You've now in a couple of places made one of your main arguments: if we think that experience includes some special stuff (spice), we do so for entirely functional reasons. That is because the functioning of neurons fully explains verbal reports, written descriptions, and even private thoughts about spice. We can therefore see that the source of spice isn't spice itself, but something about the wiring in our brains. This is illustrated by the idea of a zombie coming up with the same verbal reports, written descriptions, etc, even though spice cannot be the source of these descriptions for a zombie by definition of spice. Spice is thus an illusion, although illusion is perhaps not the best term to throw around in consciousness discussions. We still need to decide where this idea of spice comes from, and you've started to introduce the terminology to get there (Q. Ostensum being important I assume). But even before we see where spice comes from, we see spice is not real. This is a very strong argument.
Let me try to respond as a dualist. However keep in mind I'm not a 100% dualist, and I don't necessarily fully believe in this argument I'm about to give.
I'm a math guy, so here is a math analogy. Euclid defined lines as "breadthless length" and a point as "that which has no part", but these statements don't actually mean anything. In more modern treatments, we just leave these terms as undefined. A zombie can run through a geometry proof that if a triangle has two equal angles, they also have two equal sides. But all of that will be meaningless although correct symbol manipulation. Only when a human runs through the same proof do we get a proof that relates to real things that that human has experienced, because a human knows what lines and points actually are.
Similarly, if a zombie gives an eloquent argument about the magical nature of his own conscious experience, the argument isn't wrong per se but is simply meaningless because it's relying on undefined terms. When a human gives the same argument, it is correct because those same undefined terms take on meaning, not because the human is able to give a definition, but the human simply knows what they are through direct experience.
So you could say the source of spice for a zombie is an unfounded assumption, and for whatever reason it's a founded assumption on the part of the human.
You’re not the first to respond that way. It’s a fairly standard hardist response to the problems inherent in humans claiming to have knowledge of something that cannot possibly contribute to the knowledge.
I think there are 2 or 3 problems with this hardist line.
The first is that it only really makes sense if zombies are possible and if, somehow, a curtain of meaningless descends on all their deliberations. So the Zombie Argument has the structure that we propose these human-like creatures that lack spice, see if there’s a contradiction, and, if there’s not, accept that they are possible. But part of the experiment includes some small print that we can’t actually look for any contradiction or must ignore any contradiction we find, because nothing means anything. So it’s like starting an argument with: “Imagine an island where the laws of maths didn’t hold. On that island…” Nothing can be concluded from not finding a contradiction on that island; we’ve given up on logic to try the idea on. We certainly can’t conclude that the island is possible based on anything we did in that logic-free zone. Similarly, to declare that zombies’ deliberations are meaningless requires the truth of what we were trying to prove - meaning itself must be some epiphenomenal extra, not derived from the causal network of cognition. At best, the exercise proves that, in a cognitive zone we can’t examine or judge, we can imagine the falsity of physicalism without letting ourselves see a contradiction.
It’s rather pointless and circular.
The other issue is that the zombie’s deliberations are meaningful anyway. If a zombie hardist was playing chess, and we watched them plan their moves on the likoscope, it would not matter whether there was supposed to be some rule in place making their plans meaningless. We would see good moves and bad moves being considered. The goodness or badness of the moves is determined on the chess board, not by some arbitrary decree about what is meaningful. If they are better at chess than us, we can ask them for advice and their meaningless comments might show better insight than we could achieve.
When a zombie applies the logic that its imagined square seems blue so it must have an inner theatre with real phenomenal blueness, that logic is wrong even if we are trying to consider its thoughts as meaningless. The arbiter is the actual ontology that they are trying to draw inferences about; their conclusions will be safe or unsafe, defensible or non-defensible. In the case of a zombie hardist, we know why it thinks its model is blue; the logic is wrong before we declare that is meaningless. We also know why it thinks that blueness is irreducible and non-physical, though I’ve not yet spelled all that out in full.
A more important issue is that the zombie is your cognitive isomorph. Even if you somehow legitimise the idea that it’s deliberations don’t mean anything, it still makes sense to ask what the deliberations would mean if it were not a zombie, and whether those deliberations would be safe and reliable. We would necessarily see it draw inferences that were not justified, and those inferences would necessarily be unjustified when you drew the same inferences. If your zombie twin is about to blunder into a mate-in-three on the chessboard, then you are too. I can see what it plans and warn you.
When you point at some internal quality and say that it can’t possibly be functional in origin, there is a functional process your brain is doing, something it is representing to itself, for which it is necessarily true that it can be functional in origin. The zombie thought experiment just provides a way of dramatising that mistake. The whole story can be retold as a story of your bare physical brain drawing faulty inferences from its own models. And those inferences must be faulty, because they would be drawn identically if they were not vindicated by an actual non-physical target.
Perhaps the key idea I wanted to share in this series was that the zombie necessarily has a model of a mind that has no vindicating target. It models an internal Cartesian theatre, to some extent, complete with qualia, and we can extract all that modelling in functional terms. We can show, in principle, the steps that lead to the model being created and then judged as real. It’s not just what the zombie says that mimics human claims of consciousness; the internal causal dynamics consist of a model with representational significance. That model does not need third-room vindication. What it is like is fixed within the model itself, and claims about consciousness come from the model and its implicit content, not from the controversial vindication. Even if we declare the zombie’s model meaningless to avoid looking at it (which is where this started), it is still the case that the causal relations leading to pseudo-beliefs and pseudo-claims are based on the implicit content of models, not the disputed vindication. But that means your real beliefs and real claims stand in the same causal relation to models that cannot possibly be vindicated in any way that you could know about.
The belief in spice is therefore independent of the existence of spice, and it has functional causes. The content of what people think about spice is also derivable from a purely physical, spice-free brain.
It would take a whole book to justify this, but the basic idea that we don’t need to look at the zombie’s logic because we can simply declare it a void is a tactic used to hide from the logical consequences of epiphenomenalism. Hardists should at least be prepared to look at why the zombie says things, why it has certain things on its likoscope, and so on, because its reasons are identical to the hardist’s unacknowledged reasons.
This is not quite as simple as illusionism, because there is a difference between saying that the ostensum is virtual and that the externum is a complete fiction. I am prepared to be absolutely eliminativist about the externum, but we are still left with something that has a subtle ontological status; I propose it is misunderstanding that subtle real/virtual thing that leads to belief in the vindicating extra.
Thanks for the long response. Here is another try at a hardist response to the basic argument (and it's long, sorry, feel free to ignore me).
Some mathematical logic background: I what I was trying to get at is this notion in logic that differentiates meaning (semantics) and proof (syntactics). There is this result called the "Godel completeness theorem" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_completeness_theorem) which might have just as much relevance to consciousness discussions as his incompleteness theorem. It states that a statement (within a system) has a proof if and only if it is true in all possible "models" of that system. Here, the term model is kind of the opposite of how we use it in applied math: in applied math, the "model" is the theoretical thing, and the thing it's modelling is the real thing. In logic, the logic is the theoretical thing, and the model is the real thing.
So continuing my hardist line of thinking: The zombie's geometric proof is meaningful: since it is a proof, it applies to all possible models (aka meanings assigned to the undefined terms) of geometry. Thus, the thing about two sides equate to two angles are equal for triangles is true in every meaningful context. It will apply to Abby's drawing of a triangle on a piece of paper, Bob's drawing of a triangle on a sphere, and Cathy's triangle on a hyperbolic plane. It's the same thing with the zombie's chess moves: they are good moves in all relevant games of chess.
Suppose a zombie looks at the sky and then introspects on what he is seeing. His introspection mechanism detects that his V2 neurons are in the beta pattern but registers that as a raw experience because it can't see individual neurons. So the zombie calls this blueness. The zombie further states that this is proof of something (blueness) that is outside of physics. This is a correct proof. That is, it is true for all possible models (aka meanings). That is, Abby's quale of blue is outside of physics, Bob's quale of red (that he calls blue) is outside of physics, and Cathy's splurple (a color we can't even imagine, yet she also calls it blue) is also outside physics. The zombie's proof isn't acutalized, but it is correct: for every relevant meaning (aka actual experience), that will be an example of something outside of physics.
When talking about zombies, we are entering an island where meaning doesn't exist. That doesn't mean logic or math doesn't exist; logic and meaning are separate concepts. If you created a contradiction, that would be a proof and be relevant to all possible meanings. But you haven't created a contradiction because the zombie's proof isn't wrong.
Now let's switch to anti-hardist mode: is "meaning", used in the way I have above, meaningful? Godel's completeness theorem only applies to what are called "first order" theories, and the so-called meaning is what is derived from "second order" theories. That is, meaning isn't coming from some mystical other place, it's coming from other more powerful mathematics. I've coopted the term "meaning" from logic to mean something different, basically to stand in for "spice", and thus I have assumed the thing I'm trying to justify. Using a different version of the word meaning, the zombie's proof is actualized: it's actualized by physics. The zombie thinks beta patterns are outside of physics but they are not. Thus the proof must be flawed as it is not correct given this possible meaning. There is no correct proof that physics is wrong.
(Back to hardist mode real quick: The zombie is actualized by physics, but the zombie's mental space is one level of abstraction above the ontology, and thus maybe is not actualized)
I don't know, I go back and forth. But it's fun thinking about and your blog is giving me lots of food for thought.
And apologies for the bit about beta patterns and V2 neurons -- I just made that up, I don't know much actual neurology!
If the zombie is inferring that the blueness quale must be outside physics, and the reason for this conclusion is that the quale adopts the same causal relations as actual blue things within the cognitive economy (and therefore seems just as blue as the likoscope), while the quale is also non-derivable from an analysis of the substrate (has an explanatory gap), then the cognitive system applying this logic is in error regardless of whether we think there is some extra “meaning” that can be added in some lucky recipients but not others.
The zombie still has an irreducible blueness model, and will say all the usual hardist things about it - that it could not arise in a physical world, must be non-functional must be irreducible. These statements are wrong. We don’t need to add semantics to say that they are wrong.
If you are prepared to be disinterested in its mistakes because it is a zombie, then you are also showing disinterest in your own mistakes. The very reason you have for thinking that the zombie’s misdiagnosis of a special extra is not just a straightforward mistake is also giving you justification for not looking under the hood to see where the mistake is happening. I think you end up with a stable conception of a zombie, but it is one that relies on your defending your refusal to look at what it’s doing.
I think a hardist is at least obliged to become very familiar with the logical processes involved, even if those flawed processes are regarded as not comprising “true” logic because “true” meaning is imagined as absent.
The real reason for being interested in these mistakes or pseudo-mistakes si that the zombie’s pseudo-errors (if you insist that’s what they are) are still identical to your actual reasons. The human is capable of “true” meaning, but it is still applying the very same logical steps that we would have called wrong in the zombie, if we had not refrained from judging on somewhat tenuous grounds. The fact that the human has the capacity to be right does not by itself make them right, and when they say, “But I see blue”, we know they are drawing on physical sources for that conclusion.
Subtract contributions from physical sources and there is no residual reason for adopting a hardist stance.
Qualia in the third room can’t help the logical process in the human, even if those qualia somehow mysteriously add meaning (a step that remains unexplained). Their existence can vindicate the hardist’s conclusion, but getting the right answer for bad reasons is not okay, especially when there is no way of knowing that the right answer has been obtained.
If zombies are possible, you have no way of knowing you are not a zombie. Your reasons for thinking you are blessed with special meaning and vindicating qualia and so on are identical to a zombie’s, so they can’t be very good reasons. That lack of reliability in your reasoning doesn’t stop being an issue if we choose to treat the zombie as beyond the reach of judgment. At best, the zombie still has bad reasons we don’t judge. It still doesn’t have reasons that are logically defensible when reproduced step-by-step in a human.
If I am right, a series of mistakes in a physical brain gives people the idea of a special meaning, gives them a cognitive dualism that lets them imagine zombies with irreducible qualia, and also gives them this tortured rationale for not examining the original mistakes. The result is a non-falsifiable fortress that makes them doubt physicalism while making all the same predictions as physicalism, and even they say that the reasons for building this theoretical edifice must be motivated from physical sources. The whole thing has to be fuelled by a massive coincidence, that the mistakes gave them insight into a real epiphenomenal domain hiding off-stage, providing vindication that can be intuited without a single neuron changing its behaviour from if the vindication was simply not there. Given that we have already accounted for the edifice in the physical domain, I think it is extraordinary unlikely that these mistakes get invisibly vindicated just to save us from error.
There is a post’s worth of content here, though, so I will probably put all this into a post later in the series.
I'm sorry but before I read it properly, what's a Hardist again? Can you put it in a sentence or two? My memory is shit and I have ADHD and I'm a slow reader but this seems really cool
A hardist can be thought of as someone who accepts the full framing of the Hard Problem as posed by Chalmers, which means that they accept that there is a meaningful human-zombie difference.
That difference is what I have called phenomenal spice, so a hardist is a Spice Believer. A non-hardist is a Spice Denier.
You've now in a couple of places made one of your main arguments: if we think that experience includes some special stuff (spice), we do so for entirely functional reasons. That is because the functioning of neurons fully explains verbal reports, written descriptions, and even private thoughts about spice. We can therefore see that the source of spice isn't spice itself, but something about the wiring in our brains. This is illustrated by the idea of a zombie coming up with the same verbal reports, written descriptions, etc, even though spice cannot be the source of these descriptions for a zombie by definition of spice. Spice is thus an illusion, although illusion is perhaps not the best term to throw around in consciousness discussions. We still need to decide where this idea of spice comes from, and you've started to introduce the terminology to get there (Q. Ostensum being important I assume). But even before we see where spice comes from, we see spice is not real. This is a very strong argument.
Let me try to respond as a dualist. However keep in mind I'm not a 100% dualist, and I don't necessarily fully believe in this argument I'm about to give.
I'm a math guy, so here is a math analogy. Euclid defined lines as "breadthless length" and a point as "that which has no part", but these statements don't actually mean anything. In more modern treatments, we just leave these terms as undefined. A zombie can run through a geometry proof that if a triangle has two equal angles, they also have two equal sides. But all of that will be meaningless although correct symbol manipulation. Only when a human runs through the same proof do we get a proof that relates to real things that that human has experienced, because a human knows what lines and points actually are.
Similarly, if a zombie gives an eloquent argument about the magical nature of his own conscious experience, the argument isn't wrong per se but is simply meaningless because it's relying on undefined terms. When a human gives the same argument, it is correct because those same undefined terms take on meaning, not because the human is able to give a definition, but the human simply knows what they are through direct experience.
So you could say the source of spice for a zombie is an unfounded assumption, and for whatever reason it's a founded assumption on the part of the human.
You’re not the first to respond that way. It’s a fairly standard hardist response to the problems inherent in humans claiming to have knowledge of something that cannot possibly contribute to the knowledge.
I think there are 2 or 3 problems with this hardist line.
The first is that it only really makes sense if zombies are possible and if, somehow, a curtain of meaningless descends on all their deliberations. So the Zombie Argument has the structure that we propose these human-like creatures that lack spice, see if there’s a contradiction, and, if there’s not, accept that they are possible. But part of the experiment includes some small print that we can’t actually look for any contradiction or must ignore any contradiction we find, because nothing means anything. So it’s like starting an argument with: “Imagine an island where the laws of maths didn’t hold. On that island…” Nothing can be concluded from not finding a contradiction on that island; we’ve given up on logic to try the idea on. We certainly can’t conclude that the island is possible based on anything we did in that logic-free zone. Similarly, to declare that zombies’ deliberations are meaningless requires the truth of what we were trying to prove - meaning itself must be some epiphenomenal extra, not derived from the causal network of cognition. At best, the exercise proves that, in a cognitive zone we can’t examine or judge, we can imagine the falsity of physicalism without letting ourselves see a contradiction.
It’s rather pointless and circular.
The other issue is that the zombie’s deliberations are meaningful anyway. If a zombie hardist was playing chess, and we watched them plan their moves on the likoscope, it would not matter whether there was supposed to be some rule in place making their plans meaningless. We would see good moves and bad moves being considered. The goodness or badness of the moves is determined on the chess board, not by some arbitrary decree about what is meaningful. If they are better at chess than us, we can ask them for advice and their meaningless comments might show better insight than we could achieve.
When a zombie applies the logic that its imagined square seems blue so it must have an inner theatre with real phenomenal blueness, that logic is wrong even if we are trying to consider its thoughts as meaningless. The arbiter is the actual ontology that they are trying to draw inferences about; their conclusions will be safe or unsafe, defensible or non-defensible. In the case of a zombie hardist, we know why it thinks its model is blue; the logic is wrong before we declare that is meaningless. We also know why it thinks that blueness is irreducible and non-physical, though I’ve not yet spelled all that out in full.
A more important issue is that the zombie is your cognitive isomorph. Even if you somehow legitimise the idea that it’s deliberations don’t mean anything, it still makes sense to ask what the deliberations would mean if it were not a zombie, and whether those deliberations would be safe and reliable. We would necessarily see it draw inferences that were not justified, and those inferences would necessarily be unjustified when you drew the same inferences. If your zombie twin is about to blunder into a mate-in-three on the chessboard, then you are too. I can see what it plans and warn you.
When you point at some internal quality and say that it can’t possibly be functional in origin, there is a functional process your brain is doing, something it is representing to itself, for which it is necessarily true that it can be functional in origin. The zombie thought experiment just provides a way of dramatising that mistake. The whole story can be retold as a story of your bare physical brain drawing faulty inferences from its own models. And those inferences must be faulty, because they would be drawn identically if they were not vindicated by an actual non-physical target.
Perhaps the key idea I wanted to share in this series was that the zombie necessarily has a model of a mind that has no vindicating target. It models an internal Cartesian theatre, to some extent, complete with qualia, and we can extract all that modelling in functional terms. We can show, in principle, the steps that lead to the model being created and then judged as real. It’s not just what the zombie says that mimics human claims of consciousness; the internal causal dynamics consist of a model with representational significance. That model does not need third-room vindication. What it is like is fixed within the model itself, and claims about consciousness come from the model and its implicit content, not from the controversial vindication. Even if we declare the zombie’s model meaningless to avoid looking at it (which is where this started), it is still the case that the causal relations leading to pseudo-beliefs and pseudo-claims are based on the implicit content of models, not the disputed vindication. But that means your real beliefs and real claims stand in the same causal relation to models that cannot possibly be vindicated in any way that you could know about.
The belief in spice is therefore independent of the existence of spice, and it has functional causes. The content of what people think about spice is also derivable from a purely physical, spice-free brain.
It would take a whole book to justify this, but the basic idea that we don’t need to look at the zombie’s logic because we can simply declare it a void is a tactic used to hide from the logical consequences of epiphenomenalism. Hardists should at least be prepared to look at why the zombie says things, why it has certain things on its likoscope, and so on, because its reasons are identical to the hardist’s unacknowledged reasons.
This is not quite as simple as illusionism, because there is a difference between saying that the ostensum is virtual and that the externum is a complete fiction. I am prepared to be absolutely eliminativist about the externum, but we are still left with something that has a subtle ontological status; I propose it is misunderstanding that subtle real/virtual thing that leads to belief in the vindicating extra.
Thanks for the long response. Here is another try at a hardist response to the basic argument (and it's long, sorry, feel free to ignore me).
Some mathematical logic background: I what I was trying to get at is this notion in logic that differentiates meaning (semantics) and proof (syntactics). There is this result called the "Godel completeness theorem" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_completeness_theorem) which might have just as much relevance to consciousness discussions as his incompleteness theorem. It states that a statement (within a system) has a proof if and only if it is true in all possible "models" of that system. Here, the term model is kind of the opposite of how we use it in applied math: in applied math, the "model" is the theoretical thing, and the thing it's modelling is the real thing. In logic, the logic is the theoretical thing, and the model is the real thing.
So continuing my hardist line of thinking: The zombie's geometric proof is meaningful: since it is a proof, it applies to all possible models (aka meanings assigned to the undefined terms) of geometry. Thus, the thing about two sides equate to two angles are equal for triangles is true in every meaningful context. It will apply to Abby's drawing of a triangle on a piece of paper, Bob's drawing of a triangle on a sphere, and Cathy's triangle on a hyperbolic plane. It's the same thing with the zombie's chess moves: they are good moves in all relevant games of chess.
Suppose a zombie looks at the sky and then introspects on what he is seeing. His introspection mechanism detects that his V2 neurons are in the beta pattern but registers that as a raw experience because it can't see individual neurons. So the zombie calls this blueness. The zombie further states that this is proof of something (blueness) that is outside of physics. This is a correct proof. That is, it is true for all possible models (aka meanings). That is, Abby's quale of blue is outside of physics, Bob's quale of red (that he calls blue) is outside of physics, and Cathy's splurple (a color we can't even imagine, yet she also calls it blue) is also outside physics. The zombie's proof isn't acutalized, but it is correct: for every relevant meaning (aka actual experience), that will be an example of something outside of physics.
When talking about zombies, we are entering an island where meaning doesn't exist. That doesn't mean logic or math doesn't exist; logic and meaning are separate concepts. If you created a contradiction, that would be a proof and be relevant to all possible meanings. But you haven't created a contradiction because the zombie's proof isn't wrong.
Now let's switch to anti-hardist mode: is "meaning", used in the way I have above, meaningful? Godel's completeness theorem only applies to what are called "first order" theories, and the so-called meaning is what is derived from "second order" theories. That is, meaning isn't coming from some mystical other place, it's coming from other more powerful mathematics. I've coopted the term "meaning" from logic to mean something different, basically to stand in for "spice", and thus I have assumed the thing I'm trying to justify. Using a different version of the word meaning, the zombie's proof is actualized: it's actualized by physics. The zombie thinks beta patterns are outside of physics but they are not. Thus the proof must be flawed as it is not correct given this possible meaning. There is no correct proof that physics is wrong.
(Back to hardist mode real quick: The zombie is actualized by physics, but the zombie's mental space is one level of abstraction above the ontology, and thus maybe is not actualized)
I don't know, I go back and forth. But it's fun thinking about and your blog is giving me lots of food for thought.
And apologies for the bit about beta patterns and V2 neurons -- I just made that up, I don't know much actual neurology!
If the zombie is inferring that the blueness quale must be outside physics, and the reason for this conclusion is that the quale adopts the same causal relations as actual blue things within the cognitive economy (and therefore seems just as blue as the likoscope), while the quale is also non-derivable from an analysis of the substrate (has an explanatory gap), then the cognitive system applying this logic is in error regardless of whether we think there is some extra “meaning” that can be added in some lucky recipients but not others.
The zombie still has an irreducible blueness model, and will say all the usual hardist things about it - that it could not arise in a physical world, must be non-functional must be irreducible. These statements are wrong. We don’t need to add semantics to say that they are wrong.
If you are prepared to be disinterested in its mistakes because it is a zombie, then you are also showing disinterest in your own mistakes. The very reason you have for thinking that the zombie’s misdiagnosis of a special extra is not just a straightforward mistake is also giving you justification for not looking under the hood to see where the mistake is happening. I think you end up with a stable conception of a zombie, but it is one that relies on your defending your refusal to look at what it’s doing.
I think a hardist is at least obliged to become very familiar with the logical processes involved, even if those flawed processes are regarded as not comprising “true” logic because “true” meaning is imagined as absent.
The real reason for being interested in these mistakes or pseudo-mistakes si that the zombie’s pseudo-errors (if you insist that’s what they are) are still identical to your actual reasons. The human is capable of “true” meaning, but it is still applying the very same logical steps that we would have called wrong in the zombie, if we had not refrained from judging on somewhat tenuous grounds. The fact that the human has the capacity to be right does not by itself make them right, and when they say, “But I see blue”, we know they are drawing on physical sources for that conclusion.
Subtract contributions from physical sources and there is no residual reason for adopting a hardist stance.
Qualia in the third room can’t help the logical process in the human, even if those qualia somehow mysteriously add meaning (a step that remains unexplained). Their existence can vindicate the hardist’s conclusion, but getting the right answer for bad reasons is not okay, especially when there is no way of knowing that the right answer has been obtained.
If zombies are possible, you have no way of knowing you are not a zombie. Your reasons for thinking you are blessed with special meaning and vindicating qualia and so on are identical to a zombie’s, so they can’t be very good reasons. That lack of reliability in your reasoning doesn’t stop being an issue if we choose to treat the zombie as beyond the reach of judgment. At best, the zombie still has bad reasons we don’t judge. It still doesn’t have reasons that are logically defensible when reproduced step-by-step in a human.
If I am right, a series of mistakes in a physical brain gives people the idea of a special meaning, gives them a cognitive dualism that lets them imagine zombies with irreducible qualia, and also gives them this tortured rationale for not examining the original mistakes. The result is a non-falsifiable fortress that makes them doubt physicalism while making all the same predictions as physicalism, and even they say that the reasons for building this theoretical edifice must be motivated from physical sources. The whole thing has to be fuelled by a massive coincidence, that the mistakes gave them insight into a real epiphenomenal domain hiding off-stage, providing vindication that can be intuited without a single neuron changing its behaviour from if the vindication was simply not there. Given that we have already accounted for the edifice in the physical domain, I think it is extraordinary unlikely that these mistakes get invisibly vindicated just to save us from error.
There is a post’s worth of content here, though, so I will probably put all this into a post later in the series.
I think you're right with the meaning stuff. Still thinking about this argument, it's a good one.
Thanks. There’s more to come. Each part of the overall argument takes a long time to set up.
I’m currently working on the conflations in Block’s original phenomenal consciousness paper. It’s proving hard to cut it to a manageable length.
I'm sorry but before I read it properly, what's a Hardist again? Can you put it in a sentence or two? My memory is shit and I have ADHD and I'm a slow reader but this seems really cool
A hardist can be thought of as someone who accepts the full framing of the Hard Problem as posed by Chalmers, which means that they accept that there is a meaningful human-zombie difference.
That difference is what I have called phenomenal spice, so a hardist is a Spice Believer. A non-hardist is a Spice Denier.