The Zombie Argument (from David Chalmers)
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- Опубліковано 16 жов 2024
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This is a lecture video about a short article by Amy Kind, wherein she explains David Chalmers' famous Zombie argument against physicalism. A "zombie" is a philosophical term for a creature that is micro-physically identical to a normal human being, but who doesn't have any consciousness. The argument, briefly and roughly, is that such a creature seems conceivable, which means that such a creature is metaphysically possible. If zombies are possible, then consciousness cannot be identical with any physical state of affairs, meaning that physicalism is false. This video lecture is part of an introductory philosophy course.
Surely this is a circular argument. By imagining an identical 'zombie' can exist you are assuming that consciousness is not produced by physical processes, then using the imagined zombie to prove that consciousness is not a physical process. (Great series of videos by the way - I'm hooked!)
it's not circular, the zombie is just a concrete illustration of the general claim that consciousness is not a physical process
@Optimistic Determinist Sorry, I still disagree. There is nothing that precludes a physical cause of consciousness except the initial assumption of this argument. I'm reminded of the 'god of the gaps'; if we can't work out how it's done, it must be God. You can't prove what the cause of consciousness is with thought experiments imo. You need physical evidence, and just because evidence hasn't been found yet doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
@@jimdunleavypiano the argument claims that zombies are possible. That should be false if physicalism is true.
Now, it is true that the argument may look question-begging. But when we come to such fundamental claims, it is hard to avoid question-begging arguments alltogether.
E.g.a physicalists would say that zombies are impossible? Why? Because physicalism is true! But that's also question-begging.
The zombie arguments expresses an intuition of the contingency of the link between mind and body, which is not compatible with physicalism. Of course, it is perfectly legitimate from physicalists to attack that intuition, and the disagreement turns into disagreement on the relative plausibility of competing intuitions: that minds are material versus the one that body can exist without the mind.
The conclusion is baked into the premises. The zombie is identical physically and behaviourally but not metaphysically. Well thats what we are trying to find out with the question of the source of consciousness.
Maybe I should take mushrooms to know what these people are on about.
@@renb7850 Identical accusations could be levied against physicalists: their claim that consciousness is physical is already baked into their denial of the possibility of zombies.
That kind of debate is counterproductive.
Is consciousness physical? If yes, then zombies are impossible. If zombies are possible, then consciousness is not physical. Those conditionals are very plausible. Now the question becomes: what is more plausible - that consciousness is physical or that zombies are possible? Jut the fact that each of those implies something about the other doesn't mean that some party in the debate is begging the question. These logical relations are precisely what enables us to infer something about one side of those ''equations'' from the other. That's simply how normal argumentation occurs.
When you wrote "garbage ankles" I was like "where tf is this going" - turns out it's a FANTASTIC analogy!
Your videos are awesome!
Under physicalism, If a zombie had the exact same molecules in the brain then his conscious experience would be the same. The fact that one can conceive of a concept of it, only means that ones understanding of consciousness presupposes that physicalism is false.
This is a nice concise rebuttal. I get frustrated by philosophical arguments that rely on our intuitions about things without attempting to justify those intuitions.
Not necessarily, if you don't mind some hair splitting. While we know the brain has something important to do with human-like consciousness, we don't really understand what that is. There are some good arguments that only some fraction of consciousness arises from networks of relationships within the brain, and a significant fraction arises in the broader networks of relationships between the entire environment, including the person, with a heavy bias toward brain structure. In this model, consciousness does not reside IN the brain, or in any other bounded object defined purely as a convenience for the prediction machines that are our brains. Conscious may be much more broadly systemic with not clear boundaries. So you'd need to reproduce the entire system (perhaps extending to the entire universe, or at least all of it that falls within in both spacetime light cones), not just the physical person. (I am a physicalist when it comes to consciousness/awareness, but I suspect it applies to a broader range of phenomena than most assume.) All that being said, you're totally right in that just because one can conceive of something doesn't mean it is possible or true. I can conceive of transubstantiation of bread and wine into flesh and blood, but I don't think it's possible without some very advanced technology that has never existed on Earth.
Correct
@@fxm5715your response here is incoherent.
Thank you so much for making these videos! They really help me to understand theories and arguments that are completely foreign to me otherwise
You're very welcome!
Your videos are so good. They deserve more views.
Thanks! I have no idea how to work the UA-cam algorithm.
Jeffrey Kaplan They’ll get popular soon! Well as much as philosophy can on UA-cam.
Are these videos from a curriculum you teach like at a university or something? Or do you make them for another reason?
I found you while trying to get extra info for my phil of law class and found your law playlist.
Your comment is good, it deserves more likes.
I would attack the zombie argument at step 1. A zombie copy of you would answer probing questions about its subjective experience exactly as you would. Yet it’s not having any subjective experience from which to draw upon for its answers. This is inconceivable.
It's preposterous because even if consciousness isn't entirely physical, it certainly springs from the "zombies" subjective experiences.
And this is why Philosophy is almost entirely bullshit. What philosophers accept as “rigorous” often just doesn’t hold water. They’re not proper scientists.
Ithink i'm being pushed into barking up a similar tree.
what if you can't build a zombie without consciousness arising, meaning that zombies are indeed impossible.
Similar to the way that you can't have a perfect copy of a marble run that isn't inherently a marble run in its own right.
@@jamesfforthemasses Yes. If you make a list of the conceivable causes of consciousness (having an experience) it seems to me that “the processing needed to give coherent answers about its plans, thoughts, expectations, and experiences” is by far the most likely candidate.
Even if we knew the exact cause of consciousness it would still seem like magic that that thing gives rise to a conscious experience and wouldn’t be a satisfying explanation. It would just be so.
The whole argument seems critically flawed just on the face of it.
If someone is starting from the presumption that consciousness is a physical process, then the idea of "creating a one for one copy that just isn't conscious" would be the exact same nonsensical concept as creating an exact molecular copy of Jeff with good ankles.
Making an exact copy would inherently require the consciousness to be copied as well. If consciousness is physical, then making an exact copy that doesn't have consciousness is just nonsensical and contradictory.
This means that the entire argument with the objective of disproving something rest on the initial presumption that the thing is already false. In order for the first argument to be true, the conclusion needs to be presumed true. Its just circular reasoning.
I'm genuinely confused as to why this would be taken seriously by anyone.
Useful video, thanks!
My objection is to premise #1: if conscious states are self-aware states, and an organism is interacting with its own thoughts about itself in order to generate its behaviors, then a zombie wouldn't act in the same way as a conscious person since it wouldn't have access to that behavioral feedback that consciousness generates.
No, the zombie would act exactly in the way a conscious being would upto the point of claiming itself to be a conscious being, because the behavior of a p-zombie would not be dependent on it's thoughts. It would be based entirely on the structure of it's body and the physical laws of the universe. Consciousness is not needed for behavior. Thoughts are just an additional feature, but don't themselves lead to any behavior, the structure and firing of the neurons does.
@@Thatoneguy-mh4bx Sounds like you're proposing epiphenomenalism (consciousness is just an ineffectual byproduct). But I think Skythikon is correct that IF our thoughts and consciousness do have causal effects on our actions - obviously beginning from a molecular or neural level - then a philosophical zombie lacking that input or feedback would necessarily have different molecular/neural activity. Trying to imagine the same activity without the input/feedback from consciousness would be like imagining a literal knee-jerk reaction without anything tapping the knee; writ large we can imagine that activity, sure, but in detail we can't coherently imagine that effect without its cause, unless something else was different to cause it. To produce a similar-acting philosophical zombie (if consciousness/thought has some causal role) we would either need something, however minute, to be different at its molecular/neural level to replace that missing feedback, or else we're simply invoking magic akin to molecularly-identical ankles that are nevertheless healthy.
Excellent objection to step 1 from Skythikon in other words.
Epiphenomenalism avoids that problem, but I think the argument still fails on other points, namely
1) If philosophical zombies are only 'metaphysically possible' as outlined in the video, then it only follows that physicalism is not metaphysically NECESSARY; it doesn't tell us whether or not physicalism is actually true, so there's a problem with step 3
2) If philosophical zombies were physically possible, then the conclusion is correct that physicalism must be untrue; but the claim of philosophical zombies being physically possible is obviously unprovable and would be rejected by any physicalist on the grounds that those neural patterns and behavious would invariably produce consciousness - so that's a problem with (a variation of) step 2.
@@Thatoneguy-mh4bx "because the behavior of a p-zombie would not be dependent on it's thoughts" - If that is the case, the zombie copy isn't exactly the same as the original.
This is so obvious to see. All it does is to reinforce physicalism, because there is no way to prove the absence of consciousness can have the exact behaviour as having consciousness. We can be "fooled" by the appearence of consciousness, but that's another thing. It's about the observer lack of lnowledge, not because the non-conscious thing can perfectly imitate having one.
@@clorofilaazul I only said the behavior of the p-zombie would not be dependent on its thoughts BECAUSE according to physicalism, it is assumed that behavior is entirely dependent on the physical laws of the universe, which have nothing to say about consciousness itself. If true, then where, how or why does consciousness play a role anywhere? The point of the p-zombie argument is as a question to physicalists to demonstrate how a non-conscious thing cannot be conceived to imitate having consciousness.
@@Thatoneguy-mh4bx You said "The point of the p-zombie argument is as a question to physicalists to demonstrate how a non-conscious thing cannot be conceived to imitate having consciousness."
Well that being the case to put the onus of proving onto physicalism , how about this question :
Can we conceive of a computer that could learn over time , and then develop behaviors that are consistent with exhibiting malice and or empathy ... and maybe even boredom ?
I pick those because they seem rather more complex than love,hate,fear which seem to have a more instinctual basis , rather than something arriving from the inner workings of consciousness . Albeit not sure about boredom ... what you think ?
But anyways ... seems like something we could be testing eventually ... rather than the p-zombie never being testable ?
I'm currently failing my philosophy course in college and your video just helped me understand so much! I'm currently writing a paper and will be linking your video for the professor. Thank you!
Glad it was helpful. Yes, please share the video with anyone.
@Jeffrey Kaplan theoretically one could conceive a 5 sided triangle speaking 4D terms. Consider a two dimensional triangle. And then consider another two dimensional traingle in such a way that both triangle points meet (one going through/melded in the other). Take that concept and repeat until 5 sides become visible and/or - fuck wait. That would make the concept have a ratio of 2. Meaning it would follow a 2, 4, 6, 8, side theory. The theory stands. Could one argue with that concept there is such thing as a "4 sided triangle"? 🤔 i suppose this is breaching dimensional theory as well tho lol
@@valak9663 That was my 1st thought also.
Tri-angle is a 2D object. 3D would be a Tesseract, and 4D yet again something else.
@@hillarysemails1615 this makes sense. How intriguing to play with both philosophy and dimensional theory all in one conversation!
Such an interesting concept I've heard about before, but I love the breakdown you give these topics beyond surface level!
Jeffrey: “you can’t conceive of a five-sided triangle”
San Quentin inmate: “you calling me stupid?”
Fr xD So dense.
I can. Imagine we live in a world where the prefix "tri" means five.
@@fkknsikk That still doesn't allow you to imagine a five sided triangle. A triangle isn't defined in terms of the glyphs used to write the word "triangle".
@@mrosskneNot exactly a triangle as the bottom is square but a four sided pyramid is a 3 dimensional shape consisting of triangles and if you add the extra dimension of time that would be fudging the definition of a five sided triangle. Just something to be silly here as it wasn't stated that I had to imagine the five sided triangle in a 2 dimensional state.
@@gm2407 Not a triangle.
If this guy was my ethics and philosophy teacher in secondary school, i would have a PHD by now
Yes! Such clear teaching with fun thrown in!
The self deprecation is for me really appealing but also a neat teaching trick imo. It makes you want to come along for the ride instead of setting himself up as a super serious authority figure to abase yourself before in return for knowledge. "IDK how to spell either of these words", spells both correctly, "IDK much about the standard model of physics", immediately names most of the particles in the standard model, etc etc. He's right there with you while you're learning.
There wasn’t much philosophy in many secondary school. Government dont want kids to be that smart.
Why the ankles argument doesn't apply for the Zombies? In the first case we say, no, no, if the ankles are exactly the same molecule for molecule it means they have to be bad, but in the Zombie case we say that it's exact copy of the human, but we make room for the difference - lack of consciousness. Everyone who thinks physicalism is true would say that if the zombie is exactly the same then it will have consciousness and can't be the same molecule for molecule and doesn't have it, just like with the ankles. I'm missing something in this argument, may be I need to look more into it.
I don't know much about philosophy but your videos are great, I'm just a biotechnology student who wants to know more about philosophy, so thank you very much sir.
Awesome. And glad that you like the videos. If you want the videos organized by topic, or into courses, I have done that on my playlists page: ua-cam.com/channels/_hukbByJP7OZ3Xm2tszacQ.htmlplaylists
I just graduated w my masters in Biotechnology, what jobs can I get lol
Keep making these videos!! You are helping me so much and I need you to keep going 😊 Can you make a video of Frank Jackson’s view ?
Already done: ua-cam.com/video/QhTRbXpfKw8/v-deo.html
A five sided triangle can't be imagined because it violates the definition of what a triangle is. I can imagine a five sided figure that I could say was a triangle.
Okay? You would be wrong though.
@@jacobsandys6265 No, just using different labels or rather: an 'already in use label' but for referencing a new concept (kinda like the word gay meant happy not too far in the past but now means male homosexual); that of course does not actually work around the problem of the original demand to "imagine a five sided figure that (among other properties) has exactly three sides", which is the 'fully spelled out' version of "imagine a five sided triangle".
@@christiangreff5764 Sure I can imagine a 5-sided shape that we call a triangle, but I can’t imagine a 5-sided shape that is a triangle.
@@jacobsandys6265 A five-sided shape would not meet the conditions necessary to be categorized as what we currently and commonly refer to as a triangle, on that I concur.
I can imagine a universe where the definition of a triangle not only allows, but requires 5 sides. I have thus imagined a 5 sided triangle.
I have a feeling that finding out what creates consciousness would come with many other answers to our entire reality, the universe and everything
Oh yes! Be careful what you wish for! 🤔🙄😠👺
42
@@walterbushell7029 hahaha. I see what you did there. I still haven't seen the whole movie. :3
Near-death experience consensus thankfully debunks religions and material atheism dogma. Hehe.
@@ReligionAndMaterialismDebunked It was actually a radio series and later a series of novels before it saw a movie adaption, the movie is only the first novel if I remember correctly. They don't even find the question to 42 in it
The jurors in the Toronto murder trial of Kenneth Parks, who killed his mother-in-law in 1987, could conceive of unconscious actions that mimic willed, self-aware behavior. Parks was acquitted on the grounds that he was actually sleep-walking, and therefore not conscious of his actions, when the incident took place. Really, the zombie argument is just another way of framing the other minds problem. We all leap across an epistemological gap when we attribute something like our own inner awareness to other people. This is sometimes referred to as forming a theory of mind about other actors, or in Dennett's terminology, taking the intentional stance. The Turing Test is a technological variation on this same problem and question.
This is what I was looking for! All of our current popular philosophical debates eventual leads to Chalmers vs. Dennett.
Prof Kaplan - great video, but I wish you had spent a bit more time on the various objections. It seems like the conceivability premise is the one that is most often attacked. It does appear that the very premise pre-supposes that physicalism is false.
Exactly!! I was searching for such a comment.
If those zombies are just like us, that is if they are too made of exactly the same number of molecules and their orientations are all same, they would too be conscious.
There is a huge problem with this argument
How do you know that "zombie" ("clone" would be a better term) does not have consciousness?
How would you determine that it does?
Because by definition it doesn't. You're asking "how do we know the [physical copy of me with no consciousness] has no consciousness?" The answer is just that we know it a priori because we just stipulated it.
@@jacobsandys6265 Yes, but if the whole argument relies on it being possible that the zombie does not have consciousness then defining it to not have consciousness makes this pointless. That's like saying the hypothecial ankle is an atom for atom copy but isn't weak and when asked how that would work answering "because I defined it to not be weak". The lack of understanding is leveraged to argue for the possibility of a zombie where it's exactly our lack of understanding that makes it impossible to judge whether such a zombie is possible in the first place.
@@christiangreff5764 But the difference is that the strength of an ankle clearly supervenes on its physical structure. How could an identical ankle not be weak, since weakness just IS a description of its physical structure and dispositions? Consciousness seems different because we actually can conceive of zombies because it seems that it is logically possible for consciousness to not supervene on physical structures.
Also, saying “there’s a huge problem with this argument: how do we know the ankle isn’t weak?” is still a terrible reply. It is stipulated.
@@jacobsandys6265 The striking difference between the ankle and the brain/consciousness is that we understand the ankle. Our incapability to conceive of a functioning ankle that is also a perfect down-to-the-atom copy stems exactly from our understanding of how the ankle functions, it's incompatible with our model of the world. We do not have such an understanding for the brain/consciousness; the very question we want to answer is whether an atom-for-atom copy would also be capable of producing consciuousness or whether we would need to add something else.
If I didn't have an understanding of how the world works that tells me the weakness of the ankle is directly derived from its atom-arrangement, then there would be no problem in conceiving of an atom-wise copy being stronger; if I, for example, extend my model to also include non-physical 'weak ankle curses' that wouldn't be copied, then I can suddenly perceive of such a thing as a atom-for-atom copy ankle that is also not weak.
I'm not a professional philosopher so I don't get much chances to discuss this kind of issues with others, but for the past 20 years since I read David Chalmers' zombie argument I've been wondering how in the world such nonsense received so much attention. The argument you present here is pretty much what I thought the first time I read it (including the "five sided triangle" idea). In my opinion the zombie argument could be praised if coming from a high school student, but beyond that it's just idiotic.
Maybe that's because you are a p-zombie and don't know what it's like to be conscious
@@andregustavo2086
He's a zombie, a p-zombie "knows".
I’m of the same opinion. Sleight of hand versus sleight of verbal communication…
i reject the premise that such a thing is conceivable. if it is molecularly identical to me it must therefore have the same conscious experience as me. by saying that the zombie is molecularly identical but lacks the conscious experience it assumes by definition that consciousness isn't physical
If it's possible for a physical body like an airplane to work without consciousness, then why can't a physical body like a human body work without consciousness? Even if you posit that that is "impossible" (in which case you have to prove why it is impossible), that still does not mean that it is "inconceivable." In fact, you and I both just conceived of it. It's easy. If you think it can't be pulled off, then show why it can't.
@@ambitionbird because consciousness is a group of related processes working in tandem. this is like asking me to concieve of one bike, a perfectly normal, working bike with all necessary components, and then asking me to concieve of a 100% identical bike that is the same in every way and yet the wheels dont spin. this is impossible because the spinning of the wheels is a necessary byproduct of all components of the bike being arranged as they are (wheels axel gears etc). in the same way, the "zombie" that molecularly identical to me *must* be conscious because consciousness is occuring because of all the molecules in my body working in the way they do
@@realbland This is just assuming that conscious experience is a physical process. That is an unproved assumption. You are begging the question.
@@ambitionbird yes of course! that's exactly the trouble with the original argument as well. it tells us nothing about the nature of consciousness, only the opinion of the person making the argument.
i wonder if it was molecularly identical to you would you then be able to see out of it?
Because I am a random viewer (not following the lectures in series), I got a little lost. But I think the presenter (lecturer) is brilliant and in the end I was able to make sense of it and simply loved it.
I will tactfully throw this Zombie argument into a social conversation some day to earn some social points.
For the argument to work, we would have to change how we think of consciousness. I think everyone, regardless of whether they believe in libertarian free will or in hard determinism, will agree that consciousness (whatever it is) has SOME impact on the agent's physical body. Be it their behaviour or psychological state. (and psychological states have physical effects, see the placebo effect). This precludes us from imagining a zombie without consciousness, that behaves identically to a human with consciousness. Precisely because the human's consciousness impacts their behaviour or psychological state, which is observable.
So, we instead have to accept that consciousness isn't relevant to someone's behaviour or psychological state. In other words, it isn't observable by any means whatsoever. It is no different to a soul at that point. So how are we to accept anyone's claims about said consciousness, if we've never truly observed it? Not even subjectively? Whatever the argument for it being physical or non-physical is, how can it possibly be correct when we don't have experience with it existing it all?
The Zombie revision that comes to mind: if we mapped every aspect of your brain into a computer, which would perfectly produce its function, would this be close to the Zombie proposition? It would respond to stimuli exactly as you would, it would identify "pink" just as you would, but would it experience qualia or would it be nothing more than a mechanical mimic, a simulation of you?
I think this question revolves around "freedom" and it takes two forms, 1) Freedom from mechanical function, and 2) Freedom of mechanical function. AI Alpha Zero will play the same piece with the same board orientation every time and for the same reason because 1+1, no matter how many times it runs the sequence, will necessarily always = 2, as such, it hits its freedom limit of the 2nd kind.
But, but are you merely mechanical, bound to the limits of your programming, and as such, are your evaluations and decisions necessary, determinate? Or do you exhibit freedom of the 1st kind?
Now we see issues with Alpha Zero, particularly as it competes with Stockfish, and we can abstract a model of AZ which addresses these issues, producing AZ v2 and v3 and v4…
1) Mechanical constructs cannot abstract itself (imo, the essential criterion for “self”)
2) I can
3) therefore I am not mechanical
Programming AZ’s view of itself or leveling up (Godel); seeing one’s self from a third party position context, would be necessary for it to have that capacity, but this would only beg the question by pressing the same 2nd kind objection of the first on to the second level. This is the paradox of self reflection leading to an infinite regression, thus driving any potential resolution beyond the bounds of this Universe and founding the repudiation of physicalism.
Even for AI there's no such thing as 'bodyless consciousness', their mind exist in the form of code that is stored in a hard drive somewhere
Wow thank you so much for this! This is so well put and you make it easy to understand! When will you start making theology videos?
The Zombie Argument sounds a lot like the modern NPC meme.
People who don't think for themselves, merely regurgitate common talking points. Leading to the meme that they aren't conscious.
"We can coherently imagine zombies" is carrying a lot of weight. It really seems to be begging the question by sneaking in the presumption that consciousness is an optional addition to physicalism. That's the conclusion Chalmers wants to reach ... but it's in his first premise.
A pyramid is not a triangle.
5 sided triangle: 1) cut a triangle (any type) from a piece of paper. 2) label each edge (so, “1”, “2”, “3”). 3) label the side facing you “4”. 4) turn the triangle over. 5) this unlabeled ‘side’ is “5”. Do this exercise in abstract Euclidean space. The kind of space you use anytime you sketch on paper. The space you learned about in geometry where points are dimensionless, lines such as the edges “1”, “2”, & “3” have only length, and planes such as faces “4” & “5” have only length and width. If you can sketch a box, a cube, then you can conceive Euclidean space, and now you can conceive a five-sided triangle, a six-sided square, a seven-sided pentagon, and so on. And you didn’t even need to wrap your mind around additional dimensions and projecting between them.
Inconceivability/conceivability have more to do with manufactured constraints of thinking than with actual constraints of reality. It’s unnecessary to personally experience (know) something to understand it. Likewise, you have little to no problem conceiving the non-existent, even the impossible. Sherlock Holmes, Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, Harry Potter and Hermoine Granger are not actual people but fictional characters. They have no consciousness. You can understand this without having to exhaustively search (personal experience) the planet for them. Yet you’re likely to have been personally influenced by one, or more, and you thought of those as if they were actual people. We do this - treat the conceptual as though it is actual in reality - effortlessly, unconsciously, naturally. We fall into narratives, theories, stories, conjectures, movies... You likely accept that sound travels in the vacuum of space. That you can hear lasers blast and objects hundreds, even thousands, of kilometers distant explode loudly. You readily think about re-animate corpses walking-dead or barely living infected, brain-dead critters trying to eat you. Taking the philosophical zombie - a complete, particle-for-particle doppleganger lacking “consciousness” - as possible IS NOT the problem. Seeing the ‘philosophical zombie’ for being a red herring IS.
Arguing in any serious manner either for or against the ‘philosophical zombie’ concept prevents understanding the category error of treating episteme (knowledge, conception being a kind along with imagination; sense-perception, therefore hallucination; empiricism; and so on) as having the same status in reality as the ontic/ontological (fundamental grounding of existence). To bring all this abstraction into focus consider how it is that any possible knower can know. Another way to get at this is to ask, “How can episteme (knowledge and knowing knowers) exist without an ontically physical reality? Can physical reality exist without knowers and their knowledge? If humans and all other knowers ceased to exist would there still be stuff they made? Or things they named like rivers, oceans, plankton..? Or entities, processes, being that no knower ever knew? And wouldn’t plankton qualify as a knower?”
The same immense, automatic conceptual ability that allows us to navigate our experience so successfully also allows us to treat that ability and its conceiving/knowledge as existentially prior within reality. That is, we can and do treat our ability to conceive and our conceptions as arbiters of existence. Hence, one quickly arrives at some form of Idealism. Dualism is an Idealism. Kant, Hegel, Marx, Weber, Sassier, Horkheimer all Idealists. The “social construction” of ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ is an Idealistic trope, which is but a step away from nihilism and/or solipsism.
I’m not advocating for the abject dismissal of thought experiments or ideals any more than for the abandonment of knowledge and reason. I am advocating for a pedagogical change. Teaching early, repetitively, and integratively that each of these along with language, philosophy, science, theory, belief, established “laws of nature” like those of thermodynamics and evolution by selection, all thought, and most unconscious behavior are attempts to model, or map, reality. No map is ever going to be the territory. A map, a method, rule, procedure... will ever be only a guide. And since the territory-universe-reality will ceaselessly, indeterminately change; all maps, all models are both necessarily incomplete and reductive. That is, no model can capture all or even enough of reality to avoid being wrong in some way to some degree. To model all of reality with fidelity would require all of reality, at least twice: the original reality (R1) and the model (r2) running within R1. This would require all the energy to run R1 and an equal amount for r2. If r2 is expected to predict R1 an unknowable additional energy demand will have to be met to continuously run-revise-run an unknowable number of anticipatory scenarios (r2 * n) within R1. So, a meta-physically plausible scheme to model reality within itself is conceivable yet absurdly impossible. To obtain realistic models means accepting reduction. Such trade-offs have long been reasonably understood, yet the principle is rarely acknowledged, much less taught - even poorly.
gibberish
The area of a triangle is not the side of a triangle?
Loved the video! By the way a triangle cut out of a piece of paper has 3 sides and a front and back side. A five sided triangle.
Thanks! But a triangle cut out of a piece of paper is not a five sided triangle, because it isn't a triangle. It is a three-dimensional object. I believe it is a 'triangular prism'.
@@profjeffreykaplan That's how you conceive it.
P.s. and thus it is conceivable.
@@shoutitallloud Yes, and your conception of it is confused, just as with the zombie.
Very good, you beat me to it!
@@profjeffreykaplan Lol! OK, a paper cut out 'triangle' is a really really squat prism. But a 'real' triangle would be part of a Euclidean plane. Would a Euclidean plane be considered to have two sides?
A triangle with 4 sides, that would be tough to conceive, though... I will work on it.
Thank you!
Premise 3 is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition to reach conclusion 2. The best we can do with this on is to modify conclusion 2 to say that it is possible that physicalist is false. But this doesn’t move the discussion forward
Just like in game Soma, your or anyone's zombie (exact copy) will be conscious, and zombie and original will be thinking of themselves identically
This argument follows from a very specific version of a zombie, I don't know if it is actually the zombie that is posited by Chalmers, you are arguing against a carbon copy zombie. A copy of the physics. It seems obvious that the copy of the physics will also be conscious because the physics somehow correlates to the consciousness in some way even if it's not generating it. But the real zombie argument is about behavior, is about observation. So if a chat GPT robot can convince you that it's like a human that sees pink, that's the zombie because you know that it's not a brain. It's a large language model running a robot that just looks really convincing, but it might sound convincing and there's no real way to tell from the behavior. And we certainly don't have a way to tell from the physics or the chemistry. That's the real zombie argument I think?
"Garbagenous" is now officially a word.
Every argument against physicalism requires a certain amount of faith in my opinion. When I replace the word consciousness with soul I can’t help but think consciousness is thought of as something “other” merely because it’s a creation of humans. An illusion perhaps, or at the very least a fabrication we’ve created to explain phenomena with a tidy label.
When you have to create a literal straw man to argue against an idea
"I'm going to make an exact copy of your leg, except for the problem part of it."
"Well that's impossible. Either it has the problem, or it isn't an exact copy."
"Right. That's what the word 'except' means."
Then the dualist has admitted that dualism is false.
I had my paper ripped off in the mid 70s by a greedy philosophy prof. It was related to split brain experiments. In my opinion this philsophical argument is mathematically equivalent to quantum physics principles about quantum entanglement. But there is a flaw in this video - please write it down in math nomenclature. It's called logic 101 - there is a gap that needs to be explained
Very good, thanks. Interesting and entertaining as well. Thumbs up
thanks also to Amy Kind and David Chalmers, obviously (and to the poor zombies without consciousness...)
The problem of course with understanding consciousness as something non-physical is: How can this non-physical phenomenon be formed or captured in a physical body?
Yeah, that's a really hard question. No one has an answer. That's no reason, though, to just re-define clearly non-physicaly phenomena, like for instance, the experience of silently counting to ten, as physical, just in order to avoid that kind of hard question. It is just like the man who drops a key in a dark alley, then goes to look for it on the sidewalk because it is better lit.
@@ambitionbird
Your intuition that thoughts must necessarily be nonphysical is unfounded and indefensible, whereas the existence of the physical world (and the fact that thoughts are known to exist and have causes and effects there) is well evidenced.
To search in the dark alley, you must first know that the alley exists and it is possible to drop your keys there.
A man that had never seen or knowingly been to a dark alley might be forgiven for not assuming his most precious belongings all go there whenever he can't find them.
Of course, maybe it's not in the invisible, undetectable dark alley. Maybe it's in the invisible, undetectable cave nearby. Maybe it's tangled in the roots of the invisible, undetectable tree. Or maybe it was whisked away by a gryffon to its nest atop Death Mountain (the gryffon and the mountain both being undetectable, by the way).
If you begin looking for undetectable causes, you will have no leads, and search forever without any progress.
I'll stick to searching the sidewalk for now. We have a lot more work to do there before we resort to using dowsing rods to search for dragons' hidden lairs.
@@ambitionbird What is clearly non-physical of me silently counting to ten? I have seen no data that would suggest it isn't anything but very physical activities carried out in my brain, as seen from the inside perspective of being that brain.
@@christiangreff5764 then speak for yourself. I do not see or hear anything phsyical when I silently count to ten -- and if someone alleges that there is a physical process corresponding to it, then I need to see the evidence of that. I am not going to presum that such a thing is real without evidence -- that is begging the question at best.
@@ambitionbird Attributing consciousness to complex though not yet understood electrochemistry is purely based on already established phenomena, in stark contrast to attributing it to something 'non-physical', for which we do not have any evidence, either. Until evidence for such non-physical stuff is found, I think it most prudent to assume consciousness derives from already observed phenomena (see the principle of Occam's razor). This is further backed up by the fact that many observations we already have are easier to explain within a purely materialistic model:
1) Effectiveness of psychadelic drugs: Them affecting conscious experience is easily explained if it's just them altering the brains chemistry but in a non-physical model we would have to explain how this physical stuff influences the non-physical.
2) Along a similar line, the effects of brain injuries or being knocked unconscious: If consciousness is the brain experiencing its own activity, that is easy, but in a non-physical model we again have to find an explanation for how the physical injury can influence the non-physical.
3) And the other way around: How does the non-physical influence the physical so that nerves are transmitting signals to muscles to make our bodies move?
Thanks for the video, had a question about the zombie argument on my test, helped me alot!!
Never underestimate people's ability to conceive of stuff.
Imagine a pentagon, where two of the angles between its sides are exactly 180°. You got yourself a five-sided triangle!
Of course, people will immediately object that this shape is either not really a triangle or not really five-sided, but at this point the argument devolves into semantics.
A three-sided square can be more of a challenge, though 🙂
The problem with a five sided triangle is that a triangle has exactly three sides by definition. As a well defined object there's simply no room for "conceiving" to apply. Anything fitting the definition is a triangle and anything not fitting the definition is not a triangle. Context does matter, though, as a different definition of a triangle might apply outside plane geometry as described by Euclid.
No, it doesn't devolve. You imagined either a triangle with three sides, a pentagon with five sides, or something else that is neither of these. Claiming to have imagined something, and imagining it, are not the same.
@@mrosskne Retrieve my imagination and prove me wrong!
@@whycantiremainanonymous8091 Okay, let me explain it in a way that even you can understand.
If we define a term, then each appearance of that term in a statement can be replaced by its definition and the statement's meaning won't change.
For example, if we agree to define "human" as "rational mammal", then the statements "Socrates is a human" and "Socrates is a rational mammal" have the same meaning.
We define triangle as "three sided polygon".
The statement "I imagine a triangle" is equivalent to "I imagine a three sided polygon".
The statement "I imagine a five sided triangle" is equivalent to "I imagine a five sided three sided polygon".
You are, of course, free to lie about what you imagine. If your goal is to convince anyone of an argument by this method, you won't achieve your goal.
@@mrosskne Let me explain it in a way that I'm afraid you will continue to refuse understanding anyway: your arbitrary definitions are not an actual constraint on reality. They can be modified and played around with. The "if we agree" that you started your pontification with is merely a conditional. When we're working on a rigorous mathematical proof, we might indeed "agree" (even though extending and rethinking definitions is the heart of mathematics, so even here the agreement is only partial). Elsewhere, nobody is committed to agreeing with the definitions you make up.
Excelent work! I'm really thankful for your lectures.
Please do a video on Kripke “Naming and necessity”!! It would be so helpful
^ yes!! I completely agree!
Perhaps in a future semester. I will try. These videos take a lot of time!
Jeffrey Kaplan that’s OK good videos
I think many would say: “A perfect copy of me would have my ‘soul’ but still neither of us would contain any spirit. We’d be equally misunderstood and mislabeled along with all humans as having a ‘consciousness’ and ‘soul’. We’d then see spiritualists fighting over how it is that we can both (appear to) have souls when a soul is indivisible. Then one of us would be burned at the stake.”
Philosophers make irritating assumptions. The casual assumption that consciousness is one thing and it’s on or off like a switch is the first whopper. I’d ask anyone if they know of an animal that has no consciousness. If so, are they certain its unreadable nature means it actually lacks something? There’s no reason to think my clone would appear to have no consciousness. Rounding that up to ‘I can’t imagine a zombie’ is just false.
I regard consciousness as yet another construct we use to explain a familiar blur of (physical) processes.
same bruh, this problem is worthless
Even if the first two premises from Chalmers argument were sound. i think all its proving is that physicalism is not necessarily true, not that it is false.
Because if physicalism is true, you can not conceive of a particle true copy _without_ consciousness, it would follow with the molecules. That is the framework of physicalism. So premise 1 goes down fast and nothing is proved. Such a deficient but perfect copy would indeed be a very strange and foreign concept as I see it. I like Chalmers, he is a nice fellow, but I fail to grasp how he can paint himself into such a corner. He just has a proof of his own premise.
I've been a physicalist all my life I'm majoring in physics then I realized that wait a minute... I can't get colors from 1's and 0's, they must exist on their own. That's how I got here.
@Bryana Leigh Then imagine, you talk to the copy, all evening, laugh at your shared memory, having so much fun, then tell her you believe there is nobody behind her eyes, you got all the marbles. She would then cry and claim the same for you and finally you would probably accept that you are both equal and the same. That is what I think would happen, at least, the idea of having the visual impressions from four eyes may be a bit of a stretch.
Surely the interesting question is: does consciousness inevitably arise from certain arrangements of molecules? This is not easy to answer but just imagining that it does (or not) doesn't seem to help.
This argument is entirely just begging the question. It's doesn't show or prove anything.
I always thought there was more to this argument. It wasn't merely that philosophical zombies are conceivable. It was that if you can account for all behavior by reference solely to the third person properties of physical stuff, then there is nothing for first person mental stuff to do. It doesn't explain anything. Since first person mental stuff is unnecessary to explain behavior, philosophical zombies are possible and physicalism is false. Or something like that.
The first person mental stuff is the physical stuff.
I can say that I have met my fair share of zombies in life, so Chalmers is definitely right on argument 2.
As long Zombies are not attacking its Ok. Most dangerous Zombies have high education and occupying the Gouvernment in very high positions.
We know that we can't imagine the 5 sided triangle because we have the precise definition of what makes a shape a triangle. We do not have a precise definition of what makes a body conscious, therefore we do not know whether we can "imagine" the zombie. I certainly can't imagine the zombie, but this is just because my definition of consciousness already makes it incoherent. The zombie argument really is circular.
Imagine there is a soccer game going on and you are watching with a friend. The friend is a huge fan and wants to prove, that soccer is something supernatural, fundamental, not reducible to physical stuff. So he proposes a thought experiment: let's say that there is a zombie soccer game, it looks and goes exactly as a normal soccer game, there are players and ball and all that stuff, you couldn't distinguish it from a normal game from outside. But: There is no soccer game there! Hm. For me is sounds like BS... And the soccer example too😂
excellent example. just like consciousness, the thing "soccer" isn't something that exists in the world, rather it is a consequence of a pattern of objects arranged soccer-wise (not only in space, but across a period of time as well).
I would love to see Jeffrey Kaplan explaining Chalmers "Subsymbolic Computation and the Chinese Room". That would be a great and fitting addition to his course, touching a very pertinent topic right now. I am also hooked!
Chalmers seems to be saying two things: that a perfect clone of a human being would necessarily be devoid of consciousness (he forgets that it would also be deprived of life) and/or that what is feasible, as it belongs to the mental realm of conceived possibilities, cannot be physical. As these two points are extremely simple to the point of triviality, he weaves a convoluted argument in which he uses zombies as a marketing gimmick. The physicalist would remain unfazed since she could always argue that we have a narrow idea of the things her matter can do. Being a reductionist principle, materialism can never be refuted. It is a kind of protean god to the extent that no matter what you say, it can always reply that X "is nothing more than a process or property of Z" (matter). The only thing that you can do is to pin your interlocutor down to a definition of matter that shows it simply cannot do all the things she ascribes to it. The idea that imagined things are somehow entities that cannot have a physical existence with physical reality is patently false. We would not have computers or planes if that were the case. Therefore triangles must a riddle both for physicalism and Chalmers.
You are the best
Well, triangles are figments of the imagination, created by our collective experience and education. But there are images projected inside our brains due to our daily existence which can be considered instances of such, and conversely the "ideal" triangle came from stripping several such everyday objects to their bare essentials and generalising them.
Ha ha! Five sided triangle popped right into my mind when at 4:30 you asked us to think of one. Cut a triangle out of a pc of paper. That is 3 cut edges, so: a triangle. But there is a side of the paper facing you, and the other side of the paper, on the other side. Total, 5 sides. And all together, 3 angles (pointy bits) to your construction
Which is all just a fun semantics thing, does not detract from what your are getting at.
Wait, this is the last lecture in this course? I'm sad! I want more!
If we can conceive of the zombie, then physicalism _may_ be false. Just because we can conceive of it doesn't mean it's real, any more than unicorns are real just because I can conceive of them.
This seems a silly argument, so I probably missed something...
No, you got it right. The argument is incredibly silly.
As soon as he began presenting the argument formally, I _immediately_ rejected premises 1 and 2. It was so easy and so obvious that I spent the rest of the video waiting for an added twist that never came.
I can coherently imagine person with magical powers and an identical person (molecule by molecule) without magical powers, therefore a person with magical powers is possible, therefore physicalism is false because of magic?
Man! This was really damn good! Gonna have to check out some of your other videos, pronto!
Thanks!
The first principle of teaching anything is not to criticize it before you have presented the argument for whatever. Mixing in possible criticisms as you present the premisses to an argument makes it much more difficult to follow the argument.
Only present criticisms AFTER you have presented the entire argument with its conclusion.
People "coherently imagine" false and contradictory things every day. It's really dumb to use that as a logical axiom.
I watched the whole video and listened intently and I still do not understand this. :(
Great series on philosophy of mind. I have a video request. Could you please make a video explaining the different versions of dualism (property, substance, interactionism)?
I heard another philosopher describe metaphysics as "a personal set of beliefs about the most basic rules of reality". For instance that gravity is an attraction between objects with mass.
First I thought of Star trek tOS, and that temperamental transporter, putting out metaphysical zombies all over the galaxy. Then, at 9:40, when "you" said "The zombie will say " I see the pink colour" but it really doesn't", it struck me that the 'person' I was watching and listening to, was not really seeing the pink! I believe Dr. Kaplan said those things and saw the colour pink back some two years ago! I was being lectured to by a metaphysical zombie! - an un-self-aware copy of Dr Kaplan (except the zombie is left-handed)
You cannot appreciate this, but please pass my thanks for another good lecture to the real Dr. Kaplan.
When you strip away the 'zombie' language this whole argument becomes: "you can conceive of physicalism being false, therefore it is possible that physicalism is false, therefore physicalism is false."
You can also "prove" the existence of 5-sided triangles if the argument starts out with "imagine that a shape with 5 sides is called a triangle." Because that's the same thing. We don't know how many sides the metaphorical shape of consciousness has, so the premise "imagine that consciousness has 5 sides" only **seems** less ridiculous than "imagine a triangle has 5 sides". But they're still the same thing.
What.
A triangle is defined as a 3 sided object. Something with 5 sides by definition cannot be a triangle.
There are so many flaws with this idea and I am genuinely curious what definitions are being used that are vastly different from what I am used to to make this "logic" work.
The problem with the argument is, that we don't know enough about consciousness (yet?). It could well be that consciousness is emergent from a sufficiently complex system for processing information. In that case the molecule by molecule copy would also become conscious.
It could also be, that the arrangement of molecules is incomplete without consciousness, and couldn't reproduce human behavior, although that would be more of an argument against physicalism.
From a physics perspective there is a problem with making an exact copy in the first place, since an unknown quantum state can't be copied exactly without destroying the original quantum state, but maybe just putting all the atoms and electrons in the right places is a sufficiently faithful copy.
Most arguments against physicalism very much remind me of the "god of the gaps", only here it's not god, but some mystical quantity: Take something not yet understood and argue that it must result from some higher/other plane of existence.
Not sure how precise Mrs. Kind is when Ive only ever heard Chalmers call them P-zombies, the P denoting "philosophical".
I feel that you are describing a golem rather than a zombie. A zombie is a reanimated corpse, and there can only be one copy of the person existing at any time, either alive, or reanimated. Whereas a golem is an animated, anthropomorphic being created entirely from inanimate matter, (more along the lines of what you are talking about). However, both require the application of magic, so both can be dismissed as being possible anyway. And this leads us back to where we started.
The argument defines what a zombie is (for the purposes of the argument), arguing about the name is not productive.
The refutation of Chalmers' leap from proposition one to proposition two is found in a more precise (updated) view of epiphenomenon. In this view, feedback is considered. It is posited that any perfect physical copy CANNOT be constructed that will not also experience consciousness. Chalmers' premise number one is then held to be false. Chalmers has effectively "missed the forest for the trees" by adopting an antiquated, outdated understanding of how epiphenomenon actually operate in the real world, thus setting up his own metaphysical impossibility.
The simplified argument seems to be, "If we can conceive that consciousness is an extra thing, then consciousness is an extra thing." That seems a circular argument. That said, we can conceive of things that are not true. They aren't definitionally untrue, like the triangles, but they can still be untrue.
(1) I can coherently imagine that a spaceship can go faster than light.
(2) Faster-than-light spaceships are possible.
(3) The speed of light as a physical law is false.
i think a good way to imagine this theory is the following: Imagine if you have a box of loose atoms, just atoms of different kinds, kind of like a unsorted, messy lego set. Now you take these atoms which on their own are just matter, they are not conscious, and you start aranging a person or just a brain. You start with one atom, stick another atom to it, boom, you have two atoms, you just keep going and keep going until you have assembled a full person/brain. What is really interesting in this perspective, if physicalism is true, at some point in this assembling, a consciousness would arise. Like consciousness could just be one more atom apart. You take that one atom away - no consciousness, put it back again - conciousness. Mind blowing.
A differently wacky physicalist (me, I'm the differently wacky physicalist) might instead claim that the single, unsorted atom is already conscious.
It's not the type of conscious that results in the statement "I am conscious", the way a brain does, but a type of conscious nonetheless.
Now, as you arrange more and more atoms, the end result more and more closely resembles what you think of as a human brain, and so also grows more and more similar to being conscious the way a human brain is.
Basically, if you assume matter is inherently experiencing everything that it is, and everything that is happening to it (a counterintuitive assumption, I know), further absurdities (like the consciousness magically manifesting in the brain after you add a single atom, or the obvious absurdity of Epiphenomenalism, or the impossible interfacing problems of Cartesian Dualism) disappear.
Read the description everyone. You are misunderstanding one thing about the argument, which is that it claims that zombies could exist. Of course it’s somewhere just an assumption, but it’s not completely unfounded.
Conceivability seems a weak basis for the argument. I can say I conceive a universe where consciousness is physical but there is different physics for zombies, robbing them of it. That is just the flip side of P1.
Conceiving that the Zombie can exist is simply conceiving that physicalism is wrong. The problem with this example is that we don't know what would happen if we recreated a copy of someone, nor would we have any idea how to do so without them having a conscious experience. If physicalism is true than recreating a person where every physical thing about them is identical would simply recreate the same person at that point in time. That person would then have a consciousness and mind already. If the alternative is true and something more is required, then it wouldn't work, and you would get a zombie. Since we don't know what would happen, and since the argument fully depends on what would happen, we can't use this fictional counterexample to attack physicalism. That I can conceive that physicalism isn't true isn't a Valad point against it, I can just as easily conceive that dualism isn't true.
I used this argument for an essay, but I coined the idea of A-zombies (academical Zombies) where we have people who are reluctant to actually dive in knowledge and just pretend to have culture to be a part of culture in order to survive and be a part of society.
Would love to know if my theory has any weight
In my humble opinion, if something that we don't understand can interact with matter and matter can interact with this 'something' we could say that this 'something' cannot be radically different from matter.
Alcohol can change our conscience and my conscious willing to move chair can change chair position it means that conscious should be part of knowledge of matter world.
that's very simillar to Elisabeth's question to Decartes:
"Given that the soul of a human being is only a thinking substance, how can it affect the bodily spirits, in order to bring about voluntary actions?"
i.e. if the consciousness is non-physical how can it interact with the physical body?
thank you this has really helped mw with my univesity paper on philsophical zombies
It doesn't matter how better you make the ankle, someone would find a task that is so intense that the ankle would be regarded as a bad ankle. The only option left is making it perfect which is making the limited object unlimited => contradiction
In a certain way I think this argument is like saying that you could create a molecule-for-molecuole copy of a battery that couldn't hold an electric charge. The electric charge is, in many ways, separate from the physical structure of the battery. However, it is a property which arises naturally from the structure of the battery. It may be discharged/dead upon creation, but you would still be able to charge it and use it in exactly the same way you might use the original battery.
That is to say, if a philosophical zombie was created, I don't see why it couldn't GAIN consciousness upon being exposed to the world. I am dualist, but it also seems obvious to me that physical processes have a direct effect on consciousness. You can lose consciousness or have your consciousness altered via physical changes to your body. (think comas, alzheimers, schizophrenia) If consciousness can be destroyed by the physical, why couldn't it also be created by the physical?
Can one construct molecule by molecule a living human being? Even Frankenstein's monster had to be animated in a second step. It seems that something is missing.
For the point about consciousness being destroyed by schizophrenia, the dualist could say that the connection between the mental world and the physical world was disrupted by a physical illness, so that the original qualities still existed but could not be accessed in the physical world. The effect could go both directions. The mental world would no longer receive updates from the physical world.
In addition, if there are anomalies in the physical world, why couldn't there be anomalies in the mental world? Then the brain structures would all look normal, and the chemistry would be right, the history of the person would be nominal, but the defect would still be there. I believe that such things have happened. Then the medications would fail to work, I suppose.
Would it possible to re-imagine this argument going the other direction? For example, P1. I can concieve of a disembodied consciousness (God for example, or ghosts or what have you) P2. It seems possible for disembodied consciousnesses to exist. C1. Therefore consciousness is not physical. Perhaps my formulation is poor, but this seems to have similar argumentative grounding as the Zombie Argument. Though I agree with the conclusion, I don't find the argument satisfying as it seems to tell us more about our conception of the mind than anything else, and our conception may not reflect the state of the real word. If this objection were raised for the Zombie argument, or mine, how might one respond?
Forget zombies, what about energy? Mass can be converted to energy or already is energy, but how can energy be something physical? What shape does it take? Lets say I climb a tower which increases my potential energy, in what physical location within spacetime does this potential energy reside? what's its temperature? what color is it? what is it touching? how fast is it moving? what's length and height? is it rotating? is it pulled by gravity? what's its density and volume? can it reflect light or make noise? what changes were made to the atoms, molecules etc of matter before and after being converted to energy?
I'm not well-versed in those topics, or for that matter philosophy in general, but your videos are both entertaining and informative. Keep up the good work!
Speaking about the argument at hand, I don't understand why it's impossible to conceive of a molecule for molecule copy of your legs without garbage ankles, but we can coherently imagine zombies, copies molecule for molecule of a person without being conscious. If consciousness is an emerging property like the flimsiness of your ankle , then I can't conceive of a zombie.
Why does the ankle instance violate metaphysical/conceptual laws? And why the zombie does not?
The first premise states that zombies are conceivable. This is true only if consciousness isn't contingent upon the physical world. It's true that consciousness can be contingent upon something else or can be a transcendental, that is to say not contingent upon anything, property of the universe. However, I'm not aware of an argument or method by which we can determine the correct answer. I think is more parsimonious to assume physicalism, at least until a world beyond the physical one is demonstrated to exist.
I am missing something - how does 'zombies are possible, C1' inferred "therefore consciousnesses is not physical". I get is _allows_ for non-physical consciousness ingredient, but it does not necessitate it in any way. Therefore physical-only consciousness is still quite possible and quite consistent with present experience.
I was in school when Chalmers was first making this argument. Essentially it relies on a kind of begging the question (there are other rejections, this was mine). Assuming a particular conclusion based on missing information. Essentially Chalmers' argument is half of a type of hypothesis:
1) A physical system is necessary AND sufficient for consciousness
2) A physical system is unnecessary AND(/OR???) insufficient for consciousness
In all cases the position of the physical system is what is being tested. There is no conclusion to be drawn without the empirical results. Like any empirical result we can't logically derive a conclusion. Neither answer can be considered *True* without a test. The zombie argument assumes *an additional state of existence*, namely metaphysics, and so by Occam's Razor it is problematic. I have the intuition that Chalmers' position is a *not even wrong* fallacy. Nevertheless, I prefer to view it as a part of a hypothesis.
Even Dennet appealed to *illusory experience*, but he did so staying firmly physicalist. I prefer the standard physical notion of *virtual*. We do not see virtual things without physicality. Virtual things do not exist in a different dimension. It is much more likely that virtual language is more useful than metaphysical language. Virtualization scales at different complexities. We can have everything up to conscious experience in a continuum of virtualized pieces. There is a certain model of neurophysiology that is at least analogous to virtual processes.
There's more to this than should be written here so I'll leave it at that.
In the same way that having 3 sides is an inherent property of a triangle, I could just make the claim that having consciousness is some inherent property of the microphysical arrangement of the brain.
Also if you make two sides of a pentagon very small, you can make it look superficially like a triangle (but with 2 corners 'chopped off'). But just because I can superficially 'conceive' of something doesn't mean that's how it actually is, even in theory. It may look like a triangle, but it's not. It may look like philosophical zombies are conceivable, but I don't know that they are.
On a similar note, I think P2 is backwards in terms of causation. I'd argue that we can only truly and fully conceive of that which is metaphysically possible (considering the possibility for the entirety of something to be conceived in the first place, which I doubt anyway). We may still be able to superficially conceive of things, whether metaphysically impossible or not, though. This is because the mind make models & abstractions of the outside world, not the other way around.
Also if something can interact causally with the "physical" world, I'd consider that thing part of the physical world (otherwise there's the problem of a seemingly arbitrary line). When people say "nonphysical," or "supernatural," I get confused as to how that's not a contradiction. It feels like seeing a chair and claiming there's a "chairness" nonphysical property in the universe, and having a lot of it makes that thing a chair.
Maybe this is a semantic confusion of 'physical' concerning the material, and 'physical' concerning a system of physics and interactions.
There is one thing we know. That is, the mind (consciousness) exists inside the brain. There is absolutely no evidence of a mind existing without, or outside of, a brain (I know many people have a fondly held belief that the mind does exist outside the brain, but so far no one has been able to show any evidence for that). As an aside, try to imagine a mind with no body. What would such a mind spend it's time doing when there is no sensory input? Consciousness is a very interesting phenomenon, but it's worthwhile to remember that it is probably a "spandrel" in evolutionary terms. In other words, it exists because of other things in the brain. After all, the really essential things, like sight, smell, touch, hearing, and taste exist across the animal kingdom, often times evolving via different paths. That fact those senses exist throughout the animal kingdom tells us how important they are. By the same token, the lack of "consciousness" in most lifeforms tells us of how little importance it is.
"The garbagenous"
Instant sub! I love people who make up words to explain something 😂
Let's say we travelled to an alien planet and discovered that on that planet, some objects exhibit a previously unknown property: glorpiness. We even discovered that our hair exhibits glorpiness when on that planet. Our scientist have made many attempts to figure out how it is that the objects exhibit glorpiness; however an explanation has so far eluded us and what is worse, our hair seems to be microphysically identical to regular hair outside the planet. After spending a few years on the planet, we have an intuitive understanding of glorpiness and what it is like, but we have not gotten any closer to explaining it in a physicalist sense.
With these assumptions, we make the following thought process:
P1. We can conceive of our hair, being microphysically identical to the same hair, but not exhibiting glorpiness. This is in fact our observation.
P2. If hair without glorpiness is conceivable, then it is metaphysically possible.
C1. Hair without glorpiness is metaphysically possible. (of course we didn't even need to derive this, we know it's real so it must also be metaphysically possible by any definition of metaphysically possible)
P3. If hair without glorpiness is metaphysically possible, then glorpiness is nonphysical.
This is where we get a problem. It seems that if P3 about conciousness is plausible, then P3 about glorpiness seems to be even more plausible! But in this case, it seems pretty clear to me that it's just a "nonphysicality of the gaps", so to say.
I don't understand the difference between shit ankles and consciousness. If we cannot imagine molecule for molecule ankles that aren't shit, why can we imagine molecule for molecule zombies without consciousness? It seems to be assuming consciousness is non-physical from the start.
Hi i need some help checking if this idea makes sense! Would an argument in reverse refute the zombie argument? e.g in a zombie world, it would be impossible to conceive of a physically identical world in which conscious beings exist (because it is impossible to conceive of anything in a world without consciousness) so in such a world, it is metaphysically impossible for conscious beings to exist. yet the fact that we know that conscious beings exist shows that logic is flawed and cannot be used.
Hm, I think that's a good direction of inquiry, but I'm not convinced of one of your premises.
I imagine myself looking through a magic portal to a physicalist universe, filled with only philosophical zombies. I'd listen in on some philosophers in that universe discussing this matter, and they would say the exact same arguments - that they can imagine philosophical zombies unlike themselves, and they would also claim to experience consciousness. Perhaps they would all come to the same conclusion that they live in a nonphysical universe.
I would then ponder, "if they can come to the conclusion that they are in a non-physicalist universe, maybe it's not such a strong argument."
Audio is somehow skewed. Left channel need around 20% amplification.
You need to put an additional constraint about how molecules are organized. There could be many configurations of the same molecules that are different from the original but have the same quantity of molecules loosely reorganized to fix the bad ankles.
I don't know. The issues are glaring with the truth of the premises.
P1: I can conceive of zombies that lack consciousness entirely- What's a zombie that lacks consciousness entirely? Does it have a physical analog to the supposed metaphysical effects and traits of consciousness? If no, then surely something that cannot be imitated, cannot be imitated. If yes, then I would not be able to tell whether I am conscious or not. Whether my consciousness is physical or not- any battery of tests, including listening to myself, would eventually tell me the same thing.
P2: Conceivable does not imply possible. I can make up more and more intricate analogs of a truth in perspective, but that does not create an objective truth in of itself. We humans have made some serious exercises in imagination with a geocentric system only to come to the conclusion that it simply can't be.
P3: If zombies are metaphysically possible, then consciousness is nonphysical-> if a cake can be chocolate flavoured then all cakes are chocolate flavoured? Possibility does not imply certainty.
This is why I don't like modus ponens. The If-then implies missing assumptions and jumps in logic that are conveniently skipped over. Attacks on premises can be easily cast as petty, in the reverse. I could say "if the sun rises tomorrow, then I am batman". The sun rises tomorrow. Am I batman? No, but you'd have to attack the truth of a premise to do it. With mental hypotheticals, it is difficult to achieve a certain conclusion that the sun rising and I am batman do not have a "if then" relationship.
What is a garbage ankle : inefficient ankle=> doesn't do what its made to do
If someone climbs a tree and falls down, the ankle is fractured but the ankle is not garbage(inefficient ) because ankle is not made for climing the trees. I find the matter of finding something garbage completely subjective
The fact that we can coherently conceive something certainly doesn't mean that the thing is possible. Many science fiction writers have coherently conceived faster-than-light travel, even travel back in time -- but that doesn't mean that these things are possible. And if you say that time travel and faster than light travel can only be conceived "coherently" (even in a metaphysical sense) by those who do not fully understand the physics involved, one could easily make the same argument for the zombie -- that it can only be "coherently imagined" by those who do not fully appreciate the complexities of consciousness. And that's assuming that we accept that we actually CAN coherently imagine a zombie, but ca we? We can SAY that we can imagine it, but doing so requires that we understand what it means to be identical to a conscious being while not being conscious, which seems pretty inconceivable (to borrow a word from Vizzini the Genius).
I have no clue why people seriously entertain these sort of ontological arguments. Drawing conclusions about the actual nature of reality from "what's metaphysically possible" (P3) is completely unfounded without some sort of additional framework and more importantly proof of the correlation between the two. A perpetual motion machine is metaphysically possible. Almost every supernatural phenomenon is metaphysically possible. Violating laws of chemistry and physics is metaphysically possible, does that mean I can claim these metaphysical possibilities are physically possible or actually exist? That's bad enough in general, but when the conclusion is "physicalism is false" asserting metaphysical correlation as a premise seems blatantly circular.
Other's have pointed out how the argument seems circular. I wish to argue that the zombie is inconceivable but I have yet to formalize a logical argument. So instead I will pose a question that will uncover my doubts.
If this zombie talks like me, eats like me, walks like me, how would you tell if it was conscious or not? I don't think you could ever prove it one way or the other. In fact you can't prove that for any person you've interacted with in your lifetime. If you agree with my claim that a person's consciousness is unverifiable then all your friends and family could be seen as nothing more than zombie, yet we don't live assuming this to be the case. In fact we as human's constantly act and wish for the opposite to be the case. This alone causes this argument to make dualism unfavorable to me apart from seeming unnecessary and unhelpful.