Beyond the issue of appealing to our intuitions, which you noted, I immediately noticed another problem with the "zombie argument".
The assumption that an universe can be physically identical to ours and yet have "zombies" for conscious humans is logically equivalent to the assumption that physicalism is false. This is a problem because it is invoked in the argument. If physicalism is false in a metaphysically possible universe, then that universe can exhibit entities appearing to have consciousness outwardly whilst being zombies, and there can be another universe only physically identical to it but with consciousness (explained by other factors) - conversely, if there is such a "zombie universe" which is physically identical to a "non-zombie universe", then physicalism is false (since consciousness is present in one and absent in another in spite of the physical identity). This effectively renders the argument as "Physicalism is false. Therefore, physicalism is false".
I've always found the zombie argument intuitively strange because to me it seems clear zombies are not conceivable. Saying "I can imagine zombies" is saying "I can imagine the universe being literally identical except somehow something about it is inexplicably different". That doesn't make sense, and someone's confused. To me that indicates the question itself is misframed and is taking consciousness to be something it isn't.
But even if we indulge the question, I'd challenge the conceivability part. One reason zombies seem conceivable is that we don't have a full causal understanding of consciousness, so the conceivability sneaks in through the question-marks in the theory. Another reason is because people are bad at imagining things and determining what it means to "be able to conceive something" fully. For example, if I said "imagine a zombie jet plane built identical to a normal jet plane, with all its parts in working order down the smallest gear, screw, and atom. The only difference is that in this universe the plane somehow flies sideways instead of straight ahead. Try to imagine this." Can you? The answer is no. If you're truly imagining all the physics accurately and the causes and effects at every level, then the plane must fly forward. If you're imagining it flying sideways, you're ignoring something in the causal chain and imagining something that isn't true to reality. Saying you can imagine zombies is sort of analogous--it just means you're imagining in a sufficiently vague way that it seems plausible.
I agree, when I first encountered philosophical zombies I didn't initially interpret them as an argument against physicalism, I thought it was just a funny "imagine this to try to elucidate what we mean by consciousness". I don't find the intuitions they pump plausible--and that's the point, if we all have different intuitions, clearly the arguments don't have the force proponents think they do, in which case let's look for better evidence!
I don't find any of the brain damage cases you listed counterintuitive, but that may be because I have a couple of odd perceptual glitches myself.
I think a dualist would respond to your last section by claiming that physics fails to explain consciousness, so we're justified in revising it. This won't work unless dualist arguments are quite compelling, though, and I'm skeptical they are.
Interesting! What kind of perceptual glitches, if you don't mind my asking?
I agree that's how a dualist would respond--but I think their arguments are based on intuitions, and we should be deeply skeptical of our intuitions/introspections about consciousness.
I don't, though they're not nearly as interesting as motion blindness! I've got something close to amusia, my ability to perceive tones is greatly diminished, and I don't even know what it means to sing out of key (though I apparently do this whenever I try to sing). About 60% of the time, I can't understand what singers are saying, and I'm very bad at recognizing melodies. I have a couple of other auditory problems -- my hearing is painfully sensitive and my cocktail party effect is a pretty spotty -- but I don't know that they're in the same category.
I agree this is true about some dualist arguments (the one from the supposed unity of consciousness, for instance). But I don't think it is with some others. Mary's Room and P - Zombies are meant to convince you that qualia are conceivably separable from brain activity. And they succeed in that! The problem, as you pointed out in your post, is that this equally applies to water and its chemical composition, things about which dualism is obviously not true.
“I think a dualist would respond to your last section by claiming that physics fails to explain consciousness, so we're justified in revising it.”
This conclusion (by them) seems wildly premature. It’s like if we got our hands on an alien computer that we could tell was the most complex structure in the universe that we’ve ever come across, couldn’t figure out how it worked and just threw up our hands and said well it must be alien magic.
And yet most people in the world continue to believe in souls, gods and other immaterial things. (I notice you don’t touch that issue with a ten foot pole here). I think it’s because, until you are proven wrong, being wrong feels exactly like being right. If you then already sit with a foundational belief that feels right (probably due to being indoctrinated as a child), along with your strong wish to remain part of your in-group, all you have to do is refrain from full intellectual humility to continue believing things with zero evidence. There’s usually no harm, and often large social gains involved, and our brains are lazy and biased because it’s evolutionarily advantageous to be so.
‘The Big Picture’ by Sean Carroll is the most rational book I’ve ever read.
I really don’t know about some of this. If everyone starts from an inevitable belief structure of some kind, and you start from a materialist reductionist view of the universe, then surely your own “armchair intuitions” are at the basis of your views about others having incorrect intuitions? I fully agree it’s worth “exercising some humility”. How about the arrogant claim by many that we have virtually the highest level of sophisticated understanding about physics? Really? Is that not reminiscent of the claim made in the late 19th century that all that was left to do in physics was dot the i’s and cross the t’s – just before Einstein overturned everything? Look at the pitiful state of physics! String theory has got nowhere, nowhere, in fifty years! Otherwise brilliant men believe in multiple parallel universes where there are other versions of David Deutsch. And they think that's more rational than Scientology! The whole edifice of current cosmology rests on a pseudo-religious belief in “dark matter” and “dark energy”, both of which seem to exist purely conceptually as a hole in the equations because we don’t really understand gravity at large scales, and neither of which is any more detectable than zombies. A new “Einstein” is perhaps eventually going to reveal this as the emperor’s new clothes. (Listen to Lee Smolin and Eric Weinstein if you think all the physicists have got it all right and can sit in their armchairs with smug grins.)
“The laws underlying the physics of everyday life are completely understood” – really? How about “except for consciousness”? (Or even except for the origin of life itself, or except for the work of Michael Levin which defies what “genetics” was believed to be responsible for?)
Dr Iain McGilchrist knows all about hemispatial neglect and the effects of brain damage on many aspects of consciousness, but a lifetime of medical and scientific and philosophical work has led him to the position that consciousness could be an ontological primitive, built into the structure of the universe just as matter and energy are.
I agree we shouldn’t be old-school religious about this, and believe in Cartesian dualism or the “soul”, but to believe that consciousness – the subjective experience, it “being like” something to be this – can arise as an emergent property from non-conscious matter is not necessarily a coherent position. It is worth thinking about what Brett Andersen said about this. Emergent properties are not wholly disconnected from the nature of underlying physical structures. For example, the behavioural properties of water such as flow (and wetness) and surface tension can be logically derived from the structure of H2O molecules. For conscious experience to emerge from a wholly non-conscious underlying physical substrate surely requires some kind of “miracle”.
So that does not seem to be a reasonable position unless you’re fond of miracles as explanations for anything, which I’m not.
[I am of course quoting Mr Andersen from when he was involved in important scientific work, and this has no relationship to anything he may have said while suffering from an unfortunate psychotic breakdown. If a great physicist said something brilliant, its content is not invalidated by him years later suffering from, say, dementia, and would not imply it should be treated with any less respect. I thought I’d better say that in view of the vicious and spiteful nature of many commentators on social media.]
I think the jury is seriously still out on consciousness, life, the “mechanisms” (necessary but unfortunate word, as McGilchrist fans will appreciate) of biology, and the level of understanding of physicists. Fortunately for the next generation – gives them some important stuff to investigate.
"surely your own “armchair intuitions” are at the basis of your views about others having incorrect intuitions?"
Sure -- my whole point is, let's put aside our intuitions. Sorry if it isn't clear, but the argument is:
1. Philosophical arguments around consciousness rely on our intuitions about consciousness
2. Empirical evidence from brain damage cases gives us reason to be skeptical of our intuitions about consciousness
3. Therefore our philosophical arguments about consciousness are on shakey ground
4. We shouldn't be willing to upend something we're very certain of (the laws of physics) based on something we are not very certain of (philosophical arguments about consciousness).
Thanks for the link, excellent article. I see it agrees that physics doesn’t “know everything” about consciousness, dark matter, dark energy and so on, as these are not just “everyday life”. My points and my perspective were rather bigger than that, though. Perhaps I was not patiently reading the phrase “everyday life”, and perhaps I was going, possibly unfairly, beyond what you were really saying, trying to use the same “launching pad” for thinking but going deeper and further ahead. I just didn’t think it fair to leave the readers with a potential impression of “oh, this guy is smart”, which clearly you are, “and therefore this consciousness stuff is basically sorted out and not really philosophically or scientifically or even spiritually interesting” – which we are nowhere near, whatever our armchair intuitions.
Let me just chime in on some of the claims on physics. It is understandable that you get the impression of physics that you present if you read certain corners of the internet hostile to current theoretical physics - especially Eric Weinstein and his ilk. But as a professional theoretical physicist working on classical and quantum gravity myself, I don't think he gives an accurate view of neither physics nor physicists. Listening to Weinstein will unfortunately give you a very distorted, sometimes conspiratorial, view of the field. I know he can seem alluring, but relatively speaking he is not a person with deep knowledge of physics, and he consistently ignores serious physicists who are kindly willing to spend their precious time to give technical criticisms of his so-called theory of everything - a theory which suffer from inconsistencies that theoretical physics grad students learn to be on the lookout for.
Now, let me address some of your specific claims. I genuinely do not understand why you are calling "dark energy" pseudo-religious. We have a theory, general relativity, that fits experiment extremely well. That theory has a very natural free parameter, the cosmological constant, which a humble physicist have no a priori reason to set to one value or another the other. However, going out and measuring the expansion of the universe, we find that this constant is non-zero and positive, although extremely small. This shocked and disturbed many of us, but we begrudgingly accepted it. Many have tried to explain the smallness of it - but no one has succeeded. People have tried, people are trying, but mostly everyone concedes that it is a great mystery why it has the value it has. But it is not a mystery that such a term is present. Dark energy is a measured phenomenon, represented by a particular term in Einstein's gravitational equations. What exactly is religious about this behavior? What is a "hole" in an equation supposed to mean?
Second, what do you mean "the arrogant claim by many that we have virtually the highest level of sophisticated understanding about physics? Really?". It is just an objective fact that we can explain more phenomena than in the past. Yet physicists are woefully aware of how much we don't know about physics outside regimes where we currently have the power to measure. That's what makes it an exciting endeavor. As for criticisms of string theory, its not the Peter Woit doesn't have any points, but it doesn't get to the core of the issue, which is this: humanity currently does not have the capacity to measure physics at the length and energy scales where the quantum effects of gravity are expected to show up. We are left to theorizing based on consistency, rigidness, elegance and similar principles that have worked it the past. This is a pretty thankless job, but do you have a better idea than preserving some of the broad principles for guiding theorizing that worked in the 20th century? The glory days of physics in the 20th century had the massive luxury of constant new experimental data. That era is over. We picked the low hanging fruit in terms of measurements. While string theory has not produced predictions, it has produced more interesting insights into theoretical aspects quantum field theory, ways gravity can behave quantum mechanically, and mathematics than any other rival programs (by a factor somewhere between 10 and 100 in my personal biased estimation). Trust me, nothing would get me and my colleagues more excited than an alternative theory with greater promise. The sad fact is that no one has such a theory.
Thank you for going to so much trouble to explain your perspective on this. I appreciate your level of education in and knowledge of this area far exceeds my own, and I appreciate that people can be led to hasty conclusions. I also appreciate that you could have said "It is just an objective fact that we can explain more phenomena than in the past" back in 1890, and it would have been just as true - or that you could have been one of the biologists rubbing their hands with glee about solving all our medical issues once the human genome had been mapped, little knowing how much they would be surprised by epigenetics and the allegedly "junk" DNA that they were so confident about, or bioelectrics. I'm sorry I do not have the ability to come up with any alternative theories to the string dead-end, but I'm pretty damn sure I'm far from one of the crazy ones if I don't believe in parallel universes, in one of which I played bass guitar for the Beatles or became the Chancellor of the Exchequer, or the supposedly irresistible conclusion that we must be living in a computer simulation. (I appreciate you have not attempted to discuss or defend either of those.) I also appreciate that wisdom and developments can come out of "left field", the outliers, quite unexpectedly, and that no one ever gave Jesus of Nazareth a degree in theology and that nobody ever awarded Bruce Lee a black belt.
As for the parallel universes and similar crazy ideas, I don't think we should hasten to dismiss them just because of their lack of intuitiveness or seeming craziness. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics can very much be criticized for other reasons - personally I struggle to understand the operational interpretation of this proposal - although I won't dismiss it because its crazy. Quantum mechanics is crazy and unintuitive, yet it turned out to be true (or at least it is true to a very good approximation, which is usually what "true" really means in physics). I agree that wisdom and developments can come out of left field, although it is a low probability event, so you would make a lot of money in the casino betting against it. Especially in a field like physics. The more a theory is rigidly constrained by existing empirical data, the less likely it is for an outsider to be able modify this theory without creating contradictions with observed phenomena. Without at least deeply understanding existing constraints, which for a field as deeply constrained and technical as physics is almost guaranteed to remove the outsider criterion, success is near impossible. You need to dedicate most of your life to it, which makes it extremely hard to do if it is not your full time job.
I am not sure this phenomenon maps well on to neither Jesus nor Bruce Lee. But I wanna emphasize that I do not say there is never developments and paradigm changes spurned by outsiders. I just think the particulars of physics are relevant to evaluate the probability for this to happen. I think any real paradigm shift in physics realistically only could be spurned by a combination of young professional physicists not wedded deeply to old theory, plus new experimental data.
I don’t want to criticize or argue with you, Mr Folkestad, as you seem quite wise as well as knowledgeable; and it is probably clear to anybody bothering to read this exchange that there are important ways in which you “know what you are talking about” and I just don’t, not having your qualifications or background; and all my thinking could be easily dismissed by such a reader as “Folkestad is probably involved in important contributions to human knowledge”, whereas “this other guy” (me) is just some kind of articulate troll who likes to take things apart, being low in the psychological “agreeableness trait”. But I can’t help it, there are things nagging at the edge of my consciousness about all this. Your comments about needing to work through the entirety of physics before being able to take it any further seem terribly conservative, like a father saying “do as I say, son, and as your father did before me, and one day all this will be yours”. I can’t help thinking of a youngish Einstein sitting on that trolley car looking at the clock tower down the hill and imagining riding on a beam of light. I can’t help thinking of the viewpoint on some aspects of physics being seen instead through the perspective of the neuroscientific, psychological and philosophical background in the work of Iain McGilchrist, and how that work also shows that the meaning of time and space is utterly different (from that of physicists) for people who have studied perception or schizophrenia. I can’t help thinking of how, if someone approached thinking about time and space through the work of philosophers such as Kant and Whitehead, instead of physics, their very nature or essence is not just “reducible” to, or fully understood only in terms of, physics or mathematics. Although my “examples” of Jesus and Bruce Lee were put forward reasonably casually, in fact on reflection they can be mapped on to my concerns and your comments very well. A number of historians think Jesus was actually illiterate, which seems quite feasible in the economic and cultural and educational world of first century Galilee – and I can imagine Pharisees trying to argue with his natural gift for down-to-earth morality and story-telling by saying to him, “You need to learn to read and spend years studying the scriptures and analysing the words of the prophets before you have any real understanding or any right to have people following you and listening to you.” Bruce Lee did an intense amount of research into fighting techniques of numerous world cultures, and then stripped it all down philosophically to “what really happens in, and matters in, a combat situation?” and “how do you use this as a vehicle for self-expression?” and “what is wrong, conceptually, with this world of constantly growing numbers of ‘systems’ and ‘styles’ for dealing with fighting or self-defence?” So he too went back to first principles, whereas an “expert” could have said to him, “You’re just an arrogant youngster and you need to spend years and years getting high-level qualifications in, say, three different countries or cultures, and then you’ll have the right to teach us (when you’re about 35, say, by which time Lee was dead, having transformed the martial arts world). We can’t tell the future, I know, but I like to imagine some smart young upstart getting a certain amount of knowledge and then going back to some first principles and yet again raising a glass to Thomas Kuhn, perhaps. (Agreeing with your comment, of course, about a possible paradigm shift coming from young professional physicists not wedded deeply to old theory.) But if I were going to live long enough, I'd love to put money on there not being parallel universes or a big Matrix simulation around us - having read McGilchrist I think these are fundamental left-hemisphere-led delusions. And I do hope no other commentator can be bothered to tell me about how useless old "common sense" tells me the sun goes round the flat Earth; I just think there are real differences between drawing logical but incorrect inferences from actually believing utterly crazy things. I don't include non-local quantum entanglement or wave-particle duality in those things - they're not crazy, they're just not understood fully or properly yet, whereas the simulation and the parallel universes really are crazy. (I say "parallel" rather than "multiverse", which is just too Marvel-movies for me, and rather than "other" - I could certainly accept other universes before and after ours. I just don't go for the "sliding doors", if I can use another movie reference!)
Thank you for taking the time to write this Graham. I haven't encountered McGilchrist, so cannot comment on his work. And I understand where your intuitions are coming from. Here is the thing that I see as challenging for your perspective (in case of physics, not as a statement about the potential of outsider contributions in general). A theory of physics is, in the final calculus, evaluated on its ability to explain observations. If you propose a new theory of physics that predicts the wrong spectrum of light that can be emitted from a hydrogen atom, then your theory is dead. If your theory gets the orbits of the planets wrong, then your theory is dead. If your theory predicts that gold has the wrong conductivity, then you theory is dead. If your theory predicts that light bends by the wrong angle when it passes a black hole, then your theory is dead. And I can go on, and on, and on. There is an extremely long list of quantitative predictions that your theory need to get right. And here is the problem: any kind of naive modification to the existing laws, or any kind of naively cooking up something, leads to a theory that gets one of these predictions wrong (usually many of them). This is a fact that is hard to appreciate until you try to do it yourself. But then you try, and you get humbled. It is not in principle impossible that a non-academic could physics, but they would have to dedicate a big chuck of their their time to learning existing physics.
Jesus was not in this situation. There aren't any empirically verifiable moral truths. Jesus was a visionary outsider that established a new religious paradigm, of course I will concede that. But he did not play a game where there are many verifiably wrong and right answers. The current theory of physics is extremely rigid. New religions are not.
As for comments on craziness, I don't really have anything more to add. Quantum effects are crazy in my view, so I see no arguments against multiverse from this line of attack - we're left with subjective evaluations of what is crazy and not.
Can you explain this, please, a little further: "That theory has a very natural free parameter, the cosmological constant, which a humble physicist have no a priori reason to set to one value or another the other. However, going out and measuring the expansion of the universe, we find that this constant is non-zero and positive, although extremely small. "
Are you saying the universe is expanding very slowly? And at a constant rate?
I’m still working through these issues myself, but I don’t think this adequately represents the conceivability arguments. For one, the distinction between logical possibility and natural possibility is rather essential to the discussion. The pz argument merely depends on the claim that what is conceivable is logically possible - not that it’s naturally possible. If a p zombie is logically possible, one reasons consciousness arises from the physical because of a contingent natural law, not because it is analytically reducible to the physical.
Your sideways flying jet is directly on point: we know a sideways flying jet is clearly logically possible, on the basis that it is conceivable. If a p zombie is like the sideways jet, then the argument goes through. It isn’t analytically true that a jet of certain dimensions in certain settings flies forward. It’s contingently true given certain contingent laws of nature. Similarly, it’s not analytically true that certain conscious states are reducible to physical states. Rather, p zombies illustrate that there’s just a natural nomic connection between certain physical and phenomenal states.
There is some irony here, because the problem with your entire argument is that you haven’t overcome your own physicalist intuitions. It happens too often that alternatives to physicalism are presented as a homunculus watching videos inside your head.
But this creates something worse than a straw man, I’ll call it a Frankenstein, an idea created when someone keeps all their physicalist assumptions and then plonks some kind of immaterial ghost into the brain. I mean in a physicalist universe, that's the only way it could happen.
But the non-physicalist doesn’t share these assumptions about a self-sufficient physical system, so all that's happened is we’ve failed to drop our own assumptions enough to even understand the view we’re criticizing.
I assume the core of your argument is that we can’t rely on intuitions to create theories of consciousness, I’d agree. But who is doing that? Conceivability isn’t an exercise in intuition. And worse yet for the argument, if we agree to ignore intuition, physicalism is incapable of even discovering that consciousness exists. That's one hell of an epistemic gap.
1. Philosophical arguments around consciousness rely on our intuitions about consciousness
2. Empirical evidence from brain damage cases gives us reason to be skeptical of our intuitions about consciousness
3. Therefore our philosophical arguments about consciousness are on shakey ground
4. We shouldn't be willing to upend something we're very certain of (the laws of physics) based on something we are not very certain of (philosophical arguments about consciousness).
"Conceivability isn’t an exercise in intuition."
It is when we're ignorant about something, which is the case with consciousness.
"if we agree to ignore intuition, physicalism is incapable of even discovering that consciousness exists."
I'm not suggesting we ignore intuition, just suggesting we shouldn't privilege it above empirical evidence in domains we know we don't have good intuitions in. I'm not sure what you mean when you say that physicalism would be incapable of discovering consciousness exists
Why lean on the laws of physics so much at all? I'm just not convinced proponents of qualia/phenomenal states have made a good case for their views. I can reject those views independenetly of their inconsistency with physicalism: I just don't accept them on their own terms. That doesn't require endorsing physicalism.
Maybe, but pointing to the laws of physics may not be the best long-term strategy for handling bad metaphysics. Many proponents of physicalism are still trading in the same mistaken, underlying presumptions as the views they reject. There are alternative philosophical positions that eschew these assumptions and don't end up entangled in disputes that are often driven by conceptual confusions and metaphilosophical presuppositions that one need not burden oneself with, e.g., pragmatism handles metaphysical issues neatly.
My ambitions are bigger than that. I think qualia belief persists among philosophers due to a legacy of bad methods and assumptions. I want the whole field to reform. Misguided belief in qualia is downstream of more fundamental mistakes, like putting stock in intuitions and ignoring psychology. Until and unless the field moves towards better foundations, we're attacking branches and not the roots.
I understand your argument, I’m saying it’s full of physicalist assumptions.
We’re not ignorant about consciousness, no one has any doubt about the existence of their qualia. What you mean is, we’re ignorant of the brain mechanism that produces it. But the non-physicalist rejects that there is any such mechanism, that’s only true if physicalism is true. And telling them that's only because we're at present ignorant of what it is, isn't an argument likely to convince them.
Consider “how” we know qualia exists. It’s not a scientific discovery. To make this point clearer, we could reword the conceivability of zombies so it’s a conclusion rather than a premise:-
P1 - If there is a conceptual difference between phenomenal mental states (ie qualia) and [whatever physical state is being identified with them eg neural states, behavioural states, functional states] then zombies are conceivable.
P2 - There is a conceptual difference etc.
C - Therefore, zombies are conceivable.
The conclusion of that argument has nothing to do with intuitions. And if you want to defend against it, you have to justify your identity claim. The response of "So What?" isn’t going to cut it.
Those are different words with different meanings. If you replaced conceivable with possible in your argument, then P1 is just assuming your conclusion
Sure, but conceivable means without contradiction. Without contradiction means not impossible. Not impossible = possible.
So if there is a conceptual difference between [some mental state Q] and [whatever physical states you choose to identify Q with - functional, neural, behavioural etc] that means we can have one without the other. No contradiction involved.
Rejecting qualia/phenomenal consciousness doesn't require distinctively physicalist intuitions. I reject qualia/phenomenal consciousness and endorse qualia quietism/something akin to illusionism, and I'm not even a physicalist.
The key issue here is that there is not a d4finition of consciousness that is accepted by all students of it. Consciousness is the most important topic in biology and it is in need of a precise definition. Then, we could apply powerful new techniques such as molecular biology to unravel the development, physiology and pathology of this fantastic yet unresolved issue in biology.
Very well said, and argued! It's rare I find a post I agree with as much as this one.
I do think philosophical thought experiments can be useful for sparking conversation. But having the word "experiment" in them is misleading. It can lead people to think they tell us something about reality. But as you discuss, all they really do is clarify intuitions. Daniel Dennett's name for them was "intuition pumps", which I think is an improvement, and gets at their real utility. And the best ones challenge our intuitions, show where they break down, or become contradictory.
Interesting and thought provoking article! The finding you portray regarding brain damage truly shows how intricate our sensory conversion is regarding our registered perspectives and how easilly we take everything for granted - especially when we're not aware of what we're unaware of.
Note, I'm way out of my academic training (as an anthropologist) when I continue here - as it's merely speculations based on observations of different cultures, sciences, myths and the words of contemporary wise ones (enlightened individuals):
(Note: this is a very simplified description to avoid an overly lengthy text)
Some indeginous cultures claim "spirit" is in all things; rocks, trees, people, wind and such, some also say we're all connected and see the Universe/cosmos as one - expressed in all variations and fragrances. Even the Abraham religions claim that God resides in all (under rocks and so on). Further the eastern perspectives and contemporary enlightened ones points toward silence and emptiness as the "gateway" to awareness of what really is and to "unlock" our ability to achieve a state of Nirvana. While modern science has yet to find proof of a material soul and explains our smallest building blocks of the material reside in a wast emptiness comparable to our solar system and the distances between our planets.
Could it be then, that the "seat" (or source) of our awareness is this emptyness - a canvas that reality is expressed upon where conciousness as we perceive/understand it is only expressed through the biological sensory conversions that take place in our physiology?
(This interperation might as well have a name - though I'm unaware of it as this question just popped up in my head when I read your article. I saw a comment above referring to dark matter/energy which could be the same - though that's a subject I've yet to dive into)
On the other hand; proving or disproving this (nothing) seems as achievable as Russel's teapot and the benefits of achieving such probably as empty and meaningless as the void we all reside within.
Not sure if this speaks to your point, but the idea of "spirit" (or consciousness) being in all things is similar to pantheism if you want to look into that (I'm personally not a fan).
Pantheism is often a used description of certain indeginous cultures which I mentioned above though that was not exactly what I was pointing toward. Though as I stated, to prove/disprove atributes or the importance of 'nothing' seems like an imposible endevour. Interesting to reflect upon though.
Personally I'm not anchored in any beliefs but are just curious and like to approach subjects from new & different perspectives.
Nice article and a good conversation (though I am disappointed there were no casualties in your battle), but I don't think your characterization of the zombie argument here is very accurate/charitable. No one (or at least no one serious, I think) is arguing:
1. Zombies are conceivable
2. Therefore physicalism is false
There of course need to be some connecting premises there, which isn't something proponents of P-zombies have missed. Rather the argument goes something like:
1. Zombies are conceivable
2. Anything that's conceivable is possible
3. If zombies are possible then physicalism is false
4. Therefore physicalism is false
It is important here that conceivability here is meant as *ideal* conceivability--I can conceive of the 384511th digit of pi being both 3 and not 3. No one is arguing that anything interesting follows from that. But I cannot ideally conceive of any other digits of pi than the actual digits. Likewise I cannot ideally conceive of a large collection of H2O not being watery stuff at the macro level (holding the laws of nature fixed). But it looks like zombies are ideally conceivable--even if we know all physical facts about some universe, we can never be 100% whether there is consciousness or not.
3 basically runs from the idea that physicalism, if true, is necessarily true, from which it follows (assuming that zombies are incompatible with physicalism, which seems pretty obvious).
2 is clearly the most controversial. On the face of it, though, it looks like this is how we actually determine possibility. In your conversation with Connor you of course raise the counterexample of a posteriori necessities like water=H2O.
Here we need to be careful, though, as "water" can be a somewhat ambiguous term. Until 1811, it meant "watery stuff", but after 1811, "water" acquired the additional meaning "H2O". But while it is both conceivable and possible that "watery stuff" isn't H2O (it could for example be XYZ on twin earth), it is neither conceivable nor possible that H2O isn't H2O, meaning it is no counterexample to premise 2.
Now, I don't really see what is supposed to follow from brain damage causing weird conscious experience. No one is disputing the important role of the brain in consciousness. I guess the idea is that there can be strange conscious experiences that we would not expect to be possible from everyday introspection, meaning we should be distrustful of introspection.
But what you show, I think, is not that we should be distrustful of introspection, but that stuff we might expect given everyday introspection can be overturned by reports based on other introspection.
Imagine if I make the same argument with regards to empirical observation. From everyday observation, I wouldn't expect that, say, there is a limit to how fast light can travel. But it turns out that other more specific observations are best accounted for by light having a speed limit. That does nothing to show that we should not trust observation.
With regards to how revolutionary dualism is with regards to the core theory of physics, I don't really think it is very much. No one is claiming that causal closure or whatever is violated in particle accelerators. Instead, interactionist dualists claim that it is violated in brains. But pointing to causal closure holding in experiments done on non-brains gives no evidence against interactionist dualism then.
I agree I'm being a bit flippant with the zombie thing, but I think the point (that it's based on an unstated intuition about mental and physical being fundamentally different) is true.
In your breakdown, whether premise 1 or 2 is controversial depends on how much we load onto our concept of "conceive". If we say "ideally conceiving means nothing we ever learn about the physical world can change this", then saying "zombies are conceivable" is just saying "nothing we ever learn about the physical world will contradict zombies", which is a huge assumption, I don't know how you could know that.
I get the intuition: it's not clear how we could explain mental stuff via physical stuff because they seem different. It does not follow there can never be such an explanation, or that without such an explanation physicalism is false.
Re: brain damage--I think you've nailed most of it but not the conclusion. If one empirical observation contradicts another, we would take that as a lesson to be a bit more careful with the conclusions we draw from empirical observations. And we do this! We calibrate our certainty in empirical observations based on the fact that often our inferences from those observations are wrong. If there was something we could be significantly more sure of contradicting some empirical observations, we should be more willing to go with that because we know empirical observations can lead to incorrect conclusions. If we had some magic book of truth, we should look at that to learn stuff instead of looking around at the world.
"But pointing to causal closure holding in experiments done on non-brains gives no evidence against interactionist dualism then."
I think this is very much understating how much we understand about physics and how big a deal it would be if the core theory was fundamentally wrong in this way.
I agree that it is a bit hard to know the extent of ideal conceivability, though I think it is not a particularly wild claim to say that nothing we could ever learn about the physical world could in principle contradict zombies. I mean, what would that look like? Everything we ever learn about the physical world can be described from a 3rd person, or neutral, perspective. But consciousness appears to be essentially 1st person; while we can observe all sorts of things in the physical world that we suspect correlate with certain conscious experiences, we could never in principle be sure whether there is actually consciousness there--we can only know by *being* in those states. It just looks completely implausible to me that we could ever--even in principle--completely remove the problem of other minds or questions of qualia inversion just through empirical observation.
We can of course be certain conditional on a certain theory of mind. For example, if functionalism is true, we can be certain that some system is conscious, since we can observe the functional states of that system. But for this to contradict the ideal conceivability of zombies, functionalism would have to be an a priori truth or something, in which case I guess there is no point in arguing about it anymore, since you have already won :)
I suspect we aren't actually too far apart on the introspection/observation point, we may just be talking past each other. I agree that seemingly conflicting observations (eg. that tables appear to be solid, but theories based on other observations tell us that they are actually mostly empty space) should make us more skeptical of certain inferences based on observations--likewise with introspection. But observation in itself isn't to be mistrusted because of this. This is because an observation doesn't force us to make any specific inference in itself: I can have the visual experience as of an apple in front of me, and from this infer "there is an apple", "I am hallucinating an apple", "The space in front of me is mostly occupied by material", "The space in front of me is mostly empty, but with a bit of material arranged apple-wise", etc. Some of these inferences are made less certain by other observations, but this does not mean that the observation itself is to be "mistrusted"--it doesn't tell me to infer, but it is still a data point to be accounted for on my worldview regardless. Likewise with introspection.
With regards to causal closure, I agree that causal closure being violated in the brain would be a large revision to the core theory. But consider now "the schmore theory". This theory is equivalent to the core theory except that it does not hold causal closure in the brain. The schmore theory predicts *all* observations we have made just as well as the core theory, and so the core theory is in no way better supported than the schmore theory. And the schmore theory is of course compatible with interactionist dualism. The schmore theory is of course less parsimonious than the core theory, and in that way it starts at a disadvantage to the core theory. But this is not something that cannot be overcome by strong enough reasons in favor of interactionism. So while causal closure makes the evidential burden for the interactionist larger, it is far from a knockdown argument or fatal problem for the theory.
Re: conceivability, my original point was the argument is drawing on an intuition. You articulated that intuition: "while we can observe all sorts of things in the physical world that we suspect correlate with certain conscious experiences, we could never in principle be sure whether there is actually consciousness there". So we're in agreement it needs an addition intuition.
Obviously I disagree with the intuition. I think it arises from a conceptual confusion. Learning things can lead to new theories that lead to new concepts, which should make it easier to avoid the conceptual confusion.
Looks like we're aligned on the introspection thing.
Re: schmore theory--It's not just that it's less parsimonious. It's that schmore theory would have to preserve all current predictions but have very specific different theories that it's hard to imagine wouldn't have dramatic empirical consequences. For example, how would particles know their in the brain? That seems like it would violate locality, a central part of the core theory. Is a new theory that violated locality while preserving our empirical observations possible? Maybe, but the burden of proof is on the dualist. Such a theory would almost certainly lead to empirically testable predictions. But no one takes this seriously enough to do the theoretical work despite the fact that if it was validated you would go down in history. Maybe all theoretical physicists and potential theoretical physicists are all just turning up their noses at the chance for eternal glory, but I wouldn't hang my hat on that.
It's interesting to see what our disagreement on conceivability amounts to! I am not sure that it is actually an additional intuition--i think that no amount of observation/knowledge of physical properties being able to determine whether something is conscious may just *be* what it is for p-zombies to be ideally conceivable. But that is really just a semantic question and not relevant to the actual dispute :)
Though I am certainly interested in the fact that you disagree with that idea! I take it that that means that you think we could in principle settle whether some lump of matter is conscious (with certainty) through observation/experiment? I would be very interested to hear what sort of experiment could in principle settle this sort of question. I of course don't expect that you have a worked out experiment ready to perform, otherwise you would be on the plane to receive your nobel prize. But I assume you still have some rough idea of what sorts of things we should look at.
I suspect that your answer will be that we work out a complete (functionalist) theory of mind, detailing what sorts of experiences correlate with what sorts of functional states. From there we can look at new lumps of matter, and test whether they instantiate said functional states or not. My worry with this is that to gather data to develop such a theory, we will have to look at conscious lumps of matter to determine their functional states, but this assumes that we know which lumps are actually conscious. But to determine which lumps are conscious we of course need to know what to look for, which is exactly what we're trying to find out. For this sort of method to get off the ground, it looks like the theory we are trying to develop would have to be an a priory truth known with absolute certainty--otherwise we could always conceive that the lumps of matter we have been looking at to develop the theory were not in fact conscious, meaning it would be conceivable that a lump of matter which is actually conscious is not conscious, meaning it would be conceivable that a p-zombie could exist, even if we knew all physical facts. I of course don't want to put words in your mouth--I am sure you have something more/different to say to this!
These sorts of disputes sometimes make me question whether your consciousness is the same as mine--though I'll be charitable and assume that you are not a philosophical zombie ;)
Concerning the schmore theory, I may be a bit out of my depth here. I suspect it would be possible to work out a schmore theory, though I don't have a good enough understanding of the core theory to do the dirty work.
One form this theory could take, may be something like "[The core theory] except in systems that satisfy X", where X is some condition for being a conscious system. It looks like a physicalist will also have to give some sort of account of X--for example: such and such functional states obtain. However the physicalist draws the boundaries of conscious systems, the dualist can just steal those boundaries and say that within those boundaries locality, or causal closure, or whatnot doesn't hold.
I am not sure that we would have to violate locality, though. After all, particles don't have to "know" that they are in a brain. Rather, on substance dualism for example, a soul would have to "know" where a brain was, so it could cause changes within that system. I don't think that any of this would conflict with any observation that is used to support the core theory, as it would be empirically equivalent to the core theory in all non-conscious systems. All that is needed is that causal closure doesn't hold in systems that satisfy X--outside of such systems, we just have the regular core theory. So unless we test systems that satisfy X (which I take it we haven't), no observation can provide any evidence against the schmore theory.
Again, I don't know the physics here very well, so what I am saying may just be nonsense to your ears!
Enjoyed the read. A stimulating one.
Beyond the issue of appealing to our intuitions, which you noted, I immediately noticed another problem with the "zombie argument".
The assumption that an universe can be physically identical to ours and yet have "zombies" for conscious humans is logically equivalent to the assumption that physicalism is false. This is a problem because it is invoked in the argument. If physicalism is false in a metaphysically possible universe, then that universe can exhibit entities appearing to have consciousness outwardly whilst being zombies, and there can be another universe only physically identical to it but with consciousness (explained by other factors) - conversely, if there is such a "zombie universe" which is physically identical to a "non-zombie universe", then physicalism is false (since consciousness is present in one and absent in another in spite of the physical identity). This effectively renders the argument as "Physicalism is false. Therefore, physicalism is false".
Yeah I think Suzi's article does a better job than me going deep on the problems with the zombie argument: https://open.substack.com/pub/suzitravis/p/the-p-zombie-argument
All I want to say is "exactly!"
You may be familiar, but if not, you should check out this recent article by Suzi Travis! Looks like a lot of overlap here you might be interested in.
https://open.substack.com/pub/suzitravis/p/the-p-zombie-argument?r=3kyzup&utm_medium=ios
I saw it! It's great!
I've always found the zombie argument intuitively strange because to me it seems clear zombies are not conceivable. Saying "I can imagine zombies" is saying "I can imagine the universe being literally identical except somehow something about it is inexplicably different". That doesn't make sense, and someone's confused. To me that indicates the question itself is misframed and is taking consciousness to be something it isn't.
But even if we indulge the question, I'd challenge the conceivability part. One reason zombies seem conceivable is that we don't have a full causal understanding of consciousness, so the conceivability sneaks in through the question-marks in the theory. Another reason is because people are bad at imagining things and determining what it means to "be able to conceive something" fully. For example, if I said "imagine a zombie jet plane built identical to a normal jet plane, with all its parts in working order down the smallest gear, screw, and atom. The only difference is that in this universe the plane somehow flies sideways instead of straight ahead. Try to imagine this." Can you? The answer is no. If you're truly imagining all the physics accurately and the causes and effects at every level, then the plane must fly forward. If you're imagining it flying sideways, you're ignoring something in the causal chain and imagining something that isn't true to reality. Saying you can imagine zombies is sort of analogous--it just means you're imagining in a sufficiently vague way that it seems plausible.
I agree, when I first encountered philosophical zombies I didn't initially interpret them as an argument against physicalism, I thought it was just a funny "imagine this to try to elucidate what we mean by consciousness". I don't find the intuitions they pump plausible--and that's the point, if we all have different intuitions, clearly the arguments don't have the force proponents think they do, in which case let's look for better evidence!
I don't find any of the brain damage cases you listed counterintuitive, but that may be because I have a couple of odd perceptual glitches myself.
I think a dualist would respond to your last section by claiming that physics fails to explain consciousness, so we're justified in revising it. This won't work unless dualist arguments are quite compelling, though, and I'm skeptical they are.
Interesting! What kind of perceptual glitches, if you don't mind my asking?
I agree that's how a dualist would respond--but I think their arguments are based on intuitions, and we should be deeply skeptical of our intuitions/introspections about consciousness.
I don't, though they're not nearly as interesting as motion blindness! I've got something close to amusia, my ability to perceive tones is greatly diminished, and I don't even know what it means to sing out of key (though I apparently do this whenever I try to sing). About 60% of the time, I can't understand what singers are saying, and I'm very bad at recognizing melodies. I have a couple of other auditory problems -- my hearing is painfully sensitive and my cocktail party effect is a pretty spotty -- but I don't know that they're in the same category.
I agree this is true about some dualist arguments (the one from the supposed unity of consciousness, for instance). But I don't think it is with some others. Mary's Room and P - Zombies are meant to convince you that qualia are conceivably separable from brain activity. And they succeed in that! The problem, as you pointed out in your post, is that this equally applies to water and its chemical composition, things about which dualism is obviously not true.
“I think a dualist would respond to your last section by claiming that physics fails to explain consciousness, so we're justified in revising it.”
This conclusion (by them) seems wildly premature. It’s like if we got our hands on an alien computer that we could tell was the most complex structure in the universe that we’ve ever come across, couldn’t figure out how it worked and just threw up our hands and said well it must be alien magic.
And yet most people in the world continue to believe in souls, gods and other immaterial things. (I notice you don’t touch that issue with a ten foot pole here). I think it’s because, until you are proven wrong, being wrong feels exactly like being right. If you then already sit with a foundational belief that feels right (probably due to being indoctrinated as a child), along with your strong wish to remain part of your in-group, all you have to do is refrain from full intellectual humility to continue believing things with zero evidence. There’s usually no harm, and often large social gains involved, and our brains are lazy and biased because it’s evolutionarily advantageous to be so.
‘The Big Picture’ by Sean Carroll is the most rational book I’ve ever read.
I wrote about god here: https://cognitivewonderland.substack.com/p/the-incoherence-of-god
I loved "The Big Picture", I only read it recently but it's great.
I really don’t know about some of this. If everyone starts from an inevitable belief structure of some kind, and you start from a materialist reductionist view of the universe, then surely your own “armchair intuitions” are at the basis of your views about others having incorrect intuitions? I fully agree it’s worth “exercising some humility”. How about the arrogant claim by many that we have virtually the highest level of sophisticated understanding about physics? Really? Is that not reminiscent of the claim made in the late 19th century that all that was left to do in physics was dot the i’s and cross the t’s – just before Einstein overturned everything? Look at the pitiful state of physics! String theory has got nowhere, nowhere, in fifty years! Otherwise brilliant men believe in multiple parallel universes where there are other versions of David Deutsch. And they think that's more rational than Scientology! The whole edifice of current cosmology rests on a pseudo-religious belief in “dark matter” and “dark energy”, both of which seem to exist purely conceptually as a hole in the equations because we don’t really understand gravity at large scales, and neither of which is any more detectable than zombies. A new “Einstein” is perhaps eventually going to reveal this as the emperor’s new clothes. (Listen to Lee Smolin and Eric Weinstein if you think all the physicists have got it all right and can sit in their armchairs with smug grins.)
“The laws underlying the physics of everyday life are completely understood” – really? How about “except for consciousness”? (Or even except for the origin of life itself, or except for the work of Michael Levin which defies what “genetics” was believed to be responsible for?)
Dr Iain McGilchrist knows all about hemispatial neglect and the effects of brain damage on many aspects of consciousness, but a lifetime of medical and scientific and philosophical work has led him to the position that consciousness could be an ontological primitive, built into the structure of the universe just as matter and energy are.
I agree we shouldn’t be old-school religious about this, and believe in Cartesian dualism or the “soul”, but to believe that consciousness – the subjective experience, it “being like” something to be this – can arise as an emergent property from non-conscious matter is not necessarily a coherent position. It is worth thinking about what Brett Andersen said about this. Emergent properties are not wholly disconnected from the nature of underlying physical structures. For example, the behavioural properties of water such as flow (and wetness) and surface tension can be logically derived from the structure of H2O molecules. For conscious experience to emerge from a wholly non-conscious underlying physical substrate surely requires some kind of “miracle”.
So that does not seem to be a reasonable position unless you’re fond of miracles as explanations for anything, which I’m not.
[I am of course quoting Mr Andersen from when he was involved in important scientific work, and this has no relationship to anything he may have said while suffering from an unfortunate psychotic breakdown. If a great physicist said something brilliant, its content is not invalidated by him years later suffering from, say, dementia, and would not imply it should be treated with any less respect. I thought I’d better say that in view of the vicious and spiteful nature of many commentators on social media.]
I think the jury is seriously still out on consciousness, life, the “mechanisms” (necessary but unfortunate word, as McGilchrist fans will appreciate) of biology, and the level of understanding of physicists. Fortunately for the next generation – gives them some important stuff to investigate.
"surely your own “armchair intuitions” are at the basis of your views about others having incorrect intuitions?"
Sure -- my whole point is, let's put aside our intuitions. Sorry if it isn't clear, but the argument is:
1. Philosophical arguments around consciousness rely on our intuitions about consciousness
2. Empirical evidence from brain damage cases gives us reason to be skeptical of our intuitions about consciousness
3. Therefore our philosophical arguments about consciousness are on shakey ground
4. We shouldn't be willing to upend something we're very certain of (the laws of physics) based on something we are not very certain of (philosophical arguments about consciousness).
As far as concerns that physics isn't on firm ground because there are certain things we don't understand, Sean Carroll responds to those objections here: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/09/29/seriously-the-laws-underlying-the-physics-of-everyday-life-really-are-completely-understood/
Thanks for the link, excellent article. I see it agrees that physics doesn’t “know everything” about consciousness, dark matter, dark energy and so on, as these are not just “everyday life”. My points and my perspective were rather bigger than that, though. Perhaps I was not patiently reading the phrase “everyday life”, and perhaps I was going, possibly unfairly, beyond what you were really saying, trying to use the same “launching pad” for thinking but going deeper and further ahead. I just didn’t think it fair to leave the readers with a potential impression of “oh, this guy is smart”, which clearly you are, “and therefore this consciousness stuff is basically sorted out and not really philosophically or scientifically or even spiritually interesting” – which we are nowhere near, whatever our armchair intuitions.
Let me just chime in on some of the claims on physics. It is understandable that you get the impression of physics that you present if you read certain corners of the internet hostile to current theoretical physics - especially Eric Weinstein and his ilk. But as a professional theoretical physicist working on classical and quantum gravity myself, I don't think he gives an accurate view of neither physics nor physicists. Listening to Weinstein will unfortunately give you a very distorted, sometimes conspiratorial, view of the field. I know he can seem alluring, but relatively speaking he is not a person with deep knowledge of physics, and he consistently ignores serious physicists who are kindly willing to spend their precious time to give technical criticisms of his so-called theory of everything - a theory which suffer from inconsistencies that theoretical physics grad students learn to be on the lookout for.
Now, let me address some of your specific claims. I genuinely do not understand why you are calling "dark energy" pseudo-religious. We have a theory, general relativity, that fits experiment extremely well. That theory has a very natural free parameter, the cosmological constant, which a humble physicist have no a priori reason to set to one value or another the other. However, going out and measuring the expansion of the universe, we find that this constant is non-zero and positive, although extremely small. This shocked and disturbed many of us, but we begrudgingly accepted it. Many have tried to explain the smallness of it - but no one has succeeded. People have tried, people are trying, but mostly everyone concedes that it is a great mystery why it has the value it has. But it is not a mystery that such a term is present. Dark energy is a measured phenomenon, represented by a particular term in Einstein's gravitational equations. What exactly is religious about this behavior? What is a "hole" in an equation supposed to mean?
Second, what do you mean "the arrogant claim by many that we have virtually the highest level of sophisticated understanding about physics? Really?". It is just an objective fact that we can explain more phenomena than in the past. Yet physicists are woefully aware of how much we don't know about physics outside regimes where we currently have the power to measure. That's what makes it an exciting endeavor. As for criticisms of string theory, its not the Peter Woit doesn't have any points, but it doesn't get to the core of the issue, which is this: humanity currently does not have the capacity to measure physics at the length and energy scales where the quantum effects of gravity are expected to show up. We are left to theorizing based on consistency, rigidness, elegance and similar principles that have worked it the past. This is a pretty thankless job, but do you have a better idea than preserving some of the broad principles for guiding theorizing that worked in the 20th century? The glory days of physics in the 20th century had the massive luxury of constant new experimental data. That era is over. We picked the low hanging fruit in terms of measurements. While string theory has not produced predictions, it has produced more interesting insights into theoretical aspects quantum field theory, ways gravity can behave quantum mechanically, and mathematics than any other rival programs (by a factor somewhere between 10 and 100 in my personal biased estimation). Trust me, nothing would get me and my colleagues more excited than an alternative theory with greater promise. The sad fact is that no one has such a theory.
I'm curious for your view as a theoretical physicist--is Sean Carroll saying anything that would raise any eyebrows among physicists when he states that the core theory means the laws understating the physics of everyday life are completely understood (e.g. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/09/23/the-laws-underlying-the-physics-of-everyday-life-are-completely-understood/)?
Any commentary or alternative perspective you would add to Carroll's view, or how I've used it in this article?
Pretty much completely agree with Carroll here. As long as we don’t stretch “everyday life” far beyond what common sense dictates :)
Thank you for going to so much trouble to explain your perspective on this. I appreciate your level of education in and knowledge of this area far exceeds my own, and I appreciate that people can be led to hasty conclusions. I also appreciate that you could have said "It is just an objective fact that we can explain more phenomena than in the past" back in 1890, and it would have been just as true - or that you could have been one of the biologists rubbing their hands with glee about solving all our medical issues once the human genome had been mapped, little knowing how much they would be surprised by epigenetics and the allegedly "junk" DNA that they were so confident about, or bioelectrics. I'm sorry I do not have the ability to come up with any alternative theories to the string dead-end, but I'm pretty damn sure I'm far from one of the crazy ones if I don't believe in parallel universes, in one of which I played bass guitar for the Beatles or became the Chancellor of the Exchequer, or the supposedly irresistible conclusion that we must be living in a computer simulation. (I appreciate you have not attempted to discuss or defend either of those.) I also appreciate that wisdom and developments can come out of "left field", the outliers, quite unexpectedly, and that no one ever gave Jesus of Nazareth a degree in theology and that nobody ever awarded Bruce Lee a black belt.
As for the parallel universes and similar crazy ideas, I don't think we should hasten to dismiss them just because of their lack of intuitiveness or seeming craziness. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics can very much be criticized for other reasons - personally I struggle to understand the operational interpretation of this proposal - although I won't dismiss it because its crazy. Quantum mechanics is crazy and unintuitive, yet it turned out to be true (or at least it is true to a very good approximation, which is usually what "true" really means in physics). I agree that wisdom and developments can come out of left field, although it is a low probability event, so you would make a lot of money in the casino betting against it. Especially in a field like physics. The more a theory is rigidly constrained by existing empirical data, the less likely it is for an outsider to be able modify this theory without creating contradictions with observed phenomena. Without at least deeply understanding existing constraints, which for a field as deeply constrained and technical as physics is almost guaranteed to remove the outsider criterion, success is near impossible. You need to dedicate most of your life to it, which makes it extremely hard to do if it is not your full time job.
I am not sure this phenomenon maps well on to neither Jesus nor Bruce Lee. But I wanna emphasize that I do not say there is never developments and paradigm changes spurned by outsiders. I just think the particulars of physics are relevant to evaluate the probability for this to happen. I think any real paradigm shift in physics realistically only could be spurned by a combination of young professional physicists not wedded deeply to old theory, plus new experimental data.
I don’t want to criticize or argue with you, Mr Folkestad, as you seem quite wise as well as knowledgeable; and it is probably clear to anybody bothering to read this exchange that there are important ways in which you “know what you are talking about” and I just don’t, not having your qualifications or background; and all my thinking could be easily dismissed by such a reader as “Folkestad is probably involved in important contributions to human knowledge”, whereas “this other guy” (me) is just some kind of articulate troll who likes to take things apart, being low in the psychological “agreeableness trait”. But I can’t help it, there are things nagging at the edge of my consciousness about all this. Your comments about needing to work through the entirety of physics before being able to take it any further seem terribly conservative, like a father saying “do as I say, son, and as your father did before me, and one day all this will be yours”. I can’t help thinking of a youngish Einstein sitting on that trolley car looking at the clock tower down the hill and imagining riding on a beam of light. I can’t help thinking of the viewpoint on some aspects of physics being seen instead through the perspective of the neuroscientific, psychological and philosophical background in the work of Iain McGilchrist, and how that work also shows that the meaning of time and space is utterly different (from that of physicists) for people who have studied perception or schizophrenia. I can’t help thinking of how, if someone approached thinking about time and space through the work of philosophers such as Kant and Whitehead, instead of physics, their very nature or essence is not just “reducible” to, or fully understood only in terms of, physics or mathematics. Although my “examples” of Jesus and Bruce Lee were put forward reasonably casually, in fact on reflection they can be mapped on to my concerns and your comments very well. A number of historians think Jesus was actually illiterate, which seems quite feasible in the economic and cultural and educational world of first century Galilee – and I can imagine Pharisees trying to argue with his natural gift for down-to-earth morality and story-telling by saying to him, “You need to learn to read and spend years studying the scriptures and analysing the words of the prophets before you have any real understanding or any right to have people following you and listening to you.” Bruce Lee did an intense amount of research into fighting techniques of numerous world cultures, and then stripped it all down philosophically to “what really happens in, and matters in, a combat situation?” and “how do you use this as a vehicle for self-expression?” and “what is wrong, conceptually, with this world of constantly growing numbers of ‘systems’ and ‘styles’ for dealing with fighting or self-defence?” So he too went back to first principles, whereas an “expert” could have said to him, “You’re just an arrogant youngster and you need to spend years and years getting high-level qualifications in, say, three different countries or cultures, and then you’ll have the right to teach us (when you’re about 35, say, by which time Lee was dead, having transformed the martial arts world). We can’t tell the future, I know, but I like to imagine some smart young upstart getting a certain amount of knowledge and then going back to some first principles and yet again raising a glass to Thomas Kuhn, perhaps. (Agreeing with your comment, of course, about a possible paradigm shift coming from young professional physicists not wedded deeply to old theory.) But if I were going to live long enough, I'd love to put money on there not being parallel universes or a big Matrix simulation around us - having read McGilchrist I think these are fundamental left-hemisphere-led delusions. And I do hope no other commentator can be bothered to tell me about how useless old "common sense" tells me the sun goes round the flat Earth; I just think there are real differences between drawing logical but incorrect inferences from actually believing utterly crazy things. I don't include non-local quantum entanglement or wave-particle duality in those things - they're not crazy, they're just not understood fully or properly yet, whereas the simulation and the parallel universes really are crazy. (I say "parallel" rather than "multiverse", which is just too Marvel-movies for me, and rather than "other" - I could certainly accept other universes before and after ours. I just don't go for the "sliding doors", if I can use another movie reference!)
Thank you for taking the time to write this Graham. I haven't encountered McGilchrist, so cannot comment on his work. And I understand where your intuitions are coming from. Here is the thing that I see as challenging for your perspective (in case of physics, not as a statement about the potential of outsider contributions in general). A theory of physics is, in the final calculus, evaluated on its ability to explain observations. If you propose a new theory of physics that predicts the wrong spectrum of light that can be emitted from a hydrogen atom, then your theory is dead. If your theory gets the orbits of the planets wrong, then your theory is dead. If your theory predicts that gold has the wrong conductivity, then you theory is dead. If your theory predicts that light bends by the wrong angle when it passes a black hole, then your theory is dead. And I can go on, and on, and on. There is an extremely long list of quantitative predictions that your theory need to get right. And here is the problem: any kind of naive modification to the existing laws, or any kind of naively cooking up something, leads to a theory that gets one of these predictions wrong (usually many of them). This is a fact that is hard to appreciate until you try to do it yourself. But then you try, and you get humbled. It is not in principle impossible that a non-academic could physics, but they would have to dedicate a big chuck of their their time to learning existing physics.
Jesus was not in this situation. There aren't any empirically verifiable moral truths. Jesus was a visionary outsider that established a new religious paradigm, of course I will concede that. But he did not play a game where there are many verifiably wrong and right answers. The current theory of physics is extremely rigid. New religions are not.
As for comments on craziness, I don't really have anything more to add. Quantum effects are crazy in my view, so I see no arguments against multiverse from this line of attack - we're left with subjective evaluations of what is crazy and not.
Can you explain this, please, a little further: "That theory has a very natural free parameter, the cosmological constant, which a humble physicist have no a priori reason to set to one value or another the other. However, going out and measuring the expansion of the universe, we find that this constant is non-zero and positive, although extremely small. "
Are you saying the universe is expanding very slowly? And at a constant rate?
I’m still working through these issues myself, but I don’t think this adequately represents the conceivability arguments. For one, the distinction between logical possibility and natural possibility is rather essential to the discussion. The pz argument merely depends on the claim that what is conceivable is logically possible - not that it’s naturally possible. If a p zombie is logically possible, one reasons consciousness arises from the physical because of a contingent natural law, not because it is analytically reducible to the physical.
Your sideways flying jet is directly on point: we know a sideways flying jet is clearly logically possible, on the basis that it is conceivable. If a p zombie is like the sideways jet, then the argument goes through. It isn’t analytically true that a jet of certain dimensions in certain settings flies forward. It’s contingently true given certain contingent laws of nature. Similarly, it’s not analytically true that certain conscious states are reducible to physical states. Rather, p zombies illustrate that there’s just a natural nomic connection between certain physical and phenomenal states.
There is some irony here, because the problem with your entire argument is that you haven’t overcome your own physicalist intuitions. It happens too often that alternatives to physicalism are presented as a homunculus watching videos inside your head.
But this creates something worse than a straw man, I’ll call it a Frankenstein, an idea created when someone keeps all their physicalist assumptions and then plonks some kind of immaterial ghost into the brain. I mean in a physicalist universe, that's the only way it could happen.
But the non-physicalist doesn’t share these assumptions about a self-sufficient physical system, so all that's happened is we’ve failed to drop our own assumptions enough to even understand the view we’re criticizing.
I assume the core of your argument is that we can’t rely on intuitions to create theories of consciousness, I’d agree. But who is doing that? Conceivability isn’t an exercise in intuition. And worse yet for the argument, if we agree to ignore intuition, physicalism is incapable of even discovering that consciousness exists. That's one hell of an epistemic gap.
To be clear, the argument is:
1. Philosophical arguments around consciousness rely on our intuitions about consciousness
2. Empirical evidence from brain damage cases gives us reason to be skeptical of our intuitions about consciousness
3. Therefore our philosophical arguments about consciousness are on shakey ground
4. We shouldn't be willing to upend something we're very certain of (the laws of physics) based on something we are not very certain of (philosophical arguments about consciousness).
"Conceivability isn’t an exercise in intuition."
It is when we're ignorant about something, which is the case with consciousness.
"if we agree to ignore intuition, physicalism is incapable of even discovering that consciousness exists."
I'm not suggesting we ignore intuition, just suggesting we shouldn't privilege it above empirical evidence in domains we know we don't have good intuitions in. I'm not sure what you mean when you say that physicalism would be incapable of discovering consciousness exists
Why lean on the laws of physics so much at all? I'm just not convinced proponents of qualia/phenomenal states have made a good case for their views. I can reject those views independenetly of their inconsistency with physicalism: I just don't accept them on their own terms. That doesn't require endorsing physicalism.
I agree a good case hasn't been made for qualia, but I think arguing that is harder than pointing to the laws of physics
Maybe, but pointing to the laws of physics may not be the best long-term strategy for handling bad metaphysics. Many proponents of physicalism are still trading in the same mistaken, underlying presumptions as the views they reject. There are alternative philosophical positions that eschew these assumptions and don't end up entangled in disputes that are often driven by conceptual confusions and metaphilosophical presuppositions that one need not burden oneself with, e.g., pragmatism handles metaphysical issues neatly.
If you find an argument that convinces folks in the qualia crowd based on pragmatism, I'm all ears!
My ambitions are bigger than that. I think qualia belief persists among philosophers due to a legacy of bad methods and assumptions. I want the whole field to reform. Misguided belief in qualia is downstream of more fundamental mistakes, like putting stock in intuitions and ignoring psychology. Until and unless the field moves towards better foundations, we're attacking branches and not the roots.
I understand your argument, I’m saying it’s full of physicalist assumptions.
We’re not ignorant about consciousness, no one has any doubt about the existence of their qualia. What you mean is, we’re ignorant of the brain mechanism that produces it. But the non-physicalist rejects that there is any such mechanism, that’s only true if physicalism is true. And telling them that's only because we're at present ignorant of what it is, isn't an argument likely to convince them.
Consider “how” we know qualia exists. It’s not a scientific discovery. To make this point clearer, we could reword the conceivability of zombies so it’s a conclusion rather than a premise:-
P1 - If there is a conceptual difference between phenomenal mental states (ie qualia) and [whatever physical state is being identified with them eg neural states, behavioural states, functional states] then zombies are conceivable.
P2 - There is a conceptual difference etc.
C - Therefore, zombies are conceivable.
The conclusion of that argument has nothing to do with intuitions. And if you want to defend against it, you have to justify your identity claim. The response of "So What?" isn’t going to cut it.
The “so what?” applies to the conclusion here. I don’t care that something is conceivable, I want to know what’s actually possible.
Conceivable = possible.
Those are different words with different meanings. If you replaced conceivable with possible in your argument, then P1 is just assuming your conclusion
Sure, but conceivable means without contradiction. Without contradiction means not impossible. Not impossible = possible.
So if there is a conceptual difference between [some mental state Q] and [whatever physical states you choose to identify Q with - functional, neural, behavioural etc] that means we can have one without the other. No contradiction involved.
Rejecting qualia/phenomenal consciousness doesn't require distinctively physicalist intuitions. I reject qualia/phenomenal consciousness and endorse qualia quietism/something akin to illusionism, and I'm not even a physicalist.
I was responding to Tommy’s article specifically.
The key issue here is that there is not a d4finition of consciousness that is accepted by all students of it. Consciousness is the most important topic in biology and it is in need of a precise definition. Then, we could apply powerful new techniques such as molecular biology to unravel the development, physiology and pathology of this fantastic yet unresolved issue in biology.
Very well said, and argued! It's rare I find a post I agree with as much as this one.
I do think philosophical thought experiments can be useful for sparking conversation. But having the word "experiment" in them is misleading. It can lead people to think they tell us something about reality. But as you discuss, all they really do is clarify intuitions. Daniel Dennett's name for them was "intuition pumps", which I think is an improvement, and gets at their real utility. And the best ones challenge our intuitions, show where they break down, or become contradictory.
Interesting and thought provoking article! The finding you portray regarding brain damage truly shows how intricate our sensory conversion is regarding our registered perspectives and how easilly we take everything for granted - especially when we're not aware of what we're unaware of.
Note, I'm way out of my academic training (as an anthropologist) when I continue here - as it's merely speculations based on observations of different cultures, sciences, myths and the words of contemporary wise ones (enlightened individuals):
(Note: this is a very simplified description to avoid an overly lengthy text)
Some indeginous cultures claim "spirit" is in all things; rocks, trees, people, wind and such, some also say we're all connected and see the Universe/cosmos as one - expressed in all variations and fragrances. Even the Abraham religions claim that God resides in all (under rocks and so on). Further the eastern perspectives and contemporary enlightened ones points toward silence and emptiness as the "gateway" to awareness of what really is and to "unlock" our ability to achieve a state of Nirvana. While modern science has yet to find proof of a material soul and explains our smallest building blocks of the material reside in a wast emptiness comparable to our solar system and the distances between our planets.
Could it be then, that the "seat" (or source) of our awareness is this emptyness - a canvas that reality is expressed upon where conciousness as we perceive/understand it is only expressed through the biological sensory conversions that take place in our physiology?
(This interperation might as well have a name - though I'm unaware of it as this question just popped up in my head when I read your article. I saw a comment above referring to dark matter/energy which could be the same - though that's a subject I've yet to dive into)
On the other hand; proving or disproving this (nothing) seems as achievable as Russel's teapot and the benefits of achieving such probably as empty and meaningless as the void we all reside within.
Not sure if this speaks to your point, but the idea of "spirit" (or consciousness) being in all things is similar to pantheism if you want to look into that (I'm personally not a fan).
Pantheism is often a used description of certain indeginous cultures which I mentioned above though that was not exactly what I was pointing toward. Though as I stated, to prove/disprove atributes or the importance of 'nothing' seems like an imposible endevour. Interesting to reflect upon though.
Personally I'm not anchored in any beliefs but are just curious and like to approach subjects from new & different perspectives.
Nice article and a good conversation (though I am disappointed there were no casualties in your battle), but I don't think your characterization of the zombie argument here is very accurate/charitable. No one (or at least no one serious, I think) is arguing:
1. Zombies are conceivable
2. Therefore physicalism is false
There of course need to be some connecting premises there, which isn't something proponents of P-zombies have missed. Rather the argument goes something like:
1. Zombies are conceivable
2. Anything that's conceivable is possible
3. If zombies are possible then physicalism is false
4. Therefore physicalism is false
It is important here that conceivability here is meant as *ideal* conceivability--I can conceive of the 384511th digit of pi being both 3 and not 3. No one is arguing that anything interesting follows from that. But I cannot ideally conceive of any other digits of pi than the actual digits. Likewise I cannot ideally conceive of a large collection of H2O not being watery stuff at the macro level (holding the laws of nature fixed). But it looks like zombies are ideally conceivable--even if we know all physical facts about some universe, we can never be 100% whether there is consciousness or not.
3 basically runs from the idea that physicalism, if true, is necessarily true, from which it follows (assuming that zombies are incompatible with physicalism, which seems pretty obvious).
2 is clearly the most controversial. On the face of it, though, it looks like this is how we actually determine possibility. In your conversation with Connor you of course raise the counterexample of a posteriori necessities like water=H2O.
Here we need to be careful, though, as "water" can be a somewhat ambiguous term. Until 1811, it meant "watery stuff", but after 1811, "water" acquired the additional meaning "H2O". But while it is both conceivable and possible that "watery stuff" isn't H2O (it could for example be XYZ on twin earth), it is neither conceivable nor possible that H2O isn't H2O, meaning it is no counterexample to premise 2.
Now, I don't really see what is supposed to follow from brain damage causing weird conscious experience. No one is disputing the important role of the brain in consciousness. I guess the idea is that there can be strange conscious experiences that we would not expect to be possible from everyday introspection, meaning we should be distrustful of introspection.
But what you show, I think, is not that we should be distrustful of introspection, but that stuff we might expect given everyday introspection can be overturned by reports based on other introspection.
Imagine if I make the same argument with regards to empirical observation. From everyday observation, I wouldn't expect that, say, there is a limit to how fast light can travel. But it turns out that other more specific observations are best accounted for by light having a speed limit. That does nothing to show that we should not trust observation.
With regards to how revolutionary dualism is with regards to the core theory of physics, I don't really think it is very much. No one is claiming that causal closure or whatever is violated in particle accelerators. Instead, interactionist dualists claim that it is violated in brains. But pointing to causal closure holding in experiments done on non-brains gives no evidence against interactionist dualism then.
Thanks for the comment!
I agree I'm being a bit flippant with the zombie thing, but I think the point (that it's based on an unstated intuition about mental and physical being fundamentally different) is true.
In your breakdown, whether premise 1 or 2 is controversial depends on how much we load onto our concept of "conceive". If we say "ideally conceiving means nothing we ever learn about the physical world can change this", then saying "zombies are conceivable" is just saying "nothing we ever learn about the physical world will contradict zombies", which is a huge assumption, I don't know how you could know that.
I get the intuition: it's not clear how we could explain mental stuff via physical stuff because they seem different. It does not follow there can never be such an explanation, or that without such an explanation physicalism is false.
Re: brain damage--I think you've nailed most of it but not the conclusion. If one empirical observation contradicts another, we would take that as a lesson to be a bit more careful with the conclusions we draw from empirical observations. And we do this! We calibrate our certainty in empirical observations based on the fact that often our inferences from those observations are wrong. If there was something we could be significantly more sure of contradicting some empirical observations, we should be more willing to go with that because we know empirical observations can lead to incorrect conclusions. If we had some magic book of truth, we should look at that to learn stuff instead of looking around at the world.
"But pointing to causal closure holding in experiments done on non-brains gives no evidence against interactionist dualism then."
I think this is very much understating how much we understand about physics and how big a deal it would be if the core theory was fundamentally wrong in this way.
I agree that it is a bit hard to know the extent of ideal conceivability, though I think it is not a particularly wild claim to say that nothing we could ever learn about the physical world could in principle contradict zombies. I mean, what would that look like? Everything we ever learn about the physical world can be described from a 3rd person, or neutral, perspective. But consciousness appears to be essentially 1st person; while we can observe all sorts of things in the physical world that we suspect correlate with certain conscious experiences, we could never in principle be sure whether there is actually consciousness there--we can only know by *being* in those states. It just looks completely implausible to me that we could ever--even in principle--completely remove the problem of other minds or questions of qualia inversion just through empirical observation.
We can of course be certain conditional on a certain theory of mind. For example, if functionalism is true, we can be certain that some system is conscious, since we can observe the functional states of that system. But for this to contradict the ideal conceivability of zombies, functionalism would have to be an a priori truth or something, in which case I guess there is no point in arguing about it anymore, since you have already won :)
I suspect we aren't actually too far apart on the introspection/observation point, we may just be talking past each other. I agree that seemingly conflicting observations (eg. that tables appear to be solid, but theories based on other observations tell us that they are actually mostly empty space) should make us more skeptical of certain inferences based on observations--likewise with introspection. But observation in itself isn't to be mistrusted because of this. This is because an observation doesn't force us to make any specific inference in itself: I can have the visual experience as of an apple in front of me, and from this infer "there is an apple", "I am hallucinating an apple", "The space in front of me is mostly occupied by material", "The space in front of me is mostly empty, but with a bit of material arranged apple-wise", etc. Some of these inferences are made less certain by other observations, but this does not mean that the observation itself is to be "mistrusted"--it doesn't tell me to infer, but it is still a data point to be accounted for on my worldview regardless. Likewise with introspection.
With regards to causal closure, I agree that causal closure being violated in the brain would be a large revision to the core theory. But consider now "the schmore theory". This theory is equivalent to the core theory except that it does not hold causal closure in the brain. The schmore theory predicts *all* observations we have made just as well as the core theory, and so the core theory is in no way better supported than the schmore theory. And the schmore theory is of course compatible with interactionist dualism. The schmore theory is of course less parsimonious than the core theory, and in that way it starts at a disadvantage to the core theory. But this is not something that cannot be overcome by strong enough reasons in favor of interactionism. So while causal closure makes the evidential burden for the interactionist larger, it is far from a knockdown argument or fatal problem for the theory.
Re: conceivability, my original point was the argument is drawing on an intuition. You articulated that intuition: "while we can observe all sorts of things in the physical world that we suspect correlate with certain conscious experiences, we could never in principle be sure whether there is actually consciousness there". So we're in agreement it needs an addition intuition.
Obviously I disagree with the intuition. I think it arises from a conceptual confusion. Learning things can lead to new theories that lead to new concepts, which should make it easier to avoid the conceptual confusion.
Looks like we're aligned on the introspection thing.
Re: schmore theory--It's not just that it's less parsimonious. It's that schmore theory would have to preserve all current predictions but have very specific different theories that it's hard to imagine wouldn't have dramatic empirical consequences. For example, how would particles know their in the brain? That seems like it would violate locality, a central part of the core theory. Is a new theory that violated locality while preserving our empirical observations possible? Maybe, but the burden of proof is on the dualist. Such a theory would almost certainly lead to empirically testable predictions. But no one takes this seriously enough to do the theoretical work despite the fact that if it was validated you would go down in history. Maybe all theoretical physicists and potential theoretical physicists are all just turning up their noses at the chance for eternal glory, but I wouldn't hang my hat on that.
It's interesting to see what our disagreement on conceivability amounts to! I am not sure that it is actually an additional intuition--i think that no amount of observation/knowledge of physical properties being able to determine whether something is conscious may just *be* what it is for p-zombies to be ideally conceivable. But that is really just a semantic question and not relevant to the actual dispute :)
Though I am certainly interested in the fact that you disagree with that idea! I take it that that means that you think we could in principle settle whether some lump of matter is conscious (with certainty) through observation/experiment? I would be very interested to hear what sort of experiment could in principle settle this sort of question. I of course don't expect that you have a worked out experiment ready to perform, otherwise you would be on the plane to receive your nobel prize. But I assume you still have some rough idea of what sorts of things we should look at.
I suspect that your answer will be that we work out a complete (functionalist) theory of mind, detailing what sorts of experiences correlate with what sorts of functional states. From there we can look at new lumps of matter, and test whether they instantiate said functional states or not. My worry with this is that to gather data to develop such a theory, we will have to look at conscious lumps of matter to determine their functional states, but this assumes that we know which lumps are actually conscious. But to determine which lumps are conscious we of course need to know what to look for, which is exactly what we're trying to find out. For this sort of method to get off the ground, it looks like the theory we are trying to develop would have to be an a priory truth known with absolute certainty--otherwise we could always conceive that the lumps of matter we have been looking at to develop the theory were not in fact conscious, meaning it would be conceivable that a lump of matter which is actually conscious is not conscious, meaning it would be conceivable that a p-zombie could exist, even if we knew all physical facts. I of course don't want to put words in your mouth--I am sure you have something more/different to say to this!
These sorts of disputes sometimes make me question whether your consciousness is the same as mine--though I'll be charitable and assume that you are not a philosophical zombie ;)
Concerning the schmore theory, I may be a bit out of my depth here. I suspect it would be possible to work out a schmore theory, though I don't have a good enough understanding of the core theory to do the dirty work.
One form this theory could take, may be something like "[The core theory] except in systems that satisfy X", where X is some condition for being a conscious system. It looks like a physicalist will also have to give some sort of account of X--for example: such and such functional states obtain. However the physicalist draws the boundaries of conscious systems, the dualist can just steal those boundaries and say that within those boundaries locality, or causal closure, or whatnot doesn't hold.
I am not sure that we would have to violate locality, though. After all, particles don't have to "know" that they are in a brain. Rather, on substance dualism for example, a soul would have to "know" where a brain was, so it could cause changes within that system. I don't think that any of this would conflict with any observation that is used to support the core theory, as it would be empirically equivalent to the core theory in all non-conscious systems. All that is needed is that causal closure doesn't hold in systems that satisfy X--outside of such systems, we just have the regular core theory. So unless we test systems that satisfy X (which I take it we haven't), no observation can provide any evidence against the schmore theory.
Again, I don't know the physics here very well, so what I am saying may just be nonsense to your ears!