771–780 of 822 posts
The first point (analogizing the hard problem to the reaction to Darwinism) is a very common rhetorical move: an analogy and history of ideas, which is convincing to many people, but what does it prove? > A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible cons…
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A philosophical zombie [1] is essentially a mobile, autonomous human body devoid of consciousness. Critically, still giving all of the external cues that it has in fact consciousness. It is supposed to prove that physicalism doesn't work. "The sense of consciousness" is used like a "soul, with extra steps". In my humble opinion, which I have no way to prove or disprove, consciousness ("as a soul with extra steps") do…
I know I'm not a philosophical zombie based on >For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object, it would not feel any pain, but it would react exactly the way any conscious human would. in the Wikipedia article because I don't get on well with the sharp poking. On the basis of Occam's razor I assume all other humans and higher animals are similar. It would be odd if evolution had made me differ…
What I am denying is that there's anything metaphysical about the whole process.
The opponents of physicalism like Chalmers start from the axiom that consciousness is, in fact, separated from the physical world. Then they use the zombie to "demonstrate" (using circular logic, in my opinion) that physicalism is not possible.
I do believe that your (our) feelings, emotions, and our sense of self all emanate from the physical world. So in that sense "we are all the zombies that Chalmers talks about".
I'm not sure where all this discussion about the hard problem is coming from suddenly, or why people continue to struggle to understand it. It's really very simple. The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function, given only the explanatory resources of structure and function. It's like saying you can't explain…
I once read a comment on here that I found interesting but haven't been able to find it again. Basically it flipped the problem on its head. We're arguing how you start at the physical substrate and get to consciousness. They argued that you could start with consciousness and argue how you get to the physical side (experimentation via your conscious experience, etc). It was from a religious individual who called the…
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It doesnt perceive the image of a camera, it's sensor is that image. What it means to perceive is for that image to form. This is the second great fallacies of idealism: (1) the genetic fallacy above that the origin/product of a process must share properties and (2) this fallacy of ambiguity on the word 'see'/perceive (between the mental act of drawing attention to an aspect of a perception, and the physiological act…
>To see is, akin to the photographic plate, to be changed by the world so that you have an impression of it And the point is that you don't need the "world" aka reality to make that change. It can come from within, for example a faulty sensor creating an image of a cloud that does not exist. And the implication that follows is that just because you percieve something does not mean that it is "real". This can be made…
The mind doesnt have the right kind of properties to explain that. If you modify "consiousness" to include those properties then it's no longer consiousness at all.
Whatever generates law-like fixed perceptions of the objective has to be as if all of material reality exists in its law-like way.
Yes, P(Material Reality Does Not Exist) > 0 BUT whatever confidence you give to that, say p_illusion,
P(Material Reality Exists as it seems to | the fixed background of law-like perceptions) >>>>> p_illusion
You dont escape the need for the objective, the law-like, the fixed, the external.. just because you locate what generates this in "the mind" (redefined to include this). At that point the "mental origin" of this background is material. You arent making any difference to call it mental or physical.
Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable . It cannot be disproven in the same way you can't disprove the existence of God, and so arguing with people that believe in it is largely pointless.
Some good reminders in this article. However, while I, too, reject Cartesian dualism, some of the claims of the author need correction... "Many felt confounded or degraded by the idea of sharing a family tree with donkeys. [...] Amid the current cultural backlash against progressive ideas, today’s debate on consciousness reflects our human fears of belonging to the same family as inanimate matter and losing our dear,…
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoYRQl2t0w0EjRIb9Jr1y...
or Feser's articles such as
- https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/04/kurzweils-phanta...
- https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/03/artificial-intellig...
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There's nothing wrong with that chain. This is what some philosophers would call the 'easy ' problem of consciousness, to distinguish it from the 'hard' problem, which is the next step: How do you get from a physical model of brain physiology and behavior to subjective experience of mental states?
In that chain there is no distinction between subjective experience of mental state and evolution of physical state of the brain. If you believe that the 'hard' problem exists then that chain must be modified. What most of the p-zombie supporters say is merely equivalent to adding an external observer. It is like saying that a player following a sim in a game, makes sims actions more meaningful, which is kind of true…
Whether subjective experience is casual or not is a different, additional question.
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>To see is, akin to the photographic plate, to be changed by the world so that you have an impression of it And the point is that you don't need the "world" aka reality to make that change. It can come from within, for example a faulty sensor creating an image of a cloud that does not exist. And the implication that follows is that just because you percieve something does not mean that it is "real". This can be made…
Yip, but once you have to explain law-following fixed perceptual fields (ie., that it always seems as if my fixed visual perceptions follow the laws of physics, and so on; that my audial/touch/visual percetions follow geometry exacvtly; that my actions to intervene on the world are causally deterministic; ...) --- then you've a real difficulty. The mind doesnt have the right kind of properties to explain that. If you…
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> If this actually happened, would the 'I' that replaced you be any wiser. How do you know this hasn't happened to you already? Maybe multiple times per second? If this is true, that the body dies every planck time and the mind survives it, then it simply means the dualist position is true. > The information of how to put your body and mind back must have survived somewhere, in the alien mind for example or the machi…
> the experiences of one do not get magically transmitted to the brain of the other. So those are two distinct selves, even if they are made with the exact same information. How's that a problem? They would both be distinct selves with a common past.
Let me restate:
1. energy123 says that, if we completely annihilate the body of X and then we re-assemble it one planck time later, X is still the exact same self after the annihilation as they were before.
2. I reply: a monist must hold the position that X died with the annihilation and the recomposed being is a different self, Y, which just so happens to have the same memories as X. If you insist that the new being is still the same self X, you must assume that something that was not in the body survived the complete annihilation of the body and was put back in the body during the re-assembly.
3. You attempted to say that that something was the information needed to recompose the body. But now you're saying that actually we have produced two entirely different beings, A and B, both of whom believe to be X.
I 100% agree with you that this is what happened. But you cannot tell me in the same breath that X is still alive. That is a contradiction.
The ultimate challenge is always the same: assuming the technology to perfectly copy and simulate a brain exists, would you upload your mind and do you expect that it is you that awake inside the machine? If you answer "yes" you must concede you are a dualist. A monist can only answer "no". And, as I gather from this discussion, a functionalist would (i) answer "yes" after redefining what "you" means, (ii) mean "no" because as you just admitted we created two new beings, (iii) upload themselves and then die happy knowing that something else with their memories will live on.
(I realize you actually have not explicitly objected to this specific challenge yet, so maybe we fully agree and that's that)