
Zombies Must Be Dualists: Zombies and Our Philosophy of Mind - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/37/currents/zombies-must-be-dualists
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putzdown
I think the author is confusing two different issues: the problem of
disproving solipsism and the problem of proving or disproving dualism. It is
not true that we must think of zombies as being absolutely identical to "real
people" in order for them to be useful in thinking about dualism. They do not
have to do exactly what real people do in a given situation. For example, a
civilization of zombies might have speech, might even have philosophy, but
would probably not talk about consciousness in any form. The author is right
that you can't think of zombies as acting exactly the same as the
corresponding human and yet not being conscious, because consciousness is
surely a cause as well as an effect (else we wouldn't talk about it, for
example). He's wrong that you need to think of them that way in order to bear
fruit for dualism.

I can postulate a universe in which my molecules and everyone else's have been
precisely duplicated from this universe in physical terms. I can postulate
that in that universe there is no such thing as conscious experience; no
qualia or whatnot. I can imagine that universe continuing from the moment of
duplication onward, proceeding as dictated by the laws of physics. My
duplicate in that universe would probably not act exactly as I will, but will
certainly act in some way.

Simply the act of postulating, of conceiving, of that kind of zombie universe
is enough to strongly suggest that consciousness is something outside of the
physical. The zombie universe doesn't have to be identical in behavior, only
identical physically. Because what you've now done is to recognize that a
universe in which physical objects and laws are the only elements is a
universe in which mental (experiential) phenomena are unaccounted for. You can
imagine that those mental phenomena magically, mysteriously re-emerge from the
physical, but have given absolutely no reason why they should. Therefore you
can equally imagine that they _don 't_ re-emerge. So whether zombies behave
identically with real people or are merely constituted identically with real
people, their conceived existence is enough to show that the mental
universe—so to speak—is conceptually detached from the physical and therefore
a separate domain.

~~~
Almaviva
Rationally I feel like we have to accept a Daniel Dennett view: with what we
know about the brain, all human behaviour is consistent with the laws of
physics, and changing the brain very much changes "what it's like" to be - it
doesn't take very many experiences with drugs, even alcohol, to realize this.
Consciousness, then, has no explanatory power whatsoever. A lot of people
argue at this point, but they have nothing substantial to stand on. Maybe they
just want to believe that Free Will is something special.

However, I think the Hard Problem is a knot that can never go away. I notice
physicists are willing to explain much of the properties of the universe (like
time having a direction) just by saying there was a very specific initial
condition, a very low entropy state that (by definition) is extraordinarily
unlikely. So what about saying there's another constraint on conditions of the
universe, where we have physical laws that create consciousness. Is this just
an anthropic principle of some sort?

I was listening to Sean Carroll's "The Big Picture" audiobook. He argues that
I can't really be sure I'm not a p-zombie. But I think I can: I'm with
Descartes on this one - it's the one thing I actually _can_ be sure of. I'm
sure I have an inner experience (that explains nothing scientifically to
anyone else) but I can easily imagine not having it, with no change to the
laws of physics.

Does anyone know of a good read that isn't full of jargon that fleshes out
these ideas some more?

~~~
mcguire
Did Dennett back off from his intentional stance? Consciousness seems
important to explain and predict behavior in practice.

~~~
Almaviva
I wasn't clear, it's vitally important to predict behaviour in practice at a
poetic naturalism level, but there seems to be no reason to adopt strong
emergence: consciousness doesn't introduce any new explanatory power that
couldn't, in principle, be explained by physics, or even chemistry, biology
and so forth.

See Dennett's interview with Bob Wright starting at about 30 minutes:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss0aCWpNzSM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss0aCWpNzSM)

I'm just not ready to stop there, despite this all being true, I think it
seems not parsimonious to believe there is nothing fundamentally mysterious
about how I feel like something subjectively.

~~~
mcguire
It's been a while, but...

Biology doesn't introduce any explanatory power that couldn't, in principle,
be done by chemistry. Likewise, chemistry and physics. But they ain't nobody
as is gonna work out the mating behavior of tree frogs from quantum mechanical
first principles. That was, I thought, the point of the intentional stance: if
you assume consciousness, you get a good model to understand behavior; if you
don't, you may, in principle, be able to get a good model but you have a much
greater distance to go.

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shkkmo
I've long been what the author calls as "poetic naturalist" simply due to the
argument that if we are talking about qualia, then qualia must have an effect
on the physical world.

If there are elements of consciousness that are completely separate from the
physical world (in that they have no effect on it), we cannot talk about them,
nor even think about them.

I do find that trying to conceptualize p-zombies is a useful tool try to pull
apart the strength of the effects of these qualia.

To take let's say we somehow duplicate the universe at the very instant I
started writing this post, but with the potential for qualia removed. Since my
brain had already done the processing, I would continue to write about an
experience I would no longer have. I suspect everyone would continue to talk
about qualia for quite a long time.

However, if the potential for qualia were removed prior to the formation of
the earth, I think we have to image we would not be talking about it now.
(Because otherwise we are talking about nothing.) I personally suspect that
things would have developed very differently and the human race would have
been far less successful.

My suspect that we tend to over attribute consciousness to others and to
ourselves. I suspect we spend a fair amount of our lives in p-zombie mode and
then project the experience of consciousness backwards onto our memories of
those time.

~~~
Almaviva
> If there are elements of consciousness that are completely separate from the
> physical world (in that they have no effect on it), we cannot talk about
> them, nor even think about them.

Yet here we are, doing both, talking as well as thinking, right? If I talk
about a universe where you'd never "woken up" as a subjective individual, and
the present time was just like (to both of us) the previous 13.7 billion
years, you know exactly the concept I mean, whether it's expressible in terms
that have meaning beyond a single reader who knows (in the Cartesian sense)
that their (subjective) existence is something special that only they can
observe.

~~~
shkkmo
My speaking about my cartesian knowledge of my own subject experience is proof
(to me) that my subject experience has physical effects.

If there are any properties that do not have physical effects, that makes them
unspeakable, unknowable, and unthinkable. We can have a conceptual category
for these properties, but we can't place anything in that category, not even
from our own subjective experiences.

Type A Categories (that we can place things in):

Physical Causes & Effects: Our reality.

No Physical Causes but Physical Effect: True randomness

Type B Categories (that we can talk about but not place anything in):

Physical Causes but no Physical Effects: The Afterlife, The Future, Non-
physical Elements of Consciousness

Neither Physical Causes nor Physical Effects: Completely separate realities

If we say that anything from Type B categories exists, then existence becomes
a meaninglessly broad category. We can be wrong about whether something is
Type B (say if we discover time travel), but nothing that is Type B exists.

------
freshhawk
A very useful link for more on this subject is at the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy[1], which is a fantastic resource for overviews of philosophical
subjects.

[1]
[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/)

------
js8
Ahh, qualia is such an useless concept!

Here I am, a philosophical zombie. I don't have any subjective experiences, as
far as I can tell. I challenge anybody to show that I am not!

