Now Playing: revised
Topic: Mind
I mentioned in my last post that sometimes bystanders on philosophical issues, in this case the philosophy of mind, can easily get flustered because often those who publish to the public are fed up with the entire institution and want to define the issues on their terms, leaving out a lot of the context that they understand but we don’t. There isn’t really, a standardized textbook introduction to phil mind the same way there are millions which regurgitate 95% of the same material when introducing economics or biology (or even ethics). I was thinking of this when I thumbed through that new Blackmore book on consciousness I posted about a couple weeks ago. Anyway, in wanting to follow up more on that book I ran across this blog entry:
I tried to respond but for some reason comments didn’t seem to be working right. Anyway, here’s a bright guy who’s published some articles, writes well and so on trying to get a handle on the Zombie problem. In a nutshell, David Chalmers, following others who’ve argued in a similar way, that if a Zombie is logically possible, then physicalism is false. Now that doesn’t mean that Chalmers believes there really is a possibility that a molecule for molecule replacement of yourself could lack consciousness in this world. He explicitly denies that. But he holds that it’s metaphysically possible, that is, the idea itself isn’t somehow self-contradictory – it’s logically possible (though metaphysical and logical possibility might demand some distinctions as well). It might hold in some other world. Dan’s gut reaction is (from above):
I'm still unclear on why logical possibility is so interesting. It seems that all sorts of possibility are logically coherent, but their conceivability doesn’t seem to provide a reason to explain the presence or absence of these imagined possibilities in our world, which is the one we're interested in explaining.
I don't think Dan’s alone on this position, in fact when I first began reading about qualia I also didn’t pick up on exactly what the argument was and I think this is a common sentiment. One thing to note, is that philosophers like Churchland and Dennett don’t seem to deny that the possibility of zombies would refute physicalism but they either deny that zombies are really logically possible or that conceivability doesn’t lend to possibility and so on. It is, rather, a well accepted dogma of physicalism – as a philosophical position – that any “extra-physical” entities must supervene on – or be dependent upon – the physical, across all possible worlds. See SEP:
So what Chalmers and others are arguing for is the rather trivial denial of the very definition of physicalism. Of course, the next question would be, why should physicalism be defined that way? Rather than trying to outline the evolution of the formal doctrine of supervenience physicalism, which I’d probably mess up anyway, let’s look at another example. As a reductio of the Zombie argument, Patricia Churchland cites Crick:
"As Francis Crick has observed, it might be like saying that one can imagine a possible world where gases do not get hot, even though their constituent molecules are moving at high velocity.”Whether or not we accept that rebuttal, it’s instructive in the following way as an extreme example. Heat supervenes on the velocity of molecules. Or rather, talking about heat is nothing more than talking about the motion of molecules and the ... of molecules (talking about mind is no more than talking about molecules either). We don’t need anything else to explain heat other than to understand the velocity, and ... in this case, of molecules. But, let’s just pretend here, unfathomable as it is, that it were logically possible for heat to exist apart from molecular motion. No! the objection would be, that would violate the very definition of what heat is! Alternatively, we could say in that case, molecular velocity doesn’t and ... doesn't explain heat. In any case, this example should make it intuitive that if it were logically possible for molecular motion to exist apart from heat, then apparently the definition of heat is in error. And if a thought experiment could show – absurd as it sounds – that such a possibility exists, we’d all agree, intuitively, that the definition of heat must be wrong. Pretty underwhelming it might seem, but substitute heat for mind and that’s what you’ve got.
