But 'life' can clearly be analysed in functional and structural terms. There is no sense to be given to the notion of something that is functionally and structurally indiscernible from a duck, having all the same kinds of relations to other objects as another duck does, and yet somehow fails to really be a living duck. To be a living duck just is to have the right kinds of functional relations and so forth. There's nothing more to it than that.Here, Richard almost talks as if the problem with the vitalism analogy is that the argument for vitalism is wrong. But the key thing is why it's wrong. It's wrong because we have good reason to reject our the pre-theoretical intuitions about the nature of life that some people have in a powerful form. Spend enough time around creationists, and soon you realize that many of them have an intuition that life is non-physical, so it would be impossible in principle for unguided matter to give rise to life. Sounds stupid? That's the point. We often mistake stupid ideas for profound philosophical insights.
Richard says life can be analyzed in functional terms (patterns of causal relations and such). I agree. But this isn't obvious, built into our pre-theoretical intuitions, or any such similar thing. If you want to analyze life functionally, you admit our intuitions about these things don't always give us the right answer. Conversely, some people think consciousness should be analyzed in functional terms. If they're correct, then consciousness is once again in the same boat as life.
Perhaps you dislike whatever theory happens to be the currently reigning functional analysis of consciousness. Perhaps you do so with reason. Still, we're in the beginning stages of understanding the brain. It's a false dilemma to say "either we have the right answer to this key issue already, or we have to accept our intuitions and not take seriously the possibility of ever getting another answer."
The burden of proof is on anyone who thinks there could be no physicalist account of consciousness. In my last post, I suggested there might be a good argument for that conclusion. But if there were, the dualist wouldn't need a zombie horde to do his dirty work. Invoking zombies is a weird way around this--it assumes we have reason to think consciousness isn't physical without ever providing the reason.
Richard has also recently written a post challenging the idea that thought experiments are question-begging. On this point, he brings in the analogy with the common sense belief that the Pope doesn't count as a bachelor. There's a disanalogy here, though: we're in a reasonably good position to answer that question based on our experience with how the term is used. In the zombie case, I don't know how we could know such things are possibit's mainly a question of what convinces people, but his interactions with Eliezer Yudkowsky suggested he thought many people who aren't convinced should be.
The most frustrating post on the zombie argument, though, has to be how to imagine zombies. There, Richard suggests that a world microphysically identical to ours would contain things like David Chalmers' book The Conscious Mind. This is a claim that should sound a caution in any good dualist's mind: if there is non-physical consciousness, it seems plausible to think that it affects the physical world, and most importantly is the reason philosophers like Chalmers write books like The Conscious Mind. The view that consciousness exists but has no such causal powers is known as epiphenomenalism, and is quite popular today. Chalmers endorses it. But Chalmers admits he isn't entirely confident about it. Now: if even a big-shot dualist like Chalmers isn't entirely confident about the truth of epiphenomenalism, what business do we have simply intuiting claims that presuppose its truth? Richard talks about what a super-genius would calculate, but the conclusions of super-geniuses seem an even poorer candidate for intuiting than most metaphysical issues (why bother with smart people if they can be replaced by intuitions?)* If nothing else shows the doubtful, question-begging nature of the zombie argument, this point should.
For more on this issue, I strongly recommend Siris' "Zombie Invasion" round-up. Especially the links there to the Brood Comb posts on epiphenomenalism. Oh, and be sure to check this out.
*As an aside: it matters a bit whether Richard means to say that the super-genius will know everything about a snap-shot of a world, or about it's causal processes and future as well. But it seems that "all there is to know" includes these things.
12 comments:
It's not really clear where the burden of proof lies in this debate; it seems to me that each view ends up having to make some prima facie wild claims. So it's really just a matter of judging which claims seem least absurd. I'll probably write a broader post reviewing the debate sometime soon. Just one comment for now:
"his interactions with Eliezer Yudkowsky suggested he thought many people who aren't convinced should be."
Not necessarily. I think one can reasonably bite the bullet and optimistically trust that somehow it'll turn out that zombies are logically incoherent, and that third-personal microphysics really does (somehow) entail first-personal consciousness. That's one of several difficult but potentially reasonable stands one could take here. My beef with Eliezer is not with his conclusions, but how he argues for them. If you look at his earlier posts, e.g. 'hands vs. fingers', it's really clear that he just doesn't understand the opposing arguments, or why an informed and reflective person might reasonably find them compelling. Ignorance alone is forgivable, of course, but his arrogant tone and inane mockery of opposing views gets a bit annoying.
Actually, I should say something in response to the substance of your post too.
You write: "We often mistake stupid ideas for profound philosophical insights... If you want to analyze life functionally, you admit our intuitions about these things don't always give us the right answer."
One point is that this isn't enough to motivate a universal skepticism about apparent insights. It's not enough to say "Some apparent insights turn out to be stupid -- maybe yours is one of them!" To turn this into a serious argument, you have to actually do the philosophical work of showing that a mistake has been made.
Secondly, my point was that it's not actually true that vitalists denied that life could be analyzed functionally. (The analysis is perfectly intuitive to anyone who gives it a moment's thought. It's just not true that vitalists denied this.) They instead disputed the empirical question whether non-living matter could give rise to the structural/functional arrangements of living creatures.
A real analogy would require vitalists to believe in the possibility of "vital-force zombies", i.e. creatures physically and functionally indiscernible from human beings, who walk, talk, bleed and all the rest, but somehow aren't really alive. I'm not aware of anyone in the history of the world who thought this was an intuitive possibility.
So it's really not clear that the kind of intuitions that zombiephiles appeal to have been shown in the past to be unreliable at all. (As opposed to, say, our intuitions on empirical/scientific questions.)
What's your opinion about people in a persistent vegetative state? Are they analogous to zombies? What about those with dementia?
I mean, seriously, the zombie argument just sucks. Modern neuroscience pokes holes in it.
>To turn this into a serious argument, you have to actually do the philosophical work of showing that a mistake has been made.
This is fairly obviously false. You don't have to disprove a claim to show that the reasons given for believing it are lousy ones.
Perhaps I should have been a little more specific in my criticism: it's not universal skepticism about supposed insights, its skepticism about supposed insights of a certain sort: namely, intuitions about what a hypothetical situation far removed from ordinary experience would be like. The fact that it's very easy to get these things wrong, and often need careful analysis with powerful tools to have any clear idea of the truth, is good reason to doubt those sorts of things.
As for the historical vitalists, I admit I don't know much about them--I'm going off what people I've casually encountered seem to think.
Katharine:
The PVS issue is irrelevant; it's specified that zombies are supposed to be physically identical to normal people.
Then that makes the philosophical zombies argument moot, as frankly, the only empirical evidence there is surrounding the mind and brain is that they are one and the same - read work by Tristan Bekinschtein and work on the genetics of disorders such as Alzheimer's disorder and dementia and work on monkeys' conscious abilities; there is speculation that the brain's neurochemical and neurophysic attributes create an environment where quantum mechanics reigns supreme. (Physicists need to look at this in situ !) Relying merely on one's own rationalism to provide the answer merely parallels the closed-system thought processes of theists, which dualism is highly guilty of. If humans and zombies were physically identical - down to the behavior of every little quark - zombies would be conscious. The burden of proof now lies on the dualists, who haven't got a bit of evidence to back their position up - it is foolish to repose too much confidence in one's brain unless you have evidence to repose such confidence.
I do wonder why philosophers of mind don't keep up with neuroscientists.
In any case, dualism is just like theism: unsupported and ridiculous.
K - didn't we establish in the earlier thread that you haven't a clue what this debate is about? It's not an empirical issue, and nothing the property dualist says is incompatible with neuroscientific data. It's a wholly orthogonal issue.
I'm guessing you've never even read anything by the "philosophers of mind" you're so fond of denouncing. You should try it sometime. At least then you'd have some idea of what it is that you're criticizing.
lol.
The only definition of dualism I can find in philosophy of mind and the zombie argument is the mind-brain separate argument.
How is anything in philosophy of mind NOT an empirical issue, and from what I know of property dualism, according to the definition of property dualism at utm.edu and Jaegwon Kim's 'Philosophy of Mind', property dualism is the notion that mental qualities are irreducible to physical qualities.
Answer me that.
K--
I see this kind of debate happening all the time between philosophers of mind and generally well-educated non-philosophers.
Your argument seems to be essentially this: All conscious states correspond to brain processes. Therefore, conscious states are brain processes.
Even in a world with a completed neuroscience, where we could look at someone's brain and tell them what they were thinking about, or what they would do next, the fundamental question of the ontology of consciousness would not be answered.
Science can only correlate certain physical events with mental events. But philosophy of mind is a question of whether these physical events are identical to mental events. Its an essence question. I would recommend googling correlation-essence problems or something along those lines. (Carnap wrote about it, McGinn does too.)
I think you guys are having difficulty grasping what kldickson is really saying or you would not think that explaining that Qualia effect nothing is going to make him think the debate has substance. If you idealize your argument he is still going to 'call bullshit on the whole topic' and if he returns in hundred years and your still debating similar things he will feel he was proven right.
Also it takes an impressive dose of arrogance to think that you can engage in philosophy and ignore entirely the science that describes the rules of reality.
It is hard to make a point without some sort of assumption and physics can, and already has ripped the floor out from under many such assumptions that people would have thought were secure.
for example kl might have insights into what 'concievable' means inside of our brains and what 'intuition' means, and therefore what sort of weighting we should put on such things as evidence in certain contexts etc etc.
I'm a neuroscience graduate student and a "zombiephile", so I think I have some insight into what's going on here.
I think the fundamental problem here is that our idea of qualia is not designed to explain any observable phenomenon, but it's linked to what it's like to have a brain from the first person perspective.
There is not a neuroscientific concept of qualia as such because neuroscientists don't need to invoke them to explain their results. And we tend not to even consider them because we tend not to do experiments on our own brains.
K's argument seems to be that the lack of qualia in neuroscience implies the lack of qualia simpliciter, but this displays a lack of understanding of what qualia are meant to designate.
There may be a compelling argument for physicalism, but it's not going to come from neuroscience because qualia are defined in such a way that makes theoretical identities like water=H2O impossible, and this is the best possible result that come come from neuroscience. This is one of the insights of the zombie argument that physicalists don't really take the time to learn. In the language of 2D semantics qualia terms have identical a priori and a posteriori intensions, and this was initially noted by Kripke himself.
Until physicalists master the arguments that they're trying to disprove they will not be successful in winning converts from our camp. With this kind of argument they are only congratulating each other, but not in a very productive way.
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