The “mystery” of consciousness

208 thoughts on “The “mystery” of consciousness”

1. The problem with the “zombie” hypothesis is that it starts by assuming dualism: that you can have an entity that is physically identical but is not conscious. So if it leads to the same conclusion, that’s unsurprising, because that’s why assuming the conclusion is not robust.

   At this point, may I recommend Zombies: The Movie. Daniel Dennett’s a character in it.

   1. “Second, consider a zombie. Not the brain-eating undead of movies, but a philosophical zombie, defined as physically identical to you or me but containing twice as much phlogiston as the original.

      1. But only half the luminiferous aether!

         /@

         1. +1 to both!

2. For Mary to know the physical facts about the color red means that she knows the wavelength of that color. On first seeing the roses, she would know only that there was a visual contrast between the roses and the background, and only by using an instrument to measure the wavelength of the reflected light could she then say, “Ah this is what red looks like”. Of course she could have felt the flowers while still blind, and have been told that roses are red, and then she would make the connection when seeing them for the first time. I fail to see how she could make the identification any other way.

   1. I would say that not having been able to see the color, she was not in complete possession of the facts, and only completed them when she could see.

3. George looks around the room and sees a pair of shoes flying towards his head. At that moment, George for the first time experiences the loathing and contempt for him by others and now knows what a bastard he’s been. His experience, it seems clear, has taught him a fact about shoes that he did not know before. But before this, he knew all the physical facts about shoes. Therefore, there is a fact about shoes that is not physical. Physical science cannot express all the facts about shoes.

   1. But if he was learning that for the first time, how the frack did he duck so fast? I suspect something in his prior experience had clued him in.

4. The zombie argument would seem to prove that all properties of all objects are non-physical. We can imagine a blue rubber ball. And we can imagine a ball, identical in all physical respects, that is instead yellow. Hey, it’s logically possible. Therefore color is a non-physical property.

   1. It’s stupid word-play. You can conclude almost anything you like this way:

      It’s logically possible for me to have 10 billion dollars. Wow, that was the easiest 10 billion dollars I ever made!

      1. It’s logically possible for me to steal it from you…

   2. You are a true philosopher! The clarity is way overdone, though.

      Just need to camouflage your argument with more words that almost but not quite make sense, or people will realise what you’re up to.

   3. John Harshman #4 wrote:

      The zombie argument would seem to prove that all properties of all objects are non-physical.

      Exactly! The same argument against consciousness being physical can and has been made as an argument for vitalism. We can imagine two people who are absolutely identical in every single material way except that one of them is alive and the other one isn’t. Thus, the difference between a man before and after death is that the second state is the result of the life force leaving.

      We didn’t start saying that there is no such thing as “life” when we threw out the need for the vitalistic hypothesis and went reductionistic. So we don’t have to start saying that there is no such thing as “consciousness” when we throw out the hypothesis that consciousness is also irreducible. Consciousness is not a “thing:” as you point out, it is the property of a thing.

      The supernaturalists really, really, really want to make it seem as if the materialitic reductionist atheists are “denying consciousness.” They want to construct a straw man out of their OWN greedy reductionist intuitions and plant them on us, as an accusation. We can’t make sense of the world but they can.

      How? They reify abstractions. If properties are real and not illusions then physicalism is dead. Wrong. I forgot where I read it, but saying something is an illusion doesn’t mean it isn’t real or doesn’t exist. It means it’s not what it appears to be on the surface.

      1. Even a couple dozen centuries later, Plato’s ghost continues to haunt us….

         b&

      2. Yes, I think vitalism is the closest parallel argument. Imagine a century ago, when vitalism was commonly held, hearing someone claim that they could construct a bacterium using only chemicals. You most likely would have thought it absurd. ‘Add all the chemicals you want, but you’re still going to have to add some “spark of life” to get it going,’ you would probably have said.

      3. I forgot where I read it…

         “When I say that consciousness is an illusion I do not mean that consciousness does not exist. I mean that consciousness is not what it appears to be. If it seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed experiences, happening one after the other to a conscious person, this is the illusion.”
         ~ Susan J Blackmore

         Who has said many other interesting things about consciousness.

      4. Color might pose particular difficulties (see Mary). A better example is the relationship between temperature and mean kinetic energy. Can you conceive of a system identical in all respects, including mean kinetic energy, that differs in temperature? Is that really possible? It’s not clear to me that it is. I think temperature just is mean kinetic energy, and it doesn’t make any sense to talk about the two coming apart. That’s the real issue here.

   4. There is a difference: consciousness is a property that we know exists, but is unobservable. I can’t know for a fact that another person is conscious, much less an AI or something else. I believe that eventually neurologists will figure out how consciousness works in humans, enabling us to detect it, but until then, philosophers will be able to make arguments that would seem silly if applied anywhere else.

      1. Or they may make arguments that still sound silly no matter where applied, as long as you think about it just a little.

5. Color blindness is heritable, so attributes of the perception are grounded in our genes. That seems to me to put the perception squarely in the lap of physical science, even if incompletely understood.

6. You cut to the quick at the top: “…weakness for the numinous.”

   The zombie game is played in philosophy departments, especially at New York University, by the non-religious who yet cannot abide the utter denial of the numinous. They are creatures of Plato without the shock and awe. To paraphrase Kant, they find it necessary to deny objective reality to make room for magic.

   Yes, it is very subtle. They make a brave front at being devoid of God and oh so intellectually dry. Yet all it requires to smash the position is to extend out their main hypothetical: if considered justified to posit a possible world with full existence of a perfect clone, yet somehow absent consciousness, and that stands as non-contradictory on its face, then it is no less legit to conceive a man who is also the son of god and taught his followers that he might be invoked, for real, in the transubstantiation of bread into his body.

7. That Mary finally has an experience of red is perhaps not the same as learning a first person, subjective fact about red. Seeing the roses, she experiences the fact that roses are red, a third person fact she already knew. But she can’t specify any facts about the experience of red itself beyond its relations to other color experiences, relations she already knew about from the psycho-physics of color perception. Of course she might say, “So *that’s* what red is like” but when asked what the redness of red consists in, what it’s like in and of itself, she’ll have nothing to say (just like the rest of us). Finally having the experience of red enables one to re-identify it on future occasions, that is, discriminate it – a bit of behavior that doesn’t depend on access to first person facts about red.

   But even if qualitative experience doesn’t involve first person facts, Gutting is on the mark in pointing out that unlike its neural correlates, it’s categorically private. No experience has ever been observed, not even by ourselves as subjects since we consist of experience – we’re not in an observational relationship to it. This, along with the qualitative nature of experience, makes it difficult to literally identify consciousness with its neural correlates or any observable, quantifiable, objective state of affairs (the physicalist hope) even though experience closely tracks neural goings-on.

   Physicalists like Dennett and Owen Flanagan deny there’s a “hard problem” of explaining consciousness (see the Moving Naturalism Forward meeting) – we should just get on with neuroscience and all will become clear. By all means get on with it, but it isn’t just obvious, as they seem to think, that reductive physical analysis will do the trick otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation. The naturalist ontology of consciousness, whether monist, dualist or whatever, ultimately gets decided by our empirical investigations and conceptual advances, so we shouldn’t prejudge the outcome. Naturalism might not be equivalent to physicalism.

   1. Naturalism might not be equivalent to physicalism, but as I understand it there are a lot of different versions of physicalism.

   2. It isn’t obvious to me that it isn’t obvious. That philosophers can play word games means exactly nothing.

      And as far as I know, today naturalism is equivalent to physicalism. If the standard cosmological universe is spontaneous (even have to be spontaneous), then everything is physical.

      In any case you can run the same observation for the Standard Model way up (some 100 GeV so far) over the energies of chemistry (a few eV). Which means whatever consciousness is it is protected from other physics or even magic woo of zombies/qualia/ESP et cetera, or QED wouldn’t be predictive to 11 significant digits. Effective physicalism, as it were.

      1. For the Standard Model _today_, I should add. (Hi, Higgs! You freed us from biological and technical applications of woo, you little wondrous field.)

   3. How can there be a naturalist version of dualism? As I understand it, naturalism means that everything is composed of the things that physicists and chemists study, and dualism means that something beyond the physics and chemistry is required to explain consciousness.

      1. Seems to me ontologies are a function of explanatory adequacy, and as naturalists our primary commitment is getting a handle on how the world works, not to materialism/physicalism. It may turn out that phenomenal experience is identical to a certain objective, quantifiable state of physical affairs, in which case physicalism will be vindicated. But we don’t know that in advance. Just as we have to keep an open mind about the possible (although highly unlikely) existence of the supernatural, same goes for the existence of non-physical properties. See the excerpts Myron posted from Chalmers on this.

8. Well, I have difficulty distinguishing reds and greens in the simple hidden number test. But I do know what red and green look like on their own. Apparently, there are now glasses to correct such colour blindness. Were I to get a pair I would see the hidden number but how could it be said that I have gained any new information in a non materialistic way?

   1. I dunno if all such problems are correlated to color perception. I can have trouble, yet when I was asked to put 100s of colors in order in an extended test I only switched 2, meaning I have better color vision than most women. (I’m male.)

      1. One such test is here:

         http://www.colormunki.com/game/huetest_kiosk

         Unless one has some form of color deficiency, I personally think it’s more a test of patience than of perception. There’d probably have to be a standardized time component for it to be a meaningful test of perception.

         Cheers,

         b&

         1. That is the very one. (Slightly less than 100 hues, I see.)

            Son in your personal analysis, I have more patience than the average woman? That doesn’t sound right! =D

   2. That’s a subjective experience I’ve never had and can’t imagine. For me, colors that look similar are much easier to compare side by side than individually.

9. Even if the Zombie and Mary arguments don’t entail a “metaphysical gap”, they do seem suggest something like an “epistemic gap”. This is pretty straightforward insofar as it’s difficult to imagine how we could open up a skull and observe qualia. Using a microscope wouldn’t help either. It doesn’t seem like any physical theory would solve this problem because think of how the inference would go: we observe neurons firing…therefore we know there is qualia? How does that work? There are no known “psycho-physical” bridge laws that work *by necessity*; if they work at all it’s contingently. So the weaker and more plausible conclusion to these anti-physicalist argument is just a kind of epistemic skepticism: we don’t know how to formulate the bridge laws.

   With that said, I think the fundamental problem with these arguments is that we basic notion of qualia or what-it-is-likeness is so vaguely defined (if it is even defined at all!) that I’m convinced (like Dennettt) that philosophers don’t know what they’re talking about when they use the term. They acknowledge they only have access to the extension of the concept through their introspection, but introspection is not really helpful for understanding the true nature of this “qualia” stuff. And neither will empirical science help until you pin down exactly what you want to explain, but we can’t do that until we know what we mean, and introspection is no help. So in my view the term “qualia” and “phenomenology” are just not well-defined enough to serve as a theoretical terms to guide a science.

   So when qualia-philes say “Physics will never explain qualia!” I tend to agree with them, but only because the concept of qualia is too poorly defined and cannot be meaningfully operationalized and is thus pointless to spend much time worrying about.

10. “Given that these entities evolved from nonconscious physical entities, I fail to see how they can be “irreducibly subjective,” that is, independent of or not explainable by material phenomena. Maybe this is logically possible, but given the history of scientific successes resting firmly on materialism, I doubt that “naturalistic dualism” (which seems an incoherent oxymoron) will be the case.”

    I highly recommend that you read Chalmers! He is very much a proponent of science, and his arguments for consciousness being a “strongly” emergent property of physical systems with certain functional organization are, at the very least, very much worth taking seriously. (He answers your question about the evolution of phenomena not ontologically reducible to the underlying systems on which they depend, too.) Also, physicalism isn’t the thesis that everything has a physical explanation. It’s the thesis that “everything [whatever one means by that, exactly] is physical [whatever this means, exactly].” Whether or not we humans can *explain* higher-level phenomena (consciousness, economics, etc) in terms of lowest-level facts is an open question. Or, as other philosophers have pointed out (e.g., the atheist Colin McGinn), it may be that consciousness *has* a physicalistic explanation; but maybe these explanations require concepts that our evolved brains simply cannot grasp, just as a mouse will never, ever be able to understand what heliocentrism is. According to McGinn, philosophy is a receptacle for all the intellectual problems that humans have considered over the ages but not made any significant progress on. In other words, something is a philosophical problem precisely because it’s incredibly difficult — maybe impossible for us Homo sapiens — to solve. Compare progress on understanding the constitutive (not causal, take note; scientists are prone to confusing the two!) nature of consciousness, or knowledge, or free will, to progress on the problem of how digestion works. Big difference. Maybe someday consciousness will become a truly scientific problem — not just the correlates of consciousness, but consciousness itself — although there are reasons to think that this won’t happen. For one, consciousness is intrinsically subjective: it is an essentially internal phenomenon. And science only deals with objective, third-person observable phenomena. Thus, science talks about the frequencies of electromagnetic radiation while phenomenology talks about color. There is a gap of plausible, physicalistic explanation between the two.

    The point: consciousness is indeed a huge mystery — at least right now. It seems unlike anything else in the universe: subjective experience arising from physical systems with a huge explanatory gap in-between. But none of this in any way leads to religion; none of this in any way makes the existence of an immortal soul any more plausible. This is the line of attack I think works best here: admit our ignorance, read the literature and acknowledge conundra where there are conundra, and then show that all this is perfectly compatible with humble atheism.

    1. Chalmers’s ideas, such as they were, has had their time. I point to my commentary above about full respectively effective physicalism as consequences of cosmology and particle physics of the last year.

       Been there, (not) done that. I think the rest of us will move on now.

11. Mary’s room story has this sentence presented as Mary’s supposed first experience of the color red.

    Mary looks around the room and sees a bouquet of red roses sent by her husband.

    Looks like holy christian in a box to me, the deception lies in the readers emotional response to Mary having received roses from her husband which has little to do with the red color. Then, the emotionally charged sentence magically leads to this conclusion:

    Her experience, it seems clear, has taught her a fact about color that she did not know before.

    Holy christian in a box, try this sentence to see if the color red is the reasoning behind Mary being “taught” a “fact” about color that she did not know before:

    Mary looks around the room and sees the red on-off switch on the coffee maker.

    Fucking christians, haven’t they even learned yet that it is immoral to pre-load a claim with emotion and then present a conclusion as if the emotional reaction wasn’t involved.

    The christians are presenting this as if Mary would not have had any emotional response to the flowers if she hadn’t seen the red color. Damned god christians.

    P.S. I’m using the term christian(s) metaphorically, of course. But the christian already knew that because their damned god taught them how to read Its book without actually seeing what is written there or to see a murderous god as a loving god.

12. I would argue that Mary’s new sensory pattern experience is either 1) not a ‘fact’, or 2) her learning was incomplete. Ambiguity in what we call a ‘fact’ makes the experiment difficult to refute.

    We all know how the eye works… Three types of color receptors sensitive to three different bands of wavelengths of light. When the brain receives those signals, it identifies many types of patterns, including patterns of color.

    When Mary’s brain receives a pattern it has never received before, it catalogs that pattern, and compares it with the other knowledge Mary has about colors. Some people will call this “learning a new fact.”

    If that is a fact, then Mary’s learning was incomplete. The so-called perfect knowledge of color was incomplete in the sense that is was unable to describe the color in such a way that Mary’s brain could learn without direct experience.

    (Indeed, it would be difficult to claim perfect knowledge of a color. Colors are grouped and cataloged, and at some threshold the grouping of wavelengths starts to become a different color. That threshold shifts with a different observer; with different brightnesses; with impairment like color-blindness; and so on. And different groupings of wavelengths can produce the same perceptions of color.)

    But if we call this pattern recognition ‘experience’ then it is not a fact to be learned in the first place, and the premise is flawed. Calling it a fact sways the reader past this conclusion.

13. I see the experience of red as something that is still a deep puzzle to us,

    Normally I give the philosophism posts here a body-swerve as not being worth the effort, but I frankly doubt this premise is actually realistic. The putative Mary has, allegedly studied colour perception neurology for some considerable period, though never perceived colours herself. But would she not have an understanding of what colours are.
    In an occasional hobby, I enjoy eyeball astronomy. I’ve also tried doing telescopic astronomy, but that’s ruined by light pollution. However several years ago I did take a practical course in astronomy at the Observatory of Mallorca, run by the Open University ; during that we got to use, quite seriously, some non-trivial scopes, to do non-trivial undergraduate research tasks. One of the hardest week’s of work which I’ve skived through my paid work in order to afford!
    In these telescopes, we routinely use narro-band or broad band filters to control the light to which the CCD sensors are exposed, for technical reasons. In the astronomical world, we use this understanding of images acquired in different colour bands (of the same subject) to understand different aspects of the object. If we image a nebula through an O-III (bluish green ; I forget the wavelength interval) filter, and compare it with an image through a H-I filter (red), we may see that different elements are visible in different areas, telling us things about the distribution of chemicals and energy in the object.
    This I posit is comparable to the way that “Mary” has an academic understanding of “colour”.
    Now, it does take an intellectual leap, but not a big one, to do the same with images of those same objects, but in hard X-ray “light”, or in the radio waves from carbon monoxide molecules hitting each other. Effectively, we’re extending the visual range of our eyes by several dozens (hundreds even?) of octaves, when the normal visual range spans barely a single octave.
    The “Mary” experiment is done regularly. People can understand “colour” which they can’t see perfectly well. It’s not easy (the first time ; I had a head start through having done some colour photography in a darkroom with chemicals), but it’s no great philosophical biggie.
    I suspect that the woo-meisters are conflating the “understanding of colour” as a phenomenon with the social conventions that they associate with those colours. Which are just plain arbitrary, and must, of course, be learned by sucking it in with your mother’s milk. Which would be why he picked up on the husband showing his wife how much he hates her by greeting her with flower the colour of blood, to greet her from her operation. He’s saying to her “I wish you’d died”. Right? That is the One True Social Interpretation of red flowers, isn’t it? And no-body could arbitrarily misinterpret that.

    1. The specific wavelength isn’t necessarily important. I think the important distinction is between monochromatic and trichromatic vision, so the analogy would be what we would experience if we could perceive red, green, and blue as well as infrared, ultraviolet, etc. as separate channels in a single image. I know what it looks like to take the results of any three filters and make a false-color image, but can’t imagine what an image with more than three color channels would look like.

14. I wasn’t really led to the intended conclusion for the color question. If she knows all the facts about the color red, then she knows all the facts about how different brains interpret that wavelength, so she should know how her brain would react before she even had the surgery. If she didn’t, then she didn’t know all the facts about the color red.

    As far as zombies go, we could change all of physics if we so desired and have the same result. Who is to say that gravity is caused by masses effect on space? We can imagine deities pushing everything so that they behave as they do and the only reason everything doesn’t fly away is their active presence. We don’t then say that gravity doesn’t express all the facts about how objects behave.

15. A murine version of the Mary experiment has been done in mice. Mice were genetically engineered to express a long wavelength photoreceptor. As a result, they were able to discriminate red and yellow, which normal mice cannot do. Obviously, there is no way of interrogating these mice about their subjective experience. But that they change their colour-based behaviour seems to suggest a change in their experience of colour. Unless, of course, mice are zombies…

    In any event, it’s a great experiment that, if anything, speaks to how much more fascinating empirically grounded phenomena are than some of the sophistry the philosophers engage in.

    http://www.sciencemag.org/content/315/5819/1723.abstract

16. The trouble with many philosophers, and theologians, is that they exult in posing ‘difficult’ questions without justifying their axioms. My counter is always ‘show me’. Thought experiments must always be constrained by reality, otherwise we are just making stuff up.

    Show me Mary that knows of colour but has never experienced it yet has grown to maturity with the ‘meaning of coloured vision’ patterns in her brain intact. I doubt that it can be done – show me.

    Similarly with the zombie. As others have mentioned dualism is snuck in by the back door. I can imagine a twin struck by catastrophic amnesia and the inability to form long term memories. Such brain injuries are known. But these people still breathe, drink, eat, sleep and must therefore have as a minimum embodied experiences. If they didn’t you would have a dead ‘zombie’. You want a live zombie? Show me.

    1. +1.

17. I have to confess that I’m uncertain what it would mean to explain consciousness.

    1. Yes. The explanation preferred by the mysterians and supernaturalists seems to be “consciousness is explained by consciousness.” It isn’t made out of anything physical — it’s consciousness essence. This irreducible subjectivity then works through the power of conscious intention, experiencng itself directly through the force of direct experience. A=A and it is what it is and it always was that way and never got that way and if there’s any new consciousness lying around then it had to have come from the old stuff that has always been there.

       Not that it’s located anywhere.

       I find this less than enlightening. Materialistic explanations may be incomplete but by god they look like explanations!

    2. There are periods of time during which I wouldn’t characterize myself as being conscious, for example after having been driving for a while then realizing that I don’t remember much about what I was doing or having made any decisions, or getting really into a book or movie and losing track of time. I propose that it would be possible to monitor people with an fMRI in some situation where people commonly function on “autopilot” (perhaps performing some repetitive task), and periodically question them about whether they were conscious during that period, thereby determining the neural activity correlating to consciousness. I think that would be a good first step to understanding consciousness.

18. Subjective experience != knowledge. Can we go home now?

    And the zombie thing is just plain daft. My experiences have shaped the atom-by-atom configuration of my physical being right now. If another me was constructed with that same atom-by-atom configuration, it would have my experiences, character, memories – everything that makes me me is there. It’s like saying that a copy of a file on your computer doesn’t contain the same information as the original.

    1. This was my reaction as well, and I think that both you and Jerry expressed this resolution of the “problem” quite nicely.

    2. It is not a fact about the world that you have subjective experiences with certain characteristics? If so, don’t you have knowledge of your subjective experiences?

       1. Fine, but it’s a trivial amount of knowledge, and it’s pretty unreliable at that. Compared to the totality of scientific knowledge about the colour red, it’s meaningless. My subjective experience is important to me and my hypothetical zombie clone, but not to anyone else.

    3. And every time Kirk and co. used the transporters, only their zombies would materialise amongst the polystyrene rock…

       Oh, wait…

       /@

19. Antonio Damasio has answered the mystery of consciousness in “The Feeling of What Happens”:

    “Perhaps the most startling idea in this book is that, in the end, consciousness begins as a feeling, a special kind of feeling, to be sure, but a feeling nonetheless. I still remember why I began thinking of consciousness as feeling and it seems like a sensible reason: consciousness feels like a feeling, and if it feels like a feeling, it may well be a feeling.”

20. FWIW a weak version of the Mary experiment is now being played out in real life. Psychologist Mark Changizi has invented three pairs of glasses, each of which filters light to enhance certain aspects of the visual scene. One pair amplifies the red-green distinction so well that viewers who fail a standard test for RG colorblindness now pass the test. However, the glasses also attenuate the ability to sense blue and yellow.

    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=new-eyewear-could-help-people-with-red-green-color-blindness

21. The Mary parable is designed to aggrandize subjective phenomenology while exploiting the known difficulty in calibrating perceptual variations. It’s similar to Wittgenstein’s aspect-perception.

    L.W.’s “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” would be more beneficial advice to those who want to tendentiously insert equal opportunity credulity into the fray.

22. Both of these examples are almost childishly simple to refute. It the first, the argument assumes the conclusion (ie it’s circular reasoning). The second is just a fancy argument from ignorance – because it is logically possible, it’s true unless you can prove it’s not.

    Mary’s Room

    It helps if you break it down. This is what he I saying:

    Premises

    1) Prior to the operation, Mary knows every physical thing she can know about color.

    2) Post operation, she learns something else about color. Since (per point #1) we know she already knew everything physical about color, this additional thing she just learned must be non physical (ie non material).

    Conclusion

    Therefore, there is a fact about color that is not physical

    But the conclusion is the same as premise #2. The example only “works” because color is defined at the start as having physical and non physical properties. They’re conclusion is true because they defined it as being true at the start.

    P-Zombie

    A logical impossibility is something like a square circle or a married bachelor. The “twin” as defined is logically possible (ie it is not logically impossible). The mistake is to say “it follows that my experiences involve something beyond my physical makeup.” No, it does not follow. All that follows that it is logically possible (ie it could be true), but it does not follow that it is the case. This is just argument from ignorance – you can’t prove it false therefore it is true.

    I’ve been having these debates with idealists and dualists since the early days of the JREF forum in 2001, and their arguments have not changed despite these errors being pointed out to them numerous times.

    1. Hmm, they sound like crypto-creationists! 😉

    2. No, you guys are missing the point. The work done by logical possibility in the zombie argument not just creating space for “philosophy of the gaps”. Rather, the logical possibility of physically identical but mentally distinct individuals entails that mental properties are not identical with physical properties. If you grant that a physically identical zombie is logically possible, you’ve already lost. Look, if you think that the property of being a bachelor is identical to the property of being an unmarried male…, you’d better not grant the possibility of a married bachelor – same rules apply here.

       1. Which is why I wouldn’t grant that a philosophical zombie is possible.

          It seems to me Gutting is arguing for a soul here.

          The burden is on him to show that one lump of matter, precisely identical to another lump of matter, will behave in significantly different ways from that second lump.

          This would pretty much undo ALL of science.

          1. So what is your argument that it isn’t logically possible? To argue against p-zombies is to say that all behavior isn’t explicable in purely physical terms, that a physical description of a human brain does not capture everything necessary to know in order to predict what a person will do.

             I think folks here have things completely backwards. To deny the logical possibility of p-zombies is, in essence, to advocate for the causal efficacy of consciousness, which pretty much gets you to dualism.

             1. I don’t think that follows at all from what I wrote.

                I’m saying that it’s incumbent upon Gutting to show that a brain and body exactly, precisely, 100% identical to mine won’t necessarily result in consciousness. My argument is my brain and body. Here it is. The kind of consciousness I have is what results from my physical apparatus.

                It’s the p-zombie argument that requires dualism.

             2. Ah. I see what you’re saying. I think you’re interpreting what I wrote more as “I won’t grant that totally inert matter is possible.” But that’s not what I wrote.

                Yes, consciousness (the mind) will find its explanation in the physical substrate of the brain. But that’s beside the point here. The point is that Gutting wants to say one brain will result in consciousness and another identical brain won’t. He needs to establish that that’s possible for his argument to proceed.

             3. The problem is the phrase “logically possible.” If science eventually advances to the point where we have an understanding of where consciousness comes from, we will have a definite answer to whether a “zombie” twin will be conscious or not. If materialism turns out to be supported by these future scientific advances, then it will not be scientifically possible for the zombie twin to lack consciousness. Logic has nothing to do with it.

             4. Actually, that’s precisely part of the problem. A lot of philosophy is done as if events or states of affairs are in the domain of logical possibility or impossibility. There’s no such thing – *propositions* (and statements, etc. derivatively) are logically possible (or not) relative to a consequence relation.

       2. if you think that the property of being a bachelor is identical to the property of being an unmarried male…, you’d better not grant the possibility of a married bachelor…

          You don’t – a married bachelor is not logically possible. That’s the whole point.

          1. right, so you’d better not say, as you do above, “The “twin” as defined is logically possible (ie it is not logically impossible)” if you want to also maintain that mental properties are identical to physical properties. If mental properties are identical to physical properties, philosophical zombies are not logically possible. That’s the point.

             1. right, so you’d better not say, as you do above, “The “twin” as defined is logically possible (ie it is not logically impossible)” if you want to also maintain that mental properties are identical to physical properties.

                I’m not maintaining that mental properties are identical to physical properties. I’m not making any claim here; the people claiming that mental properties are not physical are the ones making the claim. My point is that their argument for this is argument from ignorance. They haven’t justified their position.

                If mental properties are identical to physical properties, philosophical zombies are not logically possible. That’s the point.

                But then you’re arguing using circular logic. You’re falling into the trap of trying to prove there are no non-physical properties. You can’t do that using logic.

                You don’t have to prove that mental properties are identical to physical properties. The non-materialists are the ones making the claim, let them try to prove it – they’ll fail.

             2. It’s neither an argument from ignorance nor circular – it’s modus tollens.

                If mental = physical, then p-zombies are not possible (identity of indiscernibles).

                p-zombies are possible (premise).

                Therefore, mental ≠ physical (modus tollens).

                The way to defeat the argument is to deny that p-zombies are logically possible. But if you grant the second premise, it’s already too late. The reason this is a philosophical problem is that it is unclear how empirical evidence could bear such a possibility.

             3. *indiscernibility of identicals

             4. It’s neither an argument from ignorance nor circular – it’s modus tollens.

                If mental = physical, then p-zombies are not possible (identity of indiscernibles).

                p-zombies are possible (premise).

                No. Not “p-zombies are possible.” The premise is “p-zombies are logically possible.” That is, you can’t show they are impossible just by using logic – ie there are no logical contradictions. This is where you are going wrong – you do not understand the argument they are making.  Read this.

                Therefore, mental ≠ physical (modus tollens).

                OK.

                The way to defeat the argument is to deny that p-zombies are logically possible.

                On what basis would you do that?

                But if you grant the second premise, it’s already too late.

                Why? You just showed the error in their reasoning.

             5. yes, read logical possibility throughout. My take is that the argument is valid, but not sound.

             6. The problem is that this turns the issue into a parlor game where someone has “lost” when he or she agrees to a certain premise. To be blunt: who cares?

                Since nobody can claim to know how, exactly, the property of consciousness arises, any claim about whether a zombie twin has consciousness is made out of ignorance. The fact that a philosopher can hoodwink someone into admitting the logical possibility that a zombie twin would lack consciousness is only proof of that philosopher’s ability to win at parlor games.

                That’s what Prof. Coyne means about “philosophy of the gaps.” The fact that we might consider it reasonable to say that somethings are “logically possible” may simply say more about our scientific ignorance than it does about the actual scientific possibilities of our universe.

             7. “If mental = physical, then p-zombies are not possible (identity of indiscernibles).”

                You take Leibniz’ identity of indiscernibles as a principle of logic, as though it were accepted as valid now in the early 21st century. Just parroting the physicist Wilczek’s famous article, what do you make of the indiscernibility of two electrons, one just coming into existence here and the other just arriving here after creation similarly 10 billion years ago, slightly more than 10 billion light years distant? I assume you won’t contradict quantum theory.

             8. [W]hat do you make of the indiscernibility of two electrons, one just coming into existence here and the other just arriving here after creation similarly 10 billion years ago, slightly more than 10 billion light years distant?

                But those two electrons are discernible, and trivially so. They’ve got radically different spatio-temporal coordinates, and are easily identified and distinguished as such.

                Now, it may well be the case that, were you to capture each and mix them up, you wouldn’t have any way of figuring out which was originally which. But you’d still have two electrons trivially discernible again by their spatial coordinates.

                There are more properties to the universe than merely the unfamiliar quantum ones, after all….

                Cheers,

                b&

             9. My “slightly more” should read “slightly less”!

             10. On Ben’s remark, I’ll give the Wilczek reference; I should have anyway:

                 http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9803075v2

                 It’s right there at the start.

                 There is lots of discussion all over the place, some even thoughtful, about whether spatio-temporal position is to be one of the properties in this hoary old chestnut of Leibniz. Quantum theory seems to change everything. I don’t recall the robot and human as being required to sit on top of one another.

             11. @Mark: what does scientifically possible mean? is it the same as physically possible? if so it’s no help in the present context, which, respectfully, is not a parlor game.

                 @peter & Ben: the identity of indescernibles or the indiscernibility of identicals isn’t really at issue here. the first premise really involves the supervenience of the mental on the physical, which is basically the claim that physical properties fix mental properties. so, if supervenience physicalism is true, then p-zombies are not possible.

             12. You are confusing “logically possible” and “metaphysically possible”.

             13. You are confusing “confusing” with “equivocating” but I grant the point, and I agree that it might be an important one.

23. The first one is at least worthy of discussion: if you want to go googling it, the magic word is “qualia”. I would start by querying whether it is plausible to assert that someone could know “all the physical facts about colors and their perception”.

    The philosophical zombie argument has always seemed to me to be entirely pointless. Thought experiments have their place, but quite how anyone would think a “me zombie” would be identical to me has always eluded me. I can’t see how it could convince anyone who didn’t already want to be convinced.

    1. Oops: I see Orestes Mantra has already mentioned qualia. I thought I’d refreshed the page, but apparently not.

24. “…’naturalistic dualism’ (which seems an incoherent oxymoron)…” – J. Coyne

    ND is the name the Australian philosopher David Chalmers has given to his position in the philosophy of mind, and it’s definitely not an “incoherent oxymoron”. And unless naturalism is equated with materialism/physicalism, it’s perfectly naturalistic.
    First of all, there is a distinction between three kinds of dualism:
    1. predicate/concept dualism
    2. attribute/property dualism
    3. substance dualism
    See: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/

    Chalmers’ ND is a form of 2 rather than of 3, which he rejects:

    “The dualism implied here is instead a kind of property dualism: conscious experience involves properties of an individual that are not entailed by the physical properties of that individual, although they may depend lawfully on those properties. Consciousness is a feature of the world over and above the physical features of the world. This is not to say it is a separate ‘substance’; the issue of what it would take to constitute a dualism of substances seems quite unclear to me. All we know is that there are properties of individuals in this world—the phenomenal properties—that are ontologically independent of physical properties.”

    (Chalmers, David J. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. p. 125)

    “This position qualifies as a variety of dualism, as it postulates basic properties over and above the properties invoked by physics. But it is an innocent version of dualism, entirely compatible with the scientific view of the world. Nothing in this approach contradicts anything in physical theory; we simply need to add further bridging principles to explain how experience arises from physical processes. There is nothing particularly spiritual or mystical about this theory—its overall shape is like that of a physical theory, with a few fundamental entities connected by fundamental laws. It expands the ontology slightly, to be sure, but Maxwell did the same thing. Indeed, the overall structure of this position is entirely naturalistic, allowing that ultimately the Universe comes down to a network of basic entities obeying simple laws, and allowing that there may ultimately be a theory of consciousness cast in terms of such laws. If the position is to have a name, a good choice might be naturalistic dualism.”

    (Chalmers, David. “Naturalistic Dualism.” In The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, edited by Max Velmans and Susan Schneider, 359-368. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. p. 360)

    “The arguments do not lead us to a dualism such as that of Descartes, with a separate realm of mental substance that exerts its own influence on physical processes. The best evidence of contemporary science tells us that the physical world is more or less physically closed: for every physical event, there is a physical sufficient cause. If so, there is no room for a mental ‘ghost in the machine’ to do any extra causal work. …
    The dualism implied here is instead a kind of property dualism: conscious experience involves properties of an individual that are not entailed by the physical properties of that individual, although they may depend lawfully on those properties. Consciousness is a feature of the world over and above the physical features of the world. This is not to say it is a separate ‘substance’; the issue of what it would take to constitute a dualism of substances seems quite unclear to me. All we know is that there are properties of individuals in this world—the phenomenal properties—that are ontologically independent of physical properties. ….
    Where we have new fundamental properties, we also have new fundamental laws. Here the fundamental laws will be psychophysical laws, specifying how phenomenal (or protophenomenal) properties depend on physical properties. These laws will not interfere with physical laws; physical laws already form a closed system. Instead, they will be supervenience laws, telling us how experience arises from physical processes. We have seen that the dependence of experience on the physical cannot be derived from physical laws, so any final theory must include laws of this variety.
    Of course, at this stage we have very little idea what the relevant fundamental theory will look like, or what the fundamental psychophysical laws will be. But we have reason to believe that such a theory exists. There is good reason to believe that there is a lawful relationship between physical properties and conscious experience, and any lawful relationship must be supported by fundamental laws. The case of physics tells us that fundamental laws are typically simple and elegant; we should expect the same of the fundamental laws in a theory of consciousness. Once we have a fundamental theory of consciousness to accompany a fundamental theory in physics, we may truly have a theory of everything. Given the basic physical and psychophysical laws, and given the distribution of the fundamental properties, we can expect that all facts about the world will follow. Developing such a theory will not be straightforward, but it ought to be possible in principle. …
    This view is entirely compatible with a contemporary scientific worldview, and is entirely naturalistic. On this view, the world still consists in a network of fundamental properties related by basic laws, and everything is to be ultimately explained in these terms. All that has happened is that the inventory of properties and laws has been expanded, as happened with Maxwell. Further, nothing about this view contradicts anything in physical theory; rather, it supplements this theory. A physical theory gives a theory of physical processes, and a psychophysical theory tells us how those processes give rise to experience.
    To capture the spirit of the view I advocate, I call it naturalistic dualism. It is naturalistic because it posits that everything is a consequence of a network of basic properties and laws, and because it is compatible with all the results of contemporary science. And as with naturalistic theories in other domains, this view allows that we can explain consciousness in terms of basic natural laws. There need be nothing especially transcendental about consciousness; it is just another natural phenomenon. All that has happened is that our picture of nature has expanded. Sometimes ‘naturalism’ is taken to be synonymous with ‘materialism’, but it seems to me that a commitment to a naturalistic understanding of the world can survive the failure of materialism. (…) Some might find a certain irony in the name of the view, but what is most important is that it conveys the central message: to embrace dualism is not necessarily to embrace mystery.”

    (Chalmers, David J. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. pp. 124-25+127-28)

    1. So he’s decided to name something that exists because he says it exists and he isn’t able to understand how it could be any other way.

       Sounds like he is inventing a god that he wants to cram into the process to explain an unknown. He wants us to accept it is there because he says it is. Then he wants us to develop explanations of events with his god as a fundamental base.

    2. This comment is way too long; please don’t post long excerpts like this again.

    3. As I understand the distinction between ‘naturalistic dualism’ and supernaturalism, a naturalistic dualist would agree that two brains which are completely identical down to every physical component and how it moves would be having the same conscious experience. A supernatural dualist would deny that this is entailed.

    4. I’ll just repeat what I commented to Baobab earlier (and it applies to the next longish excerpt you commented later too):

       Chalmers’s [and McGinn later] ideas, such as they were, has had their time. I point to my commentary above about full respectively effective physicalism as consequences of cosmology and particle physics of the last year.

       Been there, (not) done that. I think the rest of us will move on now.

    5. One thinks of these as distinct position only with residual Platonism at play. After all, what categorizes substances but what sorts of properties they have and conversely?

25. The mystery is only your own consciousness. When you look at others you see actions that can be explained by physicals facts. You attribute (extrapolate) the mystery of consciousness to them, based on your own internal experience and observation of their external actions. Their “consciousness” can be explained by you as easily as in the case of a machine that tell you that it is conscious.

    You can pull someone else up by his or her bootstraps, if you are strong enough, but you cannot pull yourself up by your own bootstraps no matter how strong. Thus is your own consciousness a mystery, but only to you.

    (We had a very long thread on all this back at the old Dawkins site: http://old.richarddawkins.net/discussions/555814-nihilism-absurdism-consciousness-and-free-will )

26. As for Chalmers’ arguments against materialism/physicalism and the possible materialist/physicalist reactions, see his paper “Consciousness and its Place in Nature”, which is essential reading:

    http://consc.net/papers/nature.html

27. Why would somebody who’s color blind become a neurologist specializing in color perception? This all seems too trumped up.

    1. Why would someone who is not religious be interested in religion? This website all seems too trumped up. /snark

    2. As someone with basic colour-deficient vision (red/green), I can comment that I am fascinated by the study of colour perception, and could indeed have specialised in that subject, had I the brains to be a neurologist in the first place. I therefore agree with yngveb’s snark.

28. As for the zombie argument, see:

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/

    Interestingly, Robert Kirk, the author of the above text and the man who introduced the idea of psychological zombies into the contemporary philosophy of mind, now strongly rejects Chalmers’ claim that such beings are really possible. For Kirk’s arguments, see:

    * Kirk, Robert. Zombies and Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

29. “And I certainly see no reason to abandon scientific studies of consciousness resting on analyses of our brain, studies of artificial intelligence, and so on.” – J. Coyne

    Neither does Chalmers!
    Here’s another paper by him that is essential reading for everyone interested in the topic: “How Can We Construct a Science of Consciousness”

    http://consc.net/papers/scicon.html

30. It seems to me this if you want to count “experience” as a form of knowledge, ie, a “fact”, then the refutation is trivial: Mary did not know everything there was to know about color.

    On top of which, this thought experiment dies nothing to establish that our perceptions, acquired with our sense organs, don’t work via physical mechanisms. This would be necessary for the scenario to hold any water.

    1. To be more precise: it’s possible that perception is physical and Mary did not really know every physical fact.

       Gutting begs the question (as skeptico noted above).

    2. By having an experience, you introspectively come to know it and what it’s like to have it.

       1. Sure. But demonstrate that this is not something that occurs physically.

31. I find the idea of philosophal zombies very amusing on several levels. On the one hand you can imagine them mindlessly parroting philosophical platitudes (like the ontological argument); on the other as mindlessly pursuing philosophical truth (or old philosphers stumbling around with grisly abandon — to borrow a phrase from Piers Anthony). The stereotypical quest for brains becomes problematic, though, if we assume a Cartesian dualism — since brain and mind are separate, will brains really sate their hunger?

    1. I also enjoy speculating about a philosophical zombi which is not at all conscious — but only thinks that it is.

       Perhaps that is the way the theist perceives the materialist atheist. We only think we think. Or … maybe we only THINK we only think we think.

       Gotta think about that one…

       1. Then I would look for evidence of the component “conscious” in the acts and actions of the two groups, also presuming that the trait “conscious” would manifest as a superior product – maybe the “conscious” would be related to not raping babies (nope catholics rape babies), not dictating the unnecessary death and pain of others (nope christians seem to often like the death and pain of others), deception and manipulation that is designed to enhance the perpetrator causing a loss to the victim (nope the christian enterprise is fairly well built on deception and manipulation (no lying unless for jebuses though (Oh except, if they want to))).

          It seems that if there is a “conscious” that is a component of one group but not the other, it wouldn’t be found in the christian but might possibly be found in the atheist.

32. That philosophers take seriously this kind of nonsense only further goes to demonstrate the complete worthlessness of the field — at least, from an academic perspective.

    Both parables quickly reduce to a violation of the Church-Turing thesis. And a violation of Church-Turing is at least closely correlated with a violation of conservation, even if that hasn’t yet been conclusively proven.

    And there really isn’t anything further that’s academically interesting about either. File ’em both away with the dowsing rods and the Tarot cards and the bendy spoons, and move on to the next subject.

    Now, if you want to approach either from a literary or anthropological perspective, great, have at it. Probably lots of meat on those bones.

    But pretending that either parable has anything to do with reality is as pointless as arguing over the specifications of a warp drive, how much braaaaaaiiiiiiinnnnnnsssss a zombie has to eat to stay animated, or which “finger” Thomas did thrust in Jesus’s “hole.”

    Cheers,

    b&

    1. Hi Ben,

       Could you elaborate about how they violate the Church-Turing thesis? Do you mean that they imply that a computer could not be conscious or know what it is like to experience something? In turn, do you think that implies a violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics?

       I don’t think we need to get too deeply into the meta-debate about the usefulness of philosophy, but I would ask whether you think worthless things are bad, and whether you think people should not study philosophy.

       1. The simplest version is that a device immune to Church-Turing would, for example, be able to pre-compute particle positions in such a way as to act as Maxwell’s Daemon, thereby putting more usable energy into the system than it takes out of it.

          This is consistent with all suggestions I’ve ever encountered for how to actually build a super-Turing device: they all either rely on an inexhaustible infinite resource or would produce an inexhaustible infinite resource. For example, a common variation is a device that can perform an infinite number of calculations in a finite amount of time, with an hypothesized method of action similar to the explanations that accompany Xeno’s arrow paradox.

          I’ve found it to be a very handy tool in analyzing the supernatural or the paranormal or what-not. See if the phenomenon in question either requires a violation of conservation or could be used to power a perpetual motion machine. If either is the case, there’s no point in wondering how real the phenomenon is, though it certainly may still be worthy of investigation.

          An angel, for example — even a fallen one — could power a generator by acting as Maxwell’s Daemon. Once you’re dead, you don’t have enough energy to move your limbs and especially operate your brain; therefore, all zombies and other forms of reanimated dead are fictional. Magic in all other forms, practically by definition, is the act of getting more out of something than you put into it — wave a stick, think really hard, mumble a few words, and the space fighter lifts itself out of the swamp.

          And anything that requires or is equivalent to computation and / or communication not done with physical hardware and an expenditure of energy is a violation of Church-Turing, which, in turn, can very easily be dismissed as fantasy. (Indeed, just the communication bit is generally all that you need…Claude Shannon established hard limits to communication, and every dualist / psychic / soulful phenomenon I’ve ever encountered would require communication without energy expenditure, again practically by definition.)

          Cheers,

          b&

          1. Sounds like a more elaborate and complete explanation to the old saw: “Science explains the ‘How’ of the world, but religion explains the ‘Why’..

             Ugh..that “why” simplification surfaces all the time on the internet.

             To me, if “why” were a legitimate question to which a supernatural, all powerful being possessed an answer, then that supernatural being would be consumed with generating “why” answers at an exponential rate, never to to return to previous positions, much less riding herd over stuff He “hates”, “delights in”, etc.

             1. An infinite regression of whys? Look out, now you have exploded Tipler’s Omega-point before its time!

          2. Excellent review!

             My own take has been that every non-conservative proposal seem to run into CT. For example, faster-than-light speed would break CT if used in computing. But now I know how to break it explicitly.

             1. Faster-than-light means time travel, and time travel is the Great Grandmother of all violations of conservation. Whatever you send back in time has just been doubled. And, if it’s “only” information, recall that, per Shannon, there is no communication without energy transfer.

                b&

             2. But what if you went back in time and killed your great grandmother…?

             3. Conservation would obviously require the heat from an equal or greater anti-grandmother to manifest as far in the future.

          3. Ben,

             Thanks for your reply–this is an interesting argument.

             Zombies aren’t supposed to be actual, though, nor are they supposed to be “walking dead,” so I’m not sure how your position bears on their metaphysical possibility. Yes, they might be physically impossible, and so if their existence would violate the First Law, then that’s another reason to say they’re impossible. But the dualist only needs that they’re metaphysically possible. (Again, this is the sort of possibility that makes square circles and numerically-prime Prime Ministers more than merely physically impossible.)

          4. There is a full-length book by the Boston U. philosopher Webb (pretty much in agreement with what I understand in the above IIRC) called “Mechanism, Mentalism and Metamathematics: An essay on finitism” which may be of interest to some here. He might be surprised to learn how a few paragraphs can replace 50 or 60 of his pages, again IIRC!

          5. If there is a general proof that conservation of energy, or other laws of thermodynamics, imply the Church-Turing thesis, it would be great to have a reference.

             1. I don’t know of any formal references, but I’d think that my simple example of Maxwell’s Daemon should be ample to at least demonstrate the merit of the idea.

                It’s not hard to come up with other examples…just pick any instance in you can get energy as the result of computation. If you can get the answer without computation — which is what a super-Turing device does — then there’s your violation of conservation.

                Or, conversely, just look at what it takes to create a super-Turing device: infinite computations in a finite amount of time, etc.

                It might help to remember that all computation requires communication, and that Shannon placed hard physical limits on communication.

                b&

33. At that moment, Mary for the first time experiences the color red and now knows what red looks like. Her experience, it seems clear, has taught her a fact about color that she did not know before.

    Any new facts that come out of this experience are facts about how Mary’s brain works.

    Richard Dawkins has touched on this theme where he hypothesises that “red” is an internal label used to describe a sensation and a bat using sonar could experience an identical sensation when getting echolocation information from an object with certain attributes.

    1. You could ask, though, what colour the bat sees it’s sonar signals as.

       Doesn’t make too much sense but IMO as much sense as the original example!

34. Finally, here’s a third important paper by Chalmers: “Facing Up to the Problem of Cosciousness”

    http://consc.net/papers/facing.html

    This one and the other two papers already mentioned by me are contained in the following book, which is highly recommendable

    * Chalmers, David J. The Character of Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

35. I’m not sure what Gutting means by “logically” possible. Yes, the laws of nature could be different for the zombie than for me, producing different subjectivity

    Jerry, that is precisely what “logically possible” means.

    1. I’ve yet to be convinced that there’s any distinction to be had between “logically” and “physically” impossible. Seems to me that the logicalists are merely privileging one set of absolutes over another.

       For example, one might suggest that it is logically impossible to draw a triangle in a uniform Euclidean geometry with more than one right angle. One can, however, draw such a triangle in any number of non-Euclidean geometries.

       One then might suggest that it’s physically impossible to attain velocities faster than the speed of light…but it’s also just as logically impossible to do so in an Einsteinian geometry as it is to draw a square triangle in an Euclidean one. If you were to suggest that the light speed limit is a physical one, not logical, then you must also concede that the limit on square triangles is also physical and not logical. And, indeed, we find that the limits to drawing a square triangle are equally physical: just as you’d need more-than-infinite energy to accelerate beyond the speed of light, you’d need a longer-than-infinite line to draw a square triangle.

       We then might take it to a smaller scale, and say that it’s physically impossible for me to run a one-minute mile. But that’s again a simple logical limit, for I lack the energy to do the trick. A cheetah, assuming it can sustain a sprint for an entire minute, has such energy…but my attempt fails for the same reason that 1 + 1 != 3.

       If “logical impossibility” is just shorthand for, “if things were different then they’d be different,” then <yawn />. Let’s go down to the lake and cast nets for wish fishes.

       Cheers,

       b&

       1. Hi Ben,

          Your “one-minute mile” example is a useful one. It might be physically impossible for you to run a one-minute mile. But doesn’t it still seem possible in some sense for you to run a one-minute mile, in the way that it doesn’t seem possible for you to run a mile in both exactly six and exactly seven minutes at once? That seven is not equal to six is a logical necessity, not merely a physical one. (If the laws of physics were different, six would still not be equal to seven. Even God couldn’t make six equal to seven. And so on.)

          1. Again, you’re just privileging one (class of) parameter(s) over another.

             It’s logically impossible for me to both be the actual human being I am and to have the Superman legs necessary to run a one-minute mile. Changing me into the Superman who could run a one-minute mile would be no different from changing the length of the course from one mile to 100 yards.

             You clearly understand that some parameter, somewhere, has to change. So why is it a logical impossibility when the parameter is one type and yet a physical impossibility when the parameter is an indistinguishably different type?

             Cheers,

             b&

             1. Ben,

                Thanks for the reply.

                We may be running into a problem here with what philosophers call “rigid designators.” Yes, it’s logically impossible for you to be identical to Superman. But it’s not logically impossible for someone very much like you to run a one-minute mile, the way it’s logically impossible even for someone very much like you be, e.g., taller than himself. Similarly: If the laws of physics were different, you could run a one-minute mile; but it is not the case that if the laws of physics were different, you could be identical to the number seven. So ‘Ben is identical to the number seven’ is impossible in a way that ‘Ben runs a one-minute mile’ is not.

             2. Actually, all you’re doing is the exact same thing as Christians do when they “answer” Epicurus’s riddle with, “Free Willies.” That is, all you’ve done is acknowledged the inadequacy of the response but pretended that the response is a definitive answer because you’ve given it a name.

                For example, going back to geometry…whenever I note that it’s impossible to draw a triangle with more than one right angle, some wisealeck always pops up with the joke about tracking polar bears. But, see…if you’re going to say that it’s logically possible to draw a triangle with more than one right angle, just so long as you change the Euclidean space variable to a non-Euclidean space, you can just as easily change the variable that says that lines must be straight to say that you can draw said triangle with “lines” that are curves — which, after all, is all that is going on with non-Euclidean space. And, if you can do that, who says that a right angle has to be perpendicular, or that a triangle must have three sides?

                That’s all you’re doing with the one-minute mile example. You’re changing one part of the specification, but there’s no good reason why it’s okay to change that part of the specification but not some other part of the specification.

                When something is stated as impossible, it’s that particular specification of variables that’s impossible. And, generally, you can make the task in question possible by changing one or more of those variables. Though it may be interesting that you can get something similar, maybe even “good enough” by loosening the definition, such fact has no bearing whatsoever on the impossibility of the original question.

                Cheers,

                b&

          2. In addition to what Ben said, your example only demonstrates that something defined as X is necessarily not equivalent to something defined as Y, where X and Y are different and exclusive. Which is pretty tautological.

             It doesn’t really say anything about running, which is what we’re trying to draw a conclusion about.

             Often, this sort of gedankenexperiment can be reduced to definitional games that don’t really support the drawing of any conclusions.

       2. ‘I’ve yet to be convinced that there’s any distinction to be had between “logically” and “physically” impossible.’

          Of course, the cosmologist/physicist Tegmark’s speculations, which I think deserve consideration, but others here do not, would seem to explain this, in that, to roughly characterize him: ‘what logically exists, in fact physically exists’. But possibly Ben delimits the logical more severely than logicians do. And I’m not sure what “logicalists” are.

36. I think it would be more enlightening, and efficient, to look at motives more than logic and precise definitions.

    Assume the best case for the dualists, that Mary indeed has learned something by seeing the roses, that she never could have known before. The fact that she could have never known it before is a limitation of her mind. That’s exactly the kind of limitation a material mind, or a computer, would have. It can represent red in the analytical/verbal/numeric section of its mind, but can’t translate that knowledge to the visual/imagination section of its mind. The only way to get the information into the visual section is to fix its camera, or otherwise rewire the mind.

    The dualists are projecting this limitation of the mind onto the universe. They do it all the time. I think it’s the main motive behind dualism. We can’t get outside our minds, see the universe without the flavors of our own human thought. And the dualists can’t resist attributing some of those flavors to the universe rather than themselves. Those poor, deluded dualists.

    The solution to the zombie problem is even simpler. Make friends with your zombie double. You can do that, since he’s capable of everything a human is, except for certain internal states. Hang out for a few years, have lots of fun and adventures, grow to care about one another. Then you won’t have to worry about all that philosophical jibber jabber. You’ll understand, on an “experiential” level, that experiences are what they do, not what they “are”. When the subject comes up of whose life is more valuable, you’ll realize that the consciousness you think you have, but he doesn’t, is a word game.

37. I think the best (and only real) way to evaluate conceivability arguments is to evaluate the alleged link between conceivability and metaphysical possibility.

    Zombie Argument: (1) There could have been a zombie I: an exact physical duplicate of me that lacked conscious experiences. (2) If there could have been a zombie I, then some facts about my conscious experiences are not physical facts.

    Premise (1) depends on a conjunct of a more general principle,

    (CP) In general, if something is conceivable, then it is metaphysically possible. In general, if something is inconceivable, then it is metaphysically impossible.

    This principle seems true; there may be a few exceptions, but usually, our guide to (nonactual) possibility and to impossibility is conceivability. But there’s also the other, Cartesian side of the coin:

    Spirit Argument: (3) There could have been a spirit I: an exact duplicate of my mind but without a physical body. (4) If there could have been a spirit I, then some facts about my conscious experiences are not physical facts.

    Again, (3) and (4) together give us dualism. Here, (3) depends on (CP) again. Last, the Leibnizian argument:

    Mill Argument:(5) Physical minds are inconceivable. (6) Therefore, physical minds are impossible.

    And once again, this depends on (CP). The support for (5) is something like that we can’t imagine a machine really having experiences; cf. the Chinese Room.

    Therefore, I’d say that most of the debate about dualism depends on to what degree conceivability really implies possibility and inconceivability implies impossibility.

    1. David Chalmers: “Does Conceivability Entail Possibility?”

       http://consc.net/papers/conceivability.html

       1. I can conceive of 2+2 making 3 in ordinary Peano arithmetic. I shall now proceed to derive all manner of remarkable conclusions from being able to conceive of this.

          1. Hi davidgerard,

             I can’t conceive of that. I mean, if it’s ordinary arithmetic, then it’s impossible for 2+2=3. And I can’t conceive of it in real life either; I can’t conceive of a set of two apples, two oranges, and exactly three fruit. That’s how I know (how else would I know?) that 2+2=3 is impossible in real life as well, not merely according to arithmetical rules.

             1. Well, yes, that’s the problem. Consider the following:

                1. I can conceive of 2+2=4 being true (in conventional everyday Peano arithmetic as we commonly know it).
                2. I can conceive of 2+2=5 being true (in conventional Peano arithmetic).

                With the second, I am claiming to “conceive of” something trivially false. I arguably haven’t conceived of anything actually possible; I’ve just shuffled some words together.

                3. I can conceive of P being equal to NP.
                4. I can conceive of P not being equal to NP.

                With the third or fourth, I’m claiming to have conceived of something no-one knows (though many suspect 3 is false and 4 is true).

                To what extent have I actually thought it through? At some point I will hit a contradiction with one of them, though no-one has yet.

                Both are “conceivable” in some sense; certainly that the speaker has formed a sentence in their head that they can try out for its logical implications. But one of those statements is as wrong as 2+2=5 nevertheless.

                Thus, “conceiving of” something in this sense does not imply it can possibly be true.

                5. I can conceive of p-zombies, therefore dualism.

                When someone claims that p-zombies are a conceivable thing at all, and that they have conceived of them (first part of statement five), this doesn’t actually say anything about the world or what is even possible; it just says they’ve formed a sentence in their head they think they can try out for its logical implications. Which is fine, but the world doesn’t care what philosophers think they think.

                6. If I can conceive of p-zombies then dualism, which is a confused idea, therefore p-zombies is a confused idea by reductio ad absurdum.

                Statement six is my own view. P-zombies is like creationism for smart people. The main argument for dualism remains its advocates really really wanting it to be true.

       2. Hi Myron,

          Yes, I actually agree that in general, conceivability implies possibility. That’s why I think the evidence for dualism is better than most philosophers think it is, although I’m not sure where the balance of evidence is.

38. Has anyone considered combining together the two scenarios so that Mary is a philosopher’s zombie? Zombies are meant to be identical to us physically, and in terms of functionality or cognitive abilities, but without “phenomenal consciousness”. Zombies can live a normal life, do science and art, fall in love, weep when reading CIF-Belief and so on. So presumably a Zombie Mary would be surprised when she first saw the colour red (in the sense of having the relevant part of her brain stimulated by light of that wavelength via the eyes). This suggests that neither of the Marys are necessarily getting access to new information, in addition to their complete physicalist theory of vision (which would imply dualism), but rather just receiving some of the same information in a new way. Zombie Mary,and perhaps Normal Mary, are surprised because when they learn the complete physicalist theory, they absorb the information intellectually, whereas when they are actually exposed to light of that wavelength, they are absorbing some of the same information in a different format.

    The surprise would be expected with or without phenomenal consciousness, and so cannot be used to argue for dualism.

    1. Interesting approach.

       And it made me laugh. Heh. I like it. Now we just have to place the Zombie Mary in a Chinese Box with Schroedinger’s cat and we can sit back and discover all sorts of stuff about the way things really are.

       1. Yes, or would Buridan’s Ass push Zombie Mary off a railway bridge to stop a trolley-car running over a brain in a vat? What does your answer tell you about ethics?

          1. thanks you guys!

          2. Actually, there’s an old “spoof” of the trolley examples that involves even more elaboration than this sort of thing, at the equivalent level of silliness. (I still remember something about embryos, some of which will grow up to be G.E.M Anscombe.) Paul Russell (I think) had it up at UBC over 10 years ago.

    2. Hehe, it makes more sense (ahem) to my non-philosophical way of thinking to combine them like this.

       Both “problems” seems to violate the way that the physical universe seems to work. I can see the use/fun in them as a thought experiment but never to actually try do demonstrate anything in our physical reality!

39. Maybe I’m missing something, but doesn’t the existence, and efficacy, of anesthetics and psychedelics at least give pause to the idea that consciousness is something entirely separate from the material?

    1. Yes, as do studies in damage to various areas of the brain.

    2. The operation that severe epileptics undergo to sever the corpus colosum, and the consequent effects that has on cognitive abilities, pretty much nails shut the coffin on the idea that consciousness relies on something beyond the physical.

       Severing the hemispheres results in two distinct cognitive spheres that can not communicate. The left hand literally does not know what the right is doing.

    3. … Plus with the use of SSRIs/anti-depressants, I can, anecdotally, confirm that minor changes in chemistry has a fundamental effect on perception, mood, and all that stuff that’s supposedly mysterious.

       When something goes wrong the connection between your brain’s physical chemistry and “conciousness” is trivially obvious.

40. As for the “mysteriousness” of consciousness/experience, I would like to mention Colin McGinn’s naturalistic mysterianism, according to which consciousness/experience is a perfectly natural but humanly unexplainable phenomenon, with its unexplainability being due to the cognitive limits of homo sapiens:

    “Mysterianism is a term coined by Owen Flanagan (1992) for a view devised, developed, and largely associated with Colin McGinn. McGinn’s position is characterized by two features:

    1. Ontological naturalism: the view that holds (inter alia) that consciousness is a natural feature of the world;

    2. Epistemic irreducibility: the view that holds that there is no explanation of consciousness available to us.

    McGinn also thinks it is likely that a stronger, modal version of the second claim will also turn out to be true:

    2*. There can be no explanation of consciousness available to us.

    However, he acknowledges that his arguments do not entirely preclude the possibility of our eventually developing an explanation of consciousness—although they do make this highly unlikely. It is the claim of epistemic irreducibility that constitutes the specifically mysterian aspect of McGinn’s position. …
    Characteristic of McGinn’s view is the idea that the problem with naturalizing consciousness stems from the fact that we are, as we might put it, faculty-poor. This is a distinct, and more serious, form of deficiency than simple conceptual poverty. For McGinn, consciousness poses a problem for naturalism not simply because we lack the requisite concepts to apply to the natural order—concepts that would allow us to see how the natural order (or simply ‘nature’?) produces or constitutes consciousness. This is true, but the real problem is that we don’t have the appropriate faculties—concept-forming capacities—that would allow us to form the requisite concepts. Thus, McGinn’s position differs from views such as Levine (1983), which identify the problem of consciousness as one primarily of conceptual mismatch.
    McGinn’s view is also to be distinguished from that of Chalmers (1996). Chalmers, in effect, understands the problem of consciousness as one stemming ultimately from the ontological poverty of the sciences of consciousness (although this is reflected in an associated conceptual poverty also). That is, the various sciences of consciousness simply do not posit the right sorts of entities to make consciousness intelligible. It is as if we were to try and understand the nature of physical things without positing the existence of protons, neutrons, or electrons. To rectify this, Chalmers advocates what he calls Naturalistic Dualism. He allows that there is an explanation of consciousness we can understand. But to get this explanation we have to be willing to expand our catalog of basic entities. From McGinn’s perspective, such a move is likely to replicate precisely those features of physical explanations that render them inadequate—this would be most obviously true, for example, if the newly posited entities were spatial.”

    (Rowlands, Mark. “Mysterianism.” In The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, edited by Max Velmans and Susan Schneider, 335-345. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. pp. 335-36)

    “[P]hilosophical perplexities arise in us because of definite inherent limitations on our epistemic faculties, not because philosophical questions concern entities or facts that are intrinsically problematic or peculiar or dubious. Philosophy is an attempt to get outside the constitutive structure of our minds. Reality itself is everywhere flatly natural, but because of our cognitive limits we are unable to make good on this general ontological principle. Our epistemic architecture obstructs knowledge of the real nature of the objective world. I shall call this thesis transcendental naturalism, TN for short.
    …
    [T]he idea of a mystery is simply the idea of a question that happens to fall outside a given creature’s cognitive space. It is analogous to the idea of items that lie outside of a creature’s phenomenal or perceptual or affective space—sensations it cannot feel, properties it cannot perceive, emotions it cannot experience. If we suppose that creatures possess ‘organs’ that define these spaces, then mysteries are questions for which the given creature lacks the requisite intellectual organ(s). The totality of these spaces would constitute the mental horizon of the type of creature in question.
    …
    TN, as I am defining it, incorporates a double naturalism (or anti-non-naturalism—I shall drop this periphrasis from now on): both about reality and about our knowledge of it. The natural world can transcend our knowledge of it precisely because our knowledge is a natural fact about us, in relation to that world. It is a general property of evolved organisms, such as ourselves, to exhibit areas of cognitive weakness or incapacity, resulting from our biological constitution; so it is entirely reasonable to expect naturally based limits to human understanding. We are not gods, cognitively speaking. A creature’s mental powers are things in the natural world, with a natural origin, function and structure, and there is no necessity that this part of the world should be capable of taking in the rest. The ‘transcendent’ component of TN simply gives expression to this naturalism about the mind.”

    (McGinn, Colin. Problems in Philosophy: The Limits of Inquiry. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. pp. 2-5)

    “We need to distinguish between what I shall call effective and existential naturalism. Effective naturalism is the thesis that we should be able to provide or construct naturalistic accounts of every phenomenon in nature: we should be able actually to specify naturalistic necessary and sufficient conditions for the phenomenon in question. There have, of course, been many successes for effective naturalism: the movements of the planets, the origin of life, reproduction, the weather. No hint of the divine need now be recognized in these areas; the miraculous has given way to the mechanistic. But it seems to me to be a form of idealism to insist that every natural phenomenon should be subject to effective naturalism. For this is to assert, dogmatically, that human powers of theory construction are capable of comprehending everything there is: to be natural is to be naturalizable by us. We are the measure of nature’s naturalness. But there is, I should urge, no guarantee that our powers are thus omnicompetent—that nature is an open book for our eyes to read and our intellects to understand. There may be tales written in that book that we are just not equipped to grasp, however natural and non-miraculous the story being told.
    And this is where existential naturalism comes in: this is the thesis, metaphysical in character, that nothing that happens in nature is inherently anomalous, God-driven, an abrogation of basic laws—whether or not we can come to comprehend the processes at work. It is, I suppose, an article of metaphysical faith, though thus phrase should be stripped of its pejorative connotations.”

    (McGinn, Colin. The Problem of Consciousness: Essays Towards a Resolution. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. p. 87)

41. “Let me also be clear that in declaring matter to be a natural mystery, and mind not to be, I am not in any way retracting the ‘mysterian’ position with respect to consciousness. The nature of experience is not a mystery, if by that we are referring to human knowledge of what experience is (its identity, we might say). What is mysterious, according to me, is how consciousness relates to matter. Indeed, we can only appreciate this mystery if we already have a good idea of what consciousness intrinsically is: if we grasped it purely functionally, we would have no deep sense of mystery. So my view, in sum, is that matter is a mystery and the relation of matter to mind is a mystery, but mind is not itself a mystery (in the special sense intended here). Consciousness, I say, is a nonmysterious thing mysteriously related to a mystery.”

    (McGinn, Colin. “Two Types of Science.” In Basic Structures of Reality: Essays in Meta-Physics, 142-164. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. p. 157)

    1. When McGinn says that matter is a mystery, he means that its intrinsic nature is physically unknown. What are physically known or knowable are its functional and structural aspects. McGinn is an epistemological structuralist about the physical and physical knowledge.

       “Even the deeply or necessarily unknowable has an intrinsic nature as robustly as the most easily known of things: epistemology never dictates ontology. So I am as realist about electric charge as l am about conscious experience. lt is just that we are profoundly ignorant of physical reality, not that there is no reality to be ignorant of. My ‘structuralism’ is epistemological not ontological.”

       (McGinn, Colin. “Two Types of Science.” In Basic Structures of Reality: Essays in Meta-Physics, 142-164. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. p. 157)

       “I make no pretensions to originality in advocating the so-called ‘structuralist’ conception of physical knowledge. Who exactly originated this view is an interesting historical question, but traces of it can be found in Hertz and Poincare, and explicit statements abound in Russell and Eddington. Roughly speaking, it is the view that our knowledge of physics does not disclose the intrinsic nature of the entities postulated, but only their mathematically specified interrelations. The knowledge is ‘abstract’, leaving it an open question what physical reality is really like in itself. In other words, a deep ignorance lies at the heart of physics, despite its formal richness.”

       (McGinn, Colin. “Introduction: Philosophy and Physics.” In Basic Structures of Reality: Essays in Meta-Physics, 3-11. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. pp. 4-5)

42. That is all well and good, but what I really want Gutting to explain is how he fits a human into an egg?

    I’m just half joking, because after biology has done the heavy lifting of predicting development of organisms, then species, he puts his gods into the little gap of one insignificant trait? Insignificant, because it is likely a trait not even shared by all animals.

    Sigh!

    red

    So I thought the zombies (so to speak) of “qualia” would walk silently into their grave with the observation of rats acquiring new colors in their vision by adding the requisite genes for different opsins. If they can do it, we can.

    Silly me. Or silly philosophers.

    zombie

    Besides being unphysical, the system expresses consciousness so a sufficiently exact copy will do too, one can note that consciousness is a robust experience as presumably it evolved to be. Every second the template, our bodies, change with metabolism and sensory input. The “I” now isn’t the same as the “I” yesterday.

    Nor will it be tomorrow, yet I feel trust in predicting it will be there and have memories of how “I behave and experience. I also feel trust in predicting that most humans share the same trait, again thanks to evolution and our mutually agreeing observations.

    These are philosopher’s irrelevant problems, I dare say not problem of empiricists analyzing consciousness.

43. It’s also logically possible that we were all created yesterday by aliens or gods, with all our memories and a bogus history implanted by our creators, but I don’t see the need to devote time to that. I’m concerned with scientific probabilities, not logical possibilities.

    Sufficient of course, but it is also interesting to see how *very* unlikely last thursday creationism is.

    The observable universe can fluctuate into being according to quantum mechanics. (And immediately disappear again, preserving energies of the fields.) It is however a likelihood exponential on the number of components, so very, very, …, very much more unlikely than inflation, during comparable time periods.

    Now take that fluctuation and add another unlikely component, an agent responsible. Keep multiplying moments, remembering the instantaneous disappearance otherwise. This is what an agent theory would have to do, because just to instantiate the whole thing de novo (or “in vitro”, perhaps =) would likely be unstable as per above physics dynamics shows us.

    Now compare that really astronomically minuscule likelihood with the likelihood of the 5+ sigma observation of inflation we currently have.

    It is a “no contest”.

    1. The simulation hypothesis is an interesting foil to that argument, though. Suppose that, last Thursday, an human programmer in a universe very much resembling ours but from what from our perspective would seem to be a few centuries in our future created a simulation of her past.

       You can play with that a lot, too. Suppose the programmer isn’t human. Suppose the programmer is basically human but that physics is subtly different. Suppose that physics is radically different. An so on.

       And you can use a similar argument to the one commonly used to explain the Halting Problem to demonstrate why it’s impossible to rule out such possibilities. Then again, even if we are a simulation, those who are simulating us similarly can’t rule out the possibility that they’re a part of a super-simulation.

       But so what? The universe I find myself in, however real and / or simulated it may be, is far bigger and richer than I could ever hope to explore in depth. If I were to someday stumble on the fact that it’s even bigger still…well, that’s hardly different from the discovery that the Earth orbits the Sun, or that the Milky Way is itself a galaxy not unlike those faint smudges, is it?

       I mean, in the end, does it really matter just how big the Total Perspective Vortex actually is?

       Cheers,

       b&

       1. Maybe I don’t get the simulation idea.

          Any quantum experiment with enough resolution would distinguish between a simulation, because there would pop up a possibility of hidden variables (because that is what the simulation secretly does), or the real world.

          1. It might help if you put yourself more in the mind frame of Randi than of an honest scientist.

             The simulation could be actively monitoring your experiments and alter your observational equipment to report whatever it wants you to see. Or you could be the proverbial brain in a vat, or even just an isolated computer simulation of a brain in a vat. Or Alice’s Red King’s dream of a computer simulation of a brain in a vat.

             In short, let your paranoia run full wild…and, yes. It’s possible, and, per the Halting Problem, there’s no way to disprove it.

             There’s also no point in worrying about such things. If “they” have that much power over you, there’s nothing you’re ever going to do to “them”…you don’t even register on “their” radar. So you might as well enjoy the ride and go along with the gag.

             And, if you really are the paranoid type and think that such fantasies are not merely disprovable but actually plausible…well, you can at least take comfort in the fact that “they” also are incapable of proving that “they” “themselves” aren’t also being simulated by even more super-duper over-whatevers.

             Cheers,

             b&

44. @J. Coyne: I’m sorry for the length of some of my comments here. But the quotations are very relevant. Nevertheless, I’ll try to keep them as short as possible in the future.

    1. And I’m not going to post any further quotations in this thread.

       1. Can I quote you on that? 😉

45. … physicalism: the idea that, at bottom, there’s a physical explanation for all phenomena in the universe. In this case, the phenomenon that supposedly defies physical explanation is consciousness. (This, of course, is also an argument of many religious people.)

    Deep waters.

    I’m going to chime in with what I think is the critical distinction between naturalism and supernaturalism and thus the crux of the issue here: naturalism is the view that no causes of events in the natural world are irreducibly mental; supernaturalism denies this. In a natural universe everything mental (mind, consciousness, awareness, thought, emotion, experience, evaluation, value, morals, goals, ideals, intelligence and intention) is eventually reducible to and dependent on matter and energy in motion.

    In a supernatural universe, at least one thing is not. Mind does not come from matter: matter came from Mind.

    Guttings seems to be dancing around in the God of the Gaps area where the confusing relationship between consciousness and the brain allows people to intuit that consciousness could exist WITHOUT a brain. Good luck pushing that one without specific evidence that way. You have to do your work and drag out the weak and pathetic evidence of NDE’s or parapsychology. You’re not going to win this by encouraging people to shove god into the gaps of ignorance and call doing this “philosophy.”

    Theists do not want the existence of God evaluated like a hypothesis because you’re supposed to think of God as simultaneously being like something subjectively mental (a thought) and something objectively real (it doesn’t depend on thought.) We don’t approach mental-things as if they were objects: we experience, we relate, we feel them subjectively. So if we set up the category this way then it’s just fine to say that we know God exists because we had a mystical experience of God … just the same way we can say we know love exists because we experience love. Except God is like a philosophical version of Cupid.

    I think all supernaturalism (woo) comes down to this deep confusion between the inner world of thought and feeling and the outer world of object and event. It just feels as if our thoughts exist nowhere and could keep on going even if our brains fell out. Appeals to intuition are going to falter on the shores of science. The person having an internal experience is not necessarily the best (or only) person who can interpret that experience properly.

    1. This is very very good! Cogent and effective piece!

       1. As so often. Remind me, Sastra, what’s your day job?

          /@

46. “This doesn’t explain the source of that feeling, but it’s entirely possible that agency is a confabulation installed in us by evolution to help make sense post facto of what we do, or relate our experiences to others.”

    In the sense that an agent is indeed responsible and the owner of its actions as opposed to being merely manipulated against its goal by other agents seeking to further their goals, then the feeling or consciousness of agency is not a confabulation but an accurate picture evolution has given us of the way we interact and compete with others. Just as there must not be ultimately a mystery to consciousness, so there is no mystery to free will. This non-mysterious free will is simply the freedom from coercion by another agent, an obvious meaning we already know from the everyday usage of the term as in “did you sign the contract of your own free will”.

47. Indisputably there’s a physical substrate, but isn’t it gob-smackingly obvious that what we refer to as consciousness emerges from “software” running on top of the wetware? I’m mystified that this simple conclusion seems to be overlooked by both the philosophers and some of the hard neuro-anatomists.

    It’s as if they are standing around a half-disassembled iPhone proclaiming that, any day now, they will explain why those angry birds are so angry — either from first principles of Plato or from reverse-engineering the electronics architecture.

    1. You have to think carefully what you mean by “running on top of”. Of course this has a natural meaning in the context of using computers because you can copy, install, and remove software.

       But this view implies a kind of dualism between hardware and software.

       When software “runs” it isn’t really “on top of” the hardware. It becomes fundamentally integrated into the physical machine as a pattern of electrical impulses propagating through its circuitry. It happens to be a property of the machine that it can absorb or consume different software images to reconfigure its internal state. The brain has no such property, except for its plasticity that enables it to learn and remember by forming new neural connections. But this isn’t analogous to taking on a whole new program or personality. It is incremental extension.

       So I think this hardware/software analogy for brain/consciousness isn’t really apt, and is more confusing than helpful.

       What’s really not obvious is how the brain gives rise to self-awareness and subjective experience like color, pleasure, pain, and taste. I think exactly because it is not obvious, people are prone to inventing dualist non-explanations, as Gutting is playing at here.

       1. You raise an excellent point.

          It is superbly practical to think of there being a distinction between hardware and software. And, yet, all the information and data processing that happens on the computer is nothing more than special arrangements of atoms and collections of electromagnetic charges and movements of said atoms and electromagnetic charges.

          That is, when a computer program flips a bit from 0 to 1, a programmer thinks of it in terms of information state changing. But it just means that there’s a particular microscopic part of some piece of silicon that now has more than a certain number of electrons occupying that space than before.

          Similar changes happen in organic brains as they observe and process information, but it tends to be a lot messier and more complex.

          There’s also a practical consideration…is any computational device capable of truly understanding itself or anything of similar complexity? Ultimately, practically, I’m sure we’ll have to settle for a simplified explanation of consciousness. That’s okay…I’m equally confident that such simplified explanation will still be quite useful. If it’s any consolation, our successors might fully understand us…but they won’t be able to fully understand themselves….

          Cheers,

          b&

48. The much-pummeled word> consciousness!

    I cannot understand how any discussion of “consciousness” can proceed without talking about memory. It’s similar to setting up scenarios about a ‘rowboat’ and how it splits the water with its bow, and leaves a wake just so, depending on the speed, etc. etc., and yet not ONCE discussing the oars, and how one rows, and if the rower is large, small, experienced, 100% inexperienced, u.s.w.

    This short elegant description of memory is from a National Geographic article

    http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2007/11/memory/foer-text

    “What is a memory? The best that neuroscientists can do for the moment is this: A memory is a stored pattern of connections between neurons in the brain. There are about a hundred billion of those neurons, each of which can make perhaps 5,000 to 10,000 synaptic connections with other neurons, which makes a total of about five hundred trillion to a thousand trillion synapses in the average adult brain. By comparison there are only about 32 trillion bytes of information in the entire Library of Congress’s print collection. Every sensation we remember, every thought we think, alters the connections within that vast network. Synapses are strengthened or weakened or formed anew. Our physical substance changes. Indeed, it is always changing, every moment, even as we sleep.”

    Within this definition is where the philospher’s composition of thought experiments fall short. How does one characterize “a trillion”? In fact, “a billion”? Numbers that large are beyond our comprehension. Like water droplets on wax paper agglomerating and forming a very large water body, our neolithic mental processes are most successful when they use numbers between 1 and 100 (in fact, some discovered “lost tribes” don’t count past ten or so.) Memory is extremely complex, with many levels (e.g. working memory, semantic memory, etc) and the preferred term (by me) for human consciousness,

    awareness

    requires a huge fraction of memory, same as paint requires both a pigment and a medium, or you don’t have “paint”.

    1. I was thinking along similar lines: the philosophers who seem incredulous that consciousness might originate fully from the physical brain seem to forget how incredibly many neurons and synapses there are in the brain.

       It’s analogous to the problems people have accepting evolution, not understanding “deep time”.

       We have “deep brains”.

       /@

       1. Very good, the both of you. “Deep brains”. I think I’m going to use that.

          On a sour note, on revisiting Dennett’s TED talk that he gave… uh, er… ten years ago… the comments are flooded with pissed-off en-woo-theists, moaning about Rupert “Pupkin” Sheldrake’s ouster to the hinterlands by a bunch of close-minded militant atheists.

          What led me there was contrasting Chalmers’ take on the situation with Dennett’s. And then surmising that it’s only a matter of time before someone else starts equating one unknown with another to make an ultra-funky deepity. A darkity. Coming to a philosophy department near you.

49. Poor Mary. Despite her wondrous operation, and new-found ability to see red, she will never see infrared, ultraviolet, or light polarization like mantis shrimp do. Therefore, mantis shrimp have far more ‘subjective experience’ than Mary and are superior to her; and to all human beings.

50. The mysterian speculation that humans can in principle *never* understand consciousness …just ‘because we are conscious’ or just ‘because we are human’ seems perniciously circular and poorly motivated. How does such speculation advance the investigation except to attempt to declare it potentially out of reach, unless to replace some disappointed longing for a trivial explanation?

    I note also that mysterianism loses any remaining relevance to the universe we live in when further evolution of humans and other species in the future is considered — “never” is a very, very long time.

    Would there be any more or less evidence for the proposal that belief in mysterianism itself is incompatible with any deep understanding of consciousness, one wonders.

    1. I agree 100%. I might also add that “mysterianism” begins with a desired end-notion (that is, immortality of the self) and works backwards into our everyday reality. It is necessary to introduce “we can never understand” and “It’s a mystery” into the argument in order to bridge the huge gap in the philosophy.

51. On Mary and color, it seems to me the answer is that Mary doesn’t really know all facts about color, that actually her perception of red it one of the facts she didn’t know.

    It’s easy to say Mary knew all the facts about color, which is based on an assumption – that a seemingly thorough knowledge of the physics of color would provide a complete understanding of all color phenomena. But it isn’t true. Unless her “complete” understanding of color physics included all knowledge of all possible images from all possible perspectives of all possible things — and if she had that Mary would understand the perception “red.” Mary would have to know A LOT.

52. Gutting unwittingly reveals the limits of his knowledge by choosing red as his example of a color. Red is the most concisely identified of the four “singular” colors. Most subjects pick a pure red from a narrow range of samples whereas there is far less agreement among subjects about which sample is a pure green or a pure blue. So by choosing red as his example he advocates for the primacy of the physicalist’s explanation. Philosophers love color as an example of a qualia or purely subjective experience often pondering Mary’s problem and the question of spectral inversion which asks, “if you could see my subjective experience of red would you describe what you saw as blue or some other color” but neurobiology has severely constrained the use of color as an example of an undetectable subjective experience locked in the black box of consciousness.

    C.L. Hardin did a thorough take down of the spectral inversion problem parts of which is contained in his article “Reinverting the Spectrum” – anthologized in a number of books.

    Margaret Livingstone wrote a wonderful book based on her and David Hubel’s work

    “Vision and Art: the Biology of Seeing”

    All colors are not the same. They are warm and cold, lighter at there most intense or darker, singular and mixed. The biology of seeing takes you from light emanations striking pigments in rods and cones and being first converted to electrical impulse and mixed and added in various ways even before being processed in the cerebral vision centers. Colors are not recieved as full blown as colors but as neural stimulation. They are intimately entwined with our neural makeup.

    1. I think any competent color scientist would be able to quickly and easily demolish the notion of colorful qualia. There’ve been so many experiments done and the visual system is so well understood…there’s just not any room left for doubt. Shine a light of such-and-such spectral composition on the eye, and these photoreceptor cells create nerve impulses in such-and-such a way (with the expected statistical variation between individuals) which gets sent to this-and-that portion of the brain which continues to react in a very predictable manner.

       I don’t think there’s any doubt, either, that if you were to interrupt the process at different points the results would be as expected. That is, sever the optic nerve, weld tiny little wires to the brain-attached ends, and re-create the signals produced by different colors, and the victim will see those colors. Implant electrodes deep in the visual cortex to do the same sort of thing, and you’ll get the same results.

       Qualia are really as outdated a concept as spirits and phlogiston.

       Cheers,

       b&

       1. To demolish the idea that there are colourful qualia, you’d have to prove that we don’t actually experience colours. Good luck with that one.

          The things you list are not problems for either qualia freaks or dualists (I happen to be both). For qualia freaks, there generally is and certainly can very well be an acceptance that qualia is the result of all of those physical and brain events that you talk about, but that having those brain events, for example, is not what it MEANS to experience qualia. For dualists, all interactionist dualists will accept every single thing you say here, because brain and mind interact and we do get our experiences from those visual events, but that there are other issues that make it just being brain operation problematic (epiphenomenalism is my big concern).

          And even dualists of the substance form — of which I’m technically one — can accept that depending on what is meant by physical, the mind is physical while still denying that it is just the brain.

          1. It is impossible to prove qualia don’t exist or that they are somehow inseperable from physical events just as it is impossible to prove that though god may not have created man 6,000 years ago he did somehow will everything into existence so that man could evolve from his immutable laws he set in motion.

             Neuroscience has merely been able to demolish every special claim of dualism. A high percentage of people choose red as their example of color because it is the most tangible color and it is the most tangible color for demonstrable physical reasons having to do with the makeup of receptors, neural processing and the nature of the visible spectrum itself. Red feels like a qualia but behaves like a physical event.

             In the end you’re left with a qualia of the gaps and it becomes a good bet that qualia will go the way of vitalism.

    2. Magenta.

       /@

    3. Tsoj. (PDF here) I’d say that our neural makeup is intimately informed by our use of language, as is evidenced by the color “maps” that we collected out in Chiapas.

       1. A bit more properly restated from what I just said above… our USE of colours and colour concepts (through language, culture and sometimes physical embodiment), is integral to the construction of our memories of it… the construction and canalization of our neural networks — subsequently affecting our perceptions of it.

          I am reminded of an exercise where Chamula Tzotzil-speaking Mayans were allowed to pick from differently-hued color chips to find the one they considered to be the “most red” (tsoj). …the best example of what they would consider to be tsoj. The result is that they would usually look at the questioner like the questioner was out of their mind. They would keep pointing to a portion of the huipil’s they were wearing and would wave away attempts to decide among the color chips they were shown, because apparently, the chips were inadequate for the task. We, as researchers, were making a category error in their eyes. They were looking at us like we were dumb as nails.

          The ‘tsoj’ they were thinking of wasn’t some rarefied abstraction, the way we tend to think of color. It had significance of terrestrial direction, religious-familial identity, and fashion – which were embodied in the weavings they made and wore. ‘tsoj’ was more than an adjective… it was still more of a verb/adverb concept – on its way through becoming a noun and on to finally becoming an adjective. As a result, we had to test people two ways – using color chips AND using threads themselves. It made for quite a challenge.

53. Both these thought experiments rely on the very hopeful delusion that any logical possibility we can conceive of must be real in some way. This is the same problem that plagues the ontological argument for the existence of god.

    In the case of Mary, the conclusion that Mary learns something new violates the premise. This doesn’t prove that there is some non-physical aspect to consciousness. It proves the initial premise was not true, and rigged to help confirm a preexisting bias and wishful thinking.

    The zombie case equivocates on the meaning of “physically identical”. It doesn’t adequately define what that means, and it simply presumes the possibility that a physically identical being might not have consciousness. Really absurd.

    If two cars were “physically identical”, but one runs and the other doesn’t, we know right away what the problem is: they aren’t truly physically identical.

    This confusion of logical possibility with reality and existence is the confusion of the subjective and the objective. It’s as silly as confusing water and fire. They aren’t the same, but they are both physical. We should call this confusion the “Philosopher’s Delusion”, which infects religious thinking as well.

    The You Tube channel Qualia Soup has an excellent pair of videos on Substance Dualism that are well worth watching.

54. I never understood why Mary’s Room is supposed to support non-physicalism. Of course Mary “learns” a new “fact” about the color red – she learns what it looks like from her brain’s perspective when it receives stimuli from the retina. I don’t see how that poses any kind of problem for physicalism.

    1. This is basically Paul Churchland’s answer – that on perfectly “physicalist” (better, materialist) premisses, the difference between various sorts of knowledge is well understood.

    2. The question is, is there any fact about ‘red’ that mary couldn’t learn without actually seeing red? If yes, then some suppose that there’s something non-physical about conciousness. Why /can’t/ she learn from books what it’s like for /her/ mind to see red?

       1. The question is, is there any fact about ‘red’ that mary couldn’t learn without actually seeing red? If yes, then some suppose that there’s something non-physical about conciousness.

          What I don’t understand is how the second sentence follows from the first. Why does personal experience suggest anything non-physical? We know the mechanisms involved in personal experience are physical – the rods in the retina reacting to light in certain wavelengths are physical, as are the signals traveling along the optic nerve to the visual cortex. On what grounds do they supposes there’s something non-physical involved?

          I can’t know how a particular beer tastes until I taste it, but that doesn’t suggest there’s anything non-physical about taste, it just suggests that my taste buds and olfactory sensors are connected to my brain, which we already knew.

          1. Presumably this is an attempt at the form “proof by contradiction”. Mary is supposed to know all physical facts, yet an operation shows her new facts, therefore the new facts aren’t physical.

             It’s full of holes as you note. The premise states something ill-defined: “knowing all physical facts about color”. Therefore we can’t rely on the apparent contradiction in the conclusion to tell us anything true.

55. Mary has not learned any new facts about red. She has been able to see red things all her life but it wasn’t the same way other people see red. It’s not as if red things were invisible to Mary. The only difference is what red looks like to her. I would be mildly impressed if everyone processed shades of color exactly the same, but we don’t. If this counts as a new fact about color, then you would learn new facts about color every time you put on tinted glasses.

    1. True, the red “things” were not invisible to Mary. I will tell you however that a male friend of mine says he cannot pick strawberries because he is totally red/green colorblind and cannot see the fruit amongst the leaves.

       And, artists/painters are aware that the color red draws the eye first. So, many painters paint as the purest red the part of the painting (lady in dress, or flower or whatever) that they want your eye to go to first. Then other parts of the painting that also are meant to be perceived as red are “toned down” with a little bit of the complementary color which is green (the colors are mixed together). A painter can make a given value of red look less vibrant or more vibrant (i.e., not attract your eye as much, or attract your eye more) just by deciding what color to surround it with. Adjacent colors are relative to each other, and affect how each is perceived.
       You could not see any of that relationship in black and white, and your eye would not be drawn to a red rose in black and white as much as it would be drawn to it when it is red.

       I apologize if this has nothing to do with the concept you are referring to.

       I also wish the general discussion would consider the sense of emotion that red brings forth. Maybe that falls into the physical things Mary already knows…I am not any sort of philosopher so have stayed out of this discussion. I’m woefully inadequate on this subject.

       1. You did get my point, and expressed it quite well. It is that Mary and your friend can both see red, but not as everyone else sees red, I don’t see hues of red the same as my wife but that doesn’t change any facts about the color red. As for drawing the eye to red or other colors in photographs and painting, I’ve also seen beautiful black and white photographs of roses that were much more vibrant and evocative than color photographs. I believe that has to do with the contrast of hue rather than properties of specific colors.

56. Regarding the adequacy of physicalism, there’s a very useful recent exchange between Owen Flanagan (physicalist) and Evan Thompson (neutral monist), video at http://video.at.northwestern.edu/2013/03-04_CogSci/CogSci_03-04-13.P2G/NewStandardPlayer.html?plugin=Silverlight

    Here are the abstracts:

    Understanding Consciousness: Is Physicalism Enough?

    Thompson’s Position: The scientific method gives us no direct and independent access to consciousness itself–no direct access, because third-person observations are always of the behavioral and physiological expressions of consciousness, not consciousness itself; and no independent access because the scientific method itself presupposes consciousness, so we must unavoidably use consciousness to study consciousness. Full recognition of this situation demands that the neuroscience of consciousness include an ineliminable phenomenological component. Some of the phenomenological resources for such a “neurophenomenology” of consciousness can be found in Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist contemplative methods of training the mind.

    Flanagan’s Position: Subjective realism is the view that the hard problem of consciousness is psychological and epistemological, not metaphysical. Conscious mental states are physical states that have an epistemically irreducible phenomenological or experiential character. The subjective realist acknowledges that providing a first-person phenomenology is a burden for a full theory of the conscious mind, and like the anti-physicalist has things to say about the rules for doing good phenomenology. The worry about many Buddhist methods of mind-training is that they are too theory-laden to deliver the kind of neutral, pure phenomenology needed by the science of the mind.

57. I wonder how it is to take the Mary’s Room argument now that Jackson has come to agree that it’s wrong. What I find interesting is that the argument was initially an argument for epiphenomenalism, but proponents (at least many I’ve read – being a layman has its drawbacks) seem to take it as an argument for the duality of mind and body.

    As for zombies, I’m really not sure how one can really take that argument seriously. Perhaps it is logically possible, but it’s hard to see how it doesn’t fall afoul of the epiphenomenalist reply – after all, the very concept of zombies requires that zombies can articulate the concept of zombies without having any understanding of zombies. I just can’t conceive of that!

58. Late to the party, but as many people have pointed out above this is desperately poor stuff, even worse than the fat man/trolley problem.

    Both just seem to be yet more bait and switch using the ambiguity of language.

    The Mary/red problem is based on the ambiguity in the phrase “knows all the physical facts about colour”.

    The zombie problem is based on the ambiguity in the phrase “logically possible”.

    Which is nicely ironic.

59. One vital ingredient being missed here: near-death experiences, especially those where people accurately report operating procedures and events beyond the operating room. This is now getting increasingly more attention from university researchers.

    1. “especially those where people accurately report operating procedures and events beyond the operating room. This is now getting increasingly more attention from university researchers.”
       So what positive findings have come out so far about this? I’ve seen a lot of anecdotes, but what experimental evidence has shown that people are consciously perceiving without the use of their sensory organs? Do you have any papers you could link?

       1. “what positive findings have come out so far about this?”

          1. CO2, O2 and other chemical effects not a factor. Physiological effects not a factor.

          2. Expectation not a factor as reports pre-1975 (i.e. Dr. Ray Moody’s pioneering work)are the same and indeed go back over centuries.

          3. Using cardiac arrest as a model (well monitored, drugs, EEG meas…) a person is dead. So 10 seconds after arrest the brain flatlines. But people are still having experiences often tremendous clarity. With what? – brain not functioning.

          4. Veridical experiences –> brain does not equal mind.

          5. Once cultural factors of the experience are taken note of – same common features, meeting dead relatives, encounter with beings and often a light form, point of no return, powerful life review.

          1. So 10 seconds after arrest the brain flatlines. But people are still having experiences often tremendous clarity.

             How do you determine that they are having those experiences during the time the brain is flatlined?

             1. *So 10 seconds after arrest the brain flatlines. But people are still having experiences often tremendous clarity.*

                “How do you determine that they are having those experiences during the time the brain is flatlined”

                Good point. Sometimes veridical time anchors, reporting of operation room events which when looked back on occurred during flatlining.

          2. And I hope your claim about veridical experiences is better supported than the last time you made it. Reporting seeing a shoe on a windowsill that is in plain view from the hospital parking lot doesn’t count.

          3. How does any of that empirically show that it’s not a construct of the brain? Again, papers please.

          4. For example: “4. Veridical experiences –> brain does not equal mind.”
             What experiments have shown that a veridical experience has taken place where the brain wasn’t involved? Can you give a rundown through the methodologies used, and what the experimental outcomes where that one could be confident that sensory organs were not involved?

    2. Scientific tests if these NDEs, putting stuff on operating room or hospital room ceilings and asking the “floating souls” to identify them, have proven complete failures.

       There are experiences people have when they’re in extremis, probably due to physiological shutdowns or the like, but they sure as hell don’t have a soul that floats up in the air and observes everthing from above!

       1. Here’s an interesting paper by Thomas Metzinger:
          “Out-of-Body Experiences as the Origin of the Concept of a ‘Soul'”
          http://www.philosophie.uni-mainz.de/metzinger/publikationen/OBE_M&M_2005.pdf

       2. “There are experiences people have when they’re in extremis, probably due to physiological shutdowns or the like, but they sure as hell don’t have a soul that floats up in the air and observes everthing from above!”
          Furthermore, if our souls can see without needing any of the physical apparatuses, then why do we need them normally? After all, eyes are prone to damage and brains can be injured – if we can bypass all that and have that same sensory input, then why did evolution waste so much time and energy building it?

    3. I call bull. What universities are doing NDE research? I found some information form Dr. Greyson and Kenneth Ring, but they haven’t done any research, they’ve only repeated anecdotes.

       1. For ethical reasons, it would be unacceptable to do controlled NDE experiments on patients. The closest thing to a controlled experiment was placing cards or screens in emergency rooms so that they are visible only from above. Sam Parnia is behind that one.
          .
          You are right in that a collection of anecdotes is not a controlled scientific experiment, even if the person collecting the anecdotes is a scientist.

          1. Perhaps unsurprisingly, such experiments have been done and patients who have had a near-death experience have universally failed to identify the hidden items.

             And, no, the items haven’t been impossibly hidden. They’ve been along the lines of something you couldn’t possibly miss placed atop the hanging light right over the patient, such that anybody who “ascended” above the table and the light and looked back at the body on the table couldn’t help but notice whatever-it-was.

             Cheers,

             b&

    4. “This is now getting increasingly more attention from university researchers.”

       Claim in need of reference.

    5. This has nothing to do with it, the authors above are arguing that consciousness itself is incorporeal, but not that it’s ‘everlasting’ and free, they’re talking about the ordinary consciousness mind, not the spirit or soul. They’re looking at consciousness as something like an emergent-property of the physical human mind, not as a supernatural phenomenon.

60. Gutting’s arguement seems to, weirdly, considering that he’s a philosopher, miss the point of these philosophical arguements. The point of Mary’s Room is not that Mary learns something new, and therefore there’s a non-physical reality, but rather Mary’s room provides the basis for a debate about that very issue. He’s simply assuming one of the major interpretations of Mary’s room as being correct.

    On Zombie-world, my understanding is that IF it’s conceivable that you could have a perfectly simulated person, and IF that simulacra of yourself has no “Real Experience”, then there’s a helluva problem with your idea of a ‘real exeperience’, since it makes absolutely no difference in the simulation and is undetectable.

    The other though experiment associated with these two is “The Chinese Room”, in which a person receives notes written in chinese slipped underneath a door, and uses a computeer that tells him how to draw/write out the proper response, in chinese. The person in the Chinese room obviously doesn’t understand the conversation, sort-of like the Zombies don’t ‘really experience’ anything, or like how Mary just doesn’t ‘get’ color.
    These all really just beg the question of what it means to be conscious (and I beleive that’s a correct use of ‘begging the question eh?).

    Also, for a moment I thought “Mary and the Zombie” was going to be a religiously themed story, with Mother Mary and Jesus as the (resurected) Zombie.

    1. “These all really just beg the question of what it means to be conscious”
       The Chinese Room, I thought, wasn’t meant to explain what it meant to be conscious; only that the functionalist account – that rested on an analogy between what our minds do and what a computer does – was lacking. The argument that Elizabeth of Bohemia’s response to Descartes didn’t explain what consciousness is, but argued why Descartes conception of mind was lacking a key component.

61. I thought zombies, philosophically speaking, were thoroughly ‘debunked’ anyway. At least that is what I recall from reading Dennett & Hofstadter.

    The Mary’s Room argument is very flimsy in my opinion for two obvious reasons (maybe I’m naive).
    One is that you can replace ‘red’ with pretty much every concept. I can read everything there is to know about marriage, but until I get married myself, etc. Or I can read the technical manual of a car plus learn all the rules of the road, but until I drive a car myself, etc. This is all trivially true; it also shows that the whole ‘sight-restoring operation’ in the story is irrelevant – a conjurer’s smoke and mirrors.

    This shows that any experience of X cannot be replaced by knowing ‘every fact’ about X. It seems to me also trivially true that normal experience is part of our physical brain, given that we forget ‘experiences’ under the influence of drugs, or brain lesions, or lack of practise.

    Secondly,I think, the argument is flawed because of the (logically wrong) leap that if a person ‘knows’ everything about concept x, then (somehow) all the relevant neurological pathways are activated. Therefore the experience (or ‘fact’) must by necessity fall outside these neurological pathways, and thus outside the material brain. Surely this is demonstrably wrong – even with our current limited scanning techniques.

    1. Dennett has been arguing against zombies for years; the consensus in the literature seems to be that there is (as ususal) no consensus on whether or not he’s right.

       (I think Churchland’s diagnosis is the best one for the lay reader, though.)

62. Maybe another – quite elegant if I may say so myself – refutation of Mary’s room argument is that the ‘sight-restoring operation’ itself adds (by definition) neurological pathways to the brain.

    These are, trivially, material and have, equally trivially, never been used by Mary before and therefore it should come as no surprise that she experiences something new after the blindfold is taken off.

    1. Ding! This is what I was going to say.

       Of course she is now possible of gaining new physical knowledge about the color red – that capability came to her via the physical surgery that she underwent to “fix” her vision.

       What if Mary is a mutant who was born with the ability to see the infrared spectrum as well as the visible spectrum. Does that mean that Mary has some non-physical knowledge about the world that we don’t have? Or does that mean that Mary has some additional receptors and processing equipment in her nervous system to allow her to process the information about the world differently than we do?

       The knowledge is there – it’s just the sensory equipment that is different. Hell bats can track things via sonar and we can’t – does that mean that a bat’s sonar ability is based on some non-physical knowledge about sound? Or does it mean that the configuration of the bat’s sound producing/receiving/analyzing equipment is physically configured in a way that provides a different analysis than what we can do with our equipment? It’s pretty clearly the latter – that’s why we don’t have sonar. And it’s the same with Mary.

63. >So in an alternative universe, there could (logically) be a being physically identical to me but with no experiences: my zombie-twin.

    *So in an alternative universe, there could (logically) be a fire physically identical to the fire in my barbecue but with no heat: my heatless barbecue-twin.*

    I don’t know. Maybe.

    How?

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