to show that the first one was flawed.

Richard4 Oct 10, 2007, 9:15 PM
0 points
on: A Priori
TGGP—You seem to have missed the conditional nature of my claim. I’m not forcing philosophy on anyone; just saying if you’re going to do it at all, best do it well.

Nick—I never suggested there was an “abiding personal essence”. (Contemporary philosophers like Derek Parfit and David Velleman have done a stellar job in revealing the conceptual confusions underlying such an idea.) In any case, it’s hardly relevant. The issue here is individuation (how to count the distinct things in the world), not personal identity and persistence through time.

James—if you’re asking what difference identity makes, that’s a good question. To answer literally, if “two” things are really identical, i.e. really one, then there is no possible world (however distant or “unrealistic”) where they come apart—where there is one without the other. That’s arguably the criterion for what it is to be one rather than two. Now you may ask why we should care about this difference. Here’s an answer: we care about the fundamental constituents of reality, or “what it takes” to create a world like ours. Imagine a god were to create all the physical stuff of our universe. Does that suffice, or does he have more work to do before he can rest? My earlier arguments suggest that there is more work to do here. He also needs to add some extra, ‘bridging’ psycho-physical laws of nature, to ensure that brainy matter gives rise to conscious minds. If they were truly one and the same thing, this extra step would not be required. (Cf. airplanes.) That’s an interesting result, no?

Richard4 Oct 10, 2007, 4:24 AM
1 point
on: A Priori
Who said anything about ‘magic pixie dust’? I agree that the brain gives rise to (or ‘powers’) the mind, thanks to the laws of nature that happen to govern our universe. I may even agree with all the causal claims you want to make. But if you’re going to start talking about identity, then you need to do some real philosophy.

“If you view it as an argument, yes. The engines yield the same outputs.”

What does the latter have to do with rationality?

Richard4 Oct 10, 2007, 2:32 AM
3 points
on: A Priori
Eliezer—It’s just fundamentally mistaken to conflate reasoning with “observing your own brain as evidence”. For one thing, no amount of mere observation will suffice to bring us to a conclusion, as Lewis Carroll’s tortoise taught us. Further, it mistakes content and vehicle. When I judge that p, and subsequently infer q, the basis for my inference is simply p—the proposition itself—and not the psychological fact that I judge that p. I could infer some things from the latter fact too, of course, but that’s a very different matter. (And in turn distinct from inferring things from the second-order judgment that I judge that p!)

Anyway, here’s a simple argument for the inescapability of a priori justification:

For any instance of empirical justification, it seems like we can construct a parallel instance of a priori justification simply through conditionalization. Suppose that empirical evidence E would justify your drawing conclusion C. Then presumably you could justifiably believe the conditional “if E then C” prior to experiencing E. We can repeat this procedure to conditionalize out all empirical grounds for belief, and the result will be a conditional statement that is justifiable a priori—i.e. not dependent on any particular experiences or empirical evidence at all.

Tom McCabe wrote: “If you argued that an airplane was not really “identical” to the pile of parts, but that they just “always went together”, people would look at you like you had three heads. Yet, when applied to brains, people think this argument makes sense.”

This is because there is nothing more to our concept of being an airplane than the reduction basis. Any possible world with all the parts arranged in the right way is immediately recognizable, under that description, as a world containing an airplane. Indeed, that’s just what it is to be an airplane. Minds are a rather different matter. They are not conceptually reducible to neurons firing. It is conceptually possible for the two to come apart (if we imagine a world with different laws of nature, perhaps), so they are not simply one and the same thing.

(Philosophers have written books on this argument, so I don’t pretend that the above is incontrovertible. But it is certainly not so easily dismissed as Tom and others—including my past self—might assume. More detail here.)