Intriguing, fascinating. you've given me the second quotable quote of the day (the first one was from a poster on another of your articles)
"the voidiness of the zombie’s void." 😊
Now I know this is all very serious stuff and I'm not supposed to laugh, but i did actually laugh out loud at that one.
" Anything at all that can be scooped up by the term “intensionality” can be imagined as missing in your twin except where the merely physical processes of the zombie’s brain create features that are, functionally at least, a little bit like an ersatz form of pseudo-intentionality, a lame pseudo-aboutness that goes entirely unobserved in the zombie’s head."
And yet, there are people out there with their AI robotic companions who imagine that the piece of AI in their robot is 'intentional' and has 'human emotions'.
This is serious stuff for a monday morning - I think I need another tea before I venture into ethereal imagined imaginary triangles.
Thank you for this extraordinary thought experiment. (Even if I'm taking a while to follow the arguments 😳😂)
"the voidiness of the zombie’s void." 😊 from yours above.
the first one, whoops, was not from your commentator but a commentator from a blog you linked on notes. it was from Uncertain Eric who was talking about the limitations of physicalism. He said:
thanks - I'm sure I will be asking questions. Its right out of my field (whatever my field maybe) but I find it interesting and worth the read. I figure if you have something unique to say which nobody else is saying (which you obviously have) put it out there. people will come. eventually. and besides, those certain turn of phrases crack me up. I think I'll raise the voidiness of the zombies void to Number 1 for today. If not the week. Hell, it might even make the month's top quotes !😀😂
Congratulations! you are producing thought-provoking ideas at a rate far greater than I can keep up with, let alone respond to in any fully thought-out way - so what follows must be considered as half-baked.
I am wondering if it is something of a straw man to specify that zombies completely lack intensionality: what they definitionally lack is conscious experience (to put it as it is in the SEP's Zombies entry.) At least at first sight, these seem to be separable issues; for example, I have never had the conscious experience of perfect pitch, yet I can have thoughts, such as "my uncle has perfect pitch" in which the term seems to have an intension.
To be clear, I am not attempting to defend the zombie intuition, I am merely trying to follow your instruction to think like a (die-)hardist. It is a challenging task to accept, for the sake of argument, so many ideas which seem unjustifiable.
I think it is something of a straw-man, too. But it also seems to be one I meet in the wild. I can't really sustain the idea even if I try.
If we grant that zombies have unconscious ideas that could be right or wrong, that creates huge problems for hardism, because a hardist is forced to confront the realisation that their twin is in error, and their twin uses isomorphic logic.
If they try to ban talk of intensionality, I think it is clearly an unnatural stance adopted to avoid accusations of the Zombie's Delusion.
Rather than a p-zombie, though, I was talking about a functionally equivalent simulation of a human, assumed to be unconscious. This is maybe a more realistic target, because plenty of people think that such things are not only conceivable but actually possible (at least in principle) and yet that they would be unconscious.
In the end, I conclude that we should embrace functionalism/computationalism because it's the more parsimonious view. By positing that intentional states and intentional* states are the same thing, we can do away with needing to have two compleletely parallel systems of states, and as a bonus it means we don't have the paradox of epiphenomenality to deal with. I guess that's where you're going too.
Sounds very similar. I will read that with interest.
The digital zombie is an easier route into this idea in many ways, because we don’t need any breach in the natural laws to make the intuitively zombified functional mimic, we just need to have confidence that the functionality is ultimately algorithmic. People are often reluctant to ascribe “true” intensionality to electronics.
Part 2 is heading in that direction, or possibly Part 3; I am deciding on the sequence.
The more I think about intensionality, the more I think we only get the idea of intensionality in the first place from functional relations between entities we interact with. We obviously don’t get it from some special floating epiphenomenal essence.
That means we already have a language that is a perfect fit for the purely functional aspects of intensionality, with every word having a functional origin, one that does not need the asterisks.
I read your earlier essay and agree with the general outline.
Many years ago, I read Denett's 'The Intentional Stance'. It didn't leave a big impression, probably because I already agreed with most of it, but I might reread it now.
I think the fallacy I have been calling the Zombie's Delusion (which could also be called the Paradox of Epiphenomenalism) is completely devastating for hardism. It's what I fall back on whenever I find my own hardist intuitions tugging at the corner of my mind.
But it is often defended along the lines you mentioned under a different post, when you were playing Devil's Advocate for hardism: zombies can't make mistakes, because nothing they do means anything. Even physicalists often just shrug and say that zombies can be imagined as voids with no intensionality; that's how hardists defined them, so it doesn't matter if zombies are drawing unjustified conclusions. The fact that we follow the same cognitive steps to reach our own philosophical positions doesn't matter, supposedly, because our steps are blessed with intensionality.
I think this defence of hardism is ultimately very weak and also very circular. Why would we end up using the same words as zombies if intensionality is so important and it is present on one half of this imagined divide but missing on the other? Shouldn't we care about the fact that intensionality, like phenomenal consciousness, has played no role whatsoever in our conclusions? We should at least be interested in what cognitive steps we took, which (if we are hardists) reach their conclusions independently of the things they are supposed to be conclusions about.
We don't have to imagine zombies according to hardist rules, as long as we are clear what we are doing. It is sometimes difficult, though, to get people to look into the zombie's imagined void, which is not a featureless void at all; it has enough rich structure that every single issue in the philosophy of the mind reappears in the spice-free version of reality, word-for-word the same, but with functional causes.
I think, if we let ourselves look at the previously ignored structure of that "void", we rediscover the messy hybrid concept of phenomenal consciousness and the apparent irreducibility of mental states... All of it. The whole drive towards hardism is accounted for.
Your essay is a step along that same path.
This reply has grown a bit long, so I will cross-post to Notes.
I guess the Zombie’s Delusion presents a dilemma to the hardist. Either Zombies can be deceived, in which hardists should concede that hardists could themselves be zombies, or zombies cannot be deceived because they have no intentional states, which you say is weak and circular. I agree that it’s weak or circular, I just think it’s the stronger of the two responses, because if Zombies can be deceived then that seems to me like a fatal blow.
But I don’t think circularity is in itself all that bad. Probably all world views are ultimately circular.
For example, I think both the Zombie argument and the physicalist refutation of the Zombie argument are circular. The zombie argument assumes that zombies are conceivable — but they are only conceivable if physicalism is false. Circular. The physicalist refutation is that zombies are not conceivable, but that is only so if physicalism (or at least functionalism) is true. Circular.
I’m thinking in terms of a Quinean web of beliefs. There is no foundation, really, just an understanding consisting of mutually consistent and supporting propositions that help to explain and navigate the world. You can trace your way around this graph in a circle, so it’s circular. But some such graphs are better than others all the same, because they are either more consistent or simpler, eliminating unnecessary loops that don’t really help to understand or navigate the world. Parsimony is king.
This may be a bit out of left field, but I wonder what you make of the strange claim that there is no such thing as objective physical existence, that this world is just a mathematical object, and exists only in the sense that mathematical objects exist (with the implication that all possible worlds also exist in the same way)? Because I think the argument to support this strange claim is exactly parallel to the argument to support the claim that consciousness is functional. If you feel tempted to resist the claim, as most people are, then I think you’re in the same position as a hardist, which might help you to empathise with them when pressed with the reasons I would give to support the strange claim.
Well, OK, but how different? I think the difference is in terms of parsimony.
Slightly disappointing for present purposes but not all that surprising that you are accepting of the idea that reality might be mathematical, since we seem to think alike. Including the idea that all possible worlds exist? I'm fairly convinced of it.
Physicalism does not require ignoring an internal contradiction. Hardism does. Sure, there can be a lot of gravitas added to the act of ignoring the contradiction implied by epiphenomenalism, but it's still there. The physicalist has physical explanations for hardist errors. The hardist cannot appeal to non-functional extras to prove the physicalist wrong.
There is no hardist argument that stands scrutiny. Obviously, many disagree.
I don't see the contradiction in hardism. If the hardist goes along the route of denying that zombies have beliefs or that zombies can be deceived, then they end up with an unnecessarily bloated web of beliefs, not a contradiction.
One thing I skipped over earlier is your position that the physicalist refutation of the Zombie argument is circular. If (as you say) the zombie argument itself is circular, then it simply fails, and without presupposing that it has been refuted.
One can also challenge the supposition that the mere conceivability of zombies (a propositional attitude) entails their possibility (an epistemic claim). Unless they are careless, physicalists are under no logical obligation to accept that zombies are inconceivable.
I think you're replying to Disagreeable Me, here, but the initial charge of circularity came from me. I do think the Zombie Argument has an element of circularity, but I don't think that is its primary fault. I think it relies on an incoherent concept of what is missing in the zombie, and it is supported by a chain of reasoning that is shared with the zombie, step for step, and therefore necessarily flawed.
The bit that I suggested was circular is the idea that we are justified in ignoring the flawed chain of reasoning leading to our own belief in the human-zombie difference, even though the same chain leads directly to false conclusions in the zombie. We don't even have to be curious about that chain of logic or its cognitive sources. And why? The hardist defends this lack of curiosity by appealing to the fact that the zombie's mistakes are not really mistakes because they lack the human-zombie difference and, in lacking whatever it is they lack, they cease to be entities capable of making mistakes. And so, when we follow the same steps, we can get to a different truth value despite having isomorphic cognition.
This means we are imagining a difference that can have no valid cognitive motivation, and the thought experiment that hinges around the difference provides its own justification for ignoring the faulty chain of reasoning that leads to belief in the special difference.
The problem for the hardist is not just that the logic of why we can supposedly ignore the errors is circular; it is that if we stop ignoring the cognitive steps involved, and actually drill down to the conceptual processes the hardists are trying to ignore, we see the actual errors.
Those errors necessarily allowed a purely physical brain to form a belief in something non-physical and non-functional, with all the steps in the formation of that belief having to be physical and functional. but with a final step of disallowing interest in the very steps that got the hardist to that position.
Duh! You are right, I did intend my reply to be in response to Disagreeable Me.
There are many ways to dispute the zombie argument for hardism, and we can deploy any or all of them. They do not include simply calling the argument from conceivability circular, as it does not technically beg the question: it does not explicitly state its conclusion as a premise. Instead, it exploits the considerable semantic overlap of 'conceivable' and 'possible' in ordinary usage to encourage its readers to ride a slippery slope from an apparently reasonable ask ("surely zombies are at least conceivable?") to a conclusion they might otherwise doubt has any justification.
I feel this is an effective way to discuss the issue with people who are on the fence, but feel that the conceivability argument is strong, as, if you can raise doubts about that, they are likely to be more receptive toward further arguments for the unimagined preposterousness of zombies. There are others, however, who feel zombies are prima facie plausible even without being prompted by the conceivability argument, and for them, your approach is probably the better one.
One of the consequences of my conviction that zombie arguments are fatally flawed from inception is that if I have seen hardists arguing that zombies are infallible, I have probably just brushed it off as more epicycles and burden-shifting arising from an untenable basis. Can you point me to who is making these claims, and where? (I would not be surprised if it is in "The Conscious Mind" somewhere!)
Firstly,, I completely agree that the Zombie Argument relies on a conflation ramp across different modes of possibility. That’s its main rhetorical weapon… But that doesn’t make zombies impossible; that just means we can’t draw conclusions. That means we can ignore the Zombie Argument as unreliable; it doesn’t let us be confident that there is a conceptual error underlying hardism.
I think we can go further, and argue that they are either impossible or so meaninglessly different from humans that they don’t matter
With respect to infallibility, we might be talking at cross purposes here. I am not familiar with any idea that zombies are infallible. I think it is more the case that they are provably making errors, but those errors are ignored by hardists on the grounds that zombies are outside the scope of being judged as right or wrong. That’s the part that is circular: using the idea of a special human extra (what we’re trying to prove) to put zombies outside the reach of logical analysis, so the contradiction they embody is not available for scrutiny… Making them conceivable, which then justifies the special human extra that makes our logic judgeable when there’s is immune to scrutiny.
We need the special human extra during the argument to ignore the contradiction. It’s especially insidious because the conflation ramp across different meanings of “possible” appeals to the lack of any obvious contradiction as evidence of logical possibility, but then needs to be shored up with special pleading for ignoring the contradiction.
I intend to write a multipart series on this, but have three other series on the go, so it will have to wait.
This is going off on a tangent from a parenthetical comment, but under the assumption that this world is just a mathematical object, would we not need to show that any possible world is a mathematical object before concluding that all possible worlds exist in the same way as this one?
Getting back on track... I suspect (strongly) that all mental phenomena in this world are consequences of physical processes in the body, mainly on the basis of the evidence showing that physical and chemical intervention in the brain has mental consequences, and that mental activity has some consistent and measurable physical consequences, together with the absence of a plausible alternative.
This (I assume) is compatible with functionalism (though without any metaphysical commitment.) On the other hand, I have no idea what it would mean to say that this world is just a mathematical object, so I am incapable of seeing how my reasons for adopting the former should persuade me to also adopt the latter.
I am entirely agnostic about the source of the base ontology of the physical world. I agree one would need some confidence that the world was a mathematical object before drawing conclusions about other worlds. I am not enthusiastically agreeing with this suggestion, just conceding it cannot be ruled out.
I don't see how we could have any reliable intuitions on this ultimate metaphysical question, or ever solve it.
My own view is that physicalism with respect to consciousness has more in common with physicalism with respect to digestion or physicalism with respect to GPT4 than it does with the deep metaphysical questions.
Some of the suggested answers to the Hard Problem obviously have metaphysical implications, so rebuttals of those answers gets dragged into metaphysics, but I don't think there is any real substance to the idea that this puzzle is more than a cognitive misunderstanding. If we knew the world to be entirely physical, and brains like ours evolved, the Hard Problem would pop out of our cognition in the same way that misunderstanding of the Monty Hall Problem pops out.
Obviously these misunderstandings (HP and MHP) differ in complexity, and they differ in their implications for our understanding of ontology. But I think they don't differ in how they actually relate to real ontology, which is: not at all.
Maybe there is some scope for disagreement then. Because you seem agnostic about the ontology of the physical world, but far from agnostic on zombies. And I think the two issues are directly parallel, but not obviously so. I would have to make the case (and I do so in the article I linked).
Being agnostic about the base ontology of the physical world is to me analogous about agnosticism about whether consciousness is substrate-dependent. If consciousness is substrate-dependent, then the basic stuff it is built from matters. If it isn't, then it doesn't, and all that matters is is the functional structure. I think the same is true of the world. But if the world itself is substrate-independent, there is no need to posit "stuff" as a substrate. The "stuff" is epiphenomenal. The structure is sufficient. And, yes, there are arguments you can make against that but all these arguments parallel hardist ones and have the same problems.
Well, did you like the article where I lay out the parallels?
If this world is just a mathematical object, and it exists in just the way that a mathematical object does, then all mathematical objects exist in the same way, including those that describe (or *are*) other possible worlds.
I guess you may be raising the suggestion that there could be possible worlds which are not so describable, and so could not be mathematical objects. OK, fair enough. I don't think such worlds are possible, but we'd need to have that discussion.
On what it would mean for the world to just be a mathematical object. OK -- briefly, the thinking is as follows. If naturalism is true (no magic, no God, no libertarian free will), then whatever happens in this world supervenes/emerges from the evolution of laws of physics which are describable mathematically. It follows that there is a mathematical object which mirrors the structure of this world. We could, in principle, explore this mathematical object by simulating it with infeasibly powerful supercomputers, the way we explore the Mandelbrot set. Within it we would find structural mirrors of ourselves.
Importantly, the existence of these mirrors does not depend on simulating them, any more than the existence of the Mandelbrot set depends on us exploring it. The simulation just allows us to see what's in there, no more. (But a little more on mathematical existence in a bit.)
Either these mirrors are Zombies or they are not. If you think Zombies are not a sensible idea, then they are not Zombies. They perceive themselves to exist in a physical world, but they are mistaken, as they are just substructures of an abstract world. But they're reasoning from the same evidence that we are, so we have no reason to think we are not just substructures of an abstract world. So the idea of an objective physical world is as redundant and incoherent as the idea of phenomenal consciousness.
Perhaps the most likely objection is that mathematical objects don't really exist. To me, this is like saying that Zombies don't have intentional states, that it's all just a void. OK, they don't "exist", but they still have all sorts of complexity and structure and features. Including even beliefs and intentional states in the case of our mirrors. So I'm OK with the idea that mathematical objects don't really "exist", but then I think nothing does, and the intuitive concept of existence is like the intuitive concept of phenomenal consciousness.
So anybody who thinks of Zombies as Zinbiel does should think the world is a mathematical object, and just one of an infinite multiverse of such.
With regard to the first point, I'm not suggesting that there could be possible worlds which are not so describable, I'm merely saying that their possibility would have to be ruled out before the strong claim goes through.
I follow the argument you have presented for the universe being a mathematical object, and it seems reasonable for deterministic universes - but ours is apparently not, and I wonder if the Gods-eye view holds up in that case (maybe it's an illusion!) I also wonder about whether there are implications from undecidability for the mathematical universe view, though I cannot say what sort of problems it might give rise to. I guess I need to make another attempt to follow what Max Tegmark is saying on the issue.
I did indeed like your article about parallels, as I have reached the point where I often see the same issues being endlessly rehashed, and this is an approach I have not seen before. The applicability of your parallels to my position seems limited, however, as I don't feel the arguments for my form of physicalism commit me to the positions in the first column (I have to admit that maybe I'm just not seeing the implications.) In addition, whenever I see arguments by analogy, I think of some of Stephen Jay Gould's essays in which he discusses the many grand theories of life presented prior to Darwin, which were constructed out of analogy and appeals to elegance and parsimony. For that matter, supersymmetry has been criticized on the same grounds, though if evidence for it appears, I will have to admit that it sometimes works.
Beyond that, I do not accept the argument invoked in your closing paragraph, about a potential flaw in computationalism - but in the accompanying articles, you also conclude by rejecting it! I reject it on different grounds than you do, but that's not an issue here. I think we could, however, turn the argument of this last paragraph around, and say that this potential flaw looms larger for those attracted to the mathematical universe hypothesis (at least in the sense that they cannot dismiss the multiple isomorphisms as being merely in the description of something more fundamental.)
Plenty of people believe in deterministic interpretations for reasons that have nothing to do with Tegmark's idea. The three most popular of these are probably the many worlds interpretation (aka MWI), Bohmian mechanics (nonlocal hidden variables) and superdeterminism (batshit crazy).
MWI is sometimes described as random because it is effectively random from the POV of an observer, but from a God's eye view nothing random is happening. There is just the smooth, deterministic evolution of the wavefunction. The apparent randomness is an artifact of your POV within one branch of a constantly branching MWI multiverse.
But, in general, even In non-deterministic universes, then the different possible ways the universe can evolve and the probability of each of those constitute a mathematical object.
So we're already deep in many worlds territory if we're even entertaining Tegmark's idea, such that even if some usually non-deterministic interpretation like a collapse theory is proven to be true with some experiment, then if Tegmark is right many worlds is *also* true, because each outcome is a mathematical possibility which exists in its own right. So, again, from a God's POV nothing non-determinsitic is really happening.
I'm sorry I asked if you liked my article about parallels -- that was a bit gauche. I meant to ask if you had read it!
I don't think there is any flaw in computationalism, ultimately, but I think the only way to rescue computationalism is with the MUH. It would be interesting to see how you would address it.
Intriguing, fascinating. you've given me the second quotable quote of the day (the first one was from a poster on another of your articles)
"the voidiness of the zombie’s void." 😊
Now I know this is all very serious stuff and I'm not supposed to laugh, but i did actually laugh out loud at that one.
" Anything at all that can be scooped up by the term “intensionality” can be imagined as missing in your twin except where the merely physical processes of the zombie’s brain create features that are, functionally at least, a little bit like an ersatz form of pseudo-intentionality, a lame pseudo-aboutness that goes entirely unobserved in the zombie’s head."
And yet, there are people out there with their AI robotic companions who imagine that the piece of AI in their robot is 'intentional' and has 'human emotions'.
This is serious stuff for a monday morning - I think I need another tea before I venture into ethereal imagined imaginary triangles.
Thank you for this extraordinary thought experiment. (Even if I'm taking a while to follow the arguments 😳😂)
What was the quotable quote?
"the voidiness of the zombie’s void." 😊 from yours above.
the first one, whoops, was not from your commentator but a commentator from a blog you linked on notes. it was from Uncertain Eric who was talking about the limitations of physicalism. He said:
"That’s not science. That’s ideological inertia."
over on this isle is full of noises. 😀
Glad you enjoyed it. Feel free to laugh. It shouldn't be taken too seriously.
Thanks for the feedback. Sometimes it feels like throwing the articles off a cliff and not knowing where they land.
Please ask any questions that occur to you while reading.
thanks - I'm sure I will be asking questions. Its right out of my field (whatever my field maybe) but I find it interesting and worth the read. I figure if you have something unique to say which nobody else is saying (which you obviously have) put it out there. people will come. eventually. and besides, those certain turn of phrases crack me up. I think I'll raise the voidiness of the zombies void to Number 1 for today. If not the week. Hell, it might even make the month's top quotes !😀😂
Congratulations! you are producing thought-provoking ideas at a rate far greater than I can keep up with, let alone respond to in any fully thought-out way - so what follows must be considered as half-baked.
I am wondering if it is something of a straw man to specify that zombies completely lack intensionality: what they definitionally lack is conscious experience (to put it as it is in the SEP's Zombies entry.) At least at first sight, these seem to be separable issues; for example, I have never had the conscious experience of perfect pitch, yet I can have thoughts, such as "my uncle has perfect pitch" in which the term seems to have an intension.
To be clear, I am not attempting to defend the zombie intuition, I am merely trying to follow your instruction to think like a (die-)hardist. It is a challenging task to accept, for the sake of argument, so many ideas which seem unjustifiable.
I think it is something of a straw-man, too. But it also seems to be one I meet in the wild. I can't really sustain the idea even if I try.
If we grant that zombies have unconscious ideas that could be right or wrong, that creates huge problems for hardism, because a hardist is forced to confront the realisation that their twin is in error, and their twin uses isomorphic logic.
If they try to ban talk of intensionality, I think it is clearly an unnatural stance adopted to avoid accusations of the Zombie's Delusion.
BTW, how did I miss the chance to pun on die-hard hardism?
Wow, we really think alike on this.
I wrote this back in 2014, which has a lot of the same ideas, right down the the asterisks.
https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2014/09/01/the-intuitional-problem-of-consciousness/
Rather than a p-zombie, though, I was talking about a functionally equivalent simulation of a human, assumed to be unconscious. This is maybe a more realistic target, because plenty of people think that such things are not only conceivable but actually possible (at least in principle) and yet that they would be unconscious.
In the end, I conclude that we should embrace functionalism/computationalism because it's the more parsimonious view. By positing that intentional states and intentional* states are the same thing, we can do away with needing to have two compleletely parallel systems of states, and as a bonus it means we don't have the paradox of epiphenomenality to deal with. I guess that's where you're going too.
Sounds very similar. I will read that with interest.
The digital zombie is an easier route into this idea in many ways, because we don’t need any breach in the natural laws to make the intuitively zombified functional mimic, we just need to have confidence that the functionality is ultimately algorithmic. People are often reluctant to ascribe “true” intensionality to electronics.
Part 2 is heading in that direction, or possibly Part 3; I am deciding on the sequence.
The more I think about intensionality, the more I think we only get the idea of intensionality in the first place from functional relations between entities we interact with. We obviously don’t get it from some special floating epiphenomenal essence.
That means we already have a language that is a perfect fit for the purely functional aspects of intensionality, with every word having a functional origin, one that does not need the asterisks.
In my case it is English.
I read your earlier essay and agree with the general outline.
Many years ago, I read Denett's 'The Intentional Stance'. It didn't leave a big impression, probably because I already agreed with most of it, but I might reread it now.
I think the fallacy I have been calling the Zombie's Delusion (which could also be called the Paradox of Epiphenomenalism) is completely devastating for hardism. It's what I fall back on whenever I find my own hardist intuitions tugging at the corner of my mind.
But it is often defended along the lines you mentioned under a different post, when you were playing Devil's Advocate for hardism: zombies can't make mistakes, because nothing they do means anything. Even physicalists often just shrug and say that zombies can be imagined as voids with no intensionality; that's how hardists defined them, so it doesn't matter if zombies are drawing unjustified conclusions. The fact that we follow the same cognitive steps to reach our own philosophical positions doesn't matter, supposedly, because our steps are blessed with intensionality.
I think this defence of hardism is ultimately very weak and also very circular. Why would we end up using the same words as zombies if intensionality is so important and it is present on one half of this imagined divide but missing on the other? Shouldn't we care about the fact that intensionality, like phenomenal consciousness, has played no role whatsoever in our conclusions? We should at least be interested in what cognitive steps we took, which (if we are hardists) reach their conclusions independently of the things they are supposed to be conclusions about.
We don't have to imagine zombies according to hardist rules, as long as we are clear what we are doing. It is sometimes difficult, though, to get people to look into the zombie's imagined void, which is not a featureless void at all; it has enough rich structure that every single issue in the philosophy of the mind reappears in the spice-free version of reality, word-for-word the same, but with functional causes.
I think, if we let ourselves look at the previously ignored structure of that "void", we rediscover the messy hybrid concept of phenomenal consciousness and the apparent irreducibility of mental states... All of it. The whole drive towards hardism is accounted for.
Your essay is a step along that same path.
This reply has grown a bit long, so I will cross-post to Notes.
Yeah, we’re in agreement, but a few points.
I guess the Zombie’s Delusion presents a dilemma to the hardist. Either Zombies can be deceived, in which hardists should concede that hardists could themselves be zombies, or zombies cannot be deceived because they have no intentional states, which you say is weak and circular. I agree that it’s weak or circular, I just think it’s the stronger of the two responses, because if Zombies can be deceived then that seems to me like a fatal blow.
But I don’t think circularity is in itself all that bad. Probably all world views are ultimately circular.
For example, I think both the Zombie argument and the physicalist refutation of the Zombie argument are circular. The zombie argument assumes that zombies are conceivable — but they are only conceivable if physicalism is false. Circular. The physicalist refutation is that zombies are not conceivable, but that is only so if physicalism (or at least functionalism) is true. Circular.
I’m thinking in terms of a Quinean web of beliefs. There is no foundation, really, just an understanding consisting of mutually consistent and supporting propositions that help to explain and navigate the world. You can trace your way around this graph in a circle, so it’s circular. But some such graphs are better than others all the same, because they are either more consistent or simpler, eliminating unnecessary loops that don’t really help to understand or navigate the world. Parsimony is king.
This may be a bit out of left field, but I wonder what you make of the strange claim that there is no such thing as objective physical existence, that this world is just a mathematical object, and exists only in the sense that mathematical objects exist (with the implication that all possible worlds also exist in the same way)? Because I think the argument to support this strange claim is exactly parallel to the argument to support the claim that consciousness is functional. If you feel tempted to resist the claim, as most people are, then I think you’re in the same position as a hardist, which might help you to empathise with them when pressed with the reasons I would give to support the strange claim.
I don't have a major issue with the idea that physical reality is ultimately mathematical.
I don't think the circularity of hardism and physicalism are the same, though.
Well, OK, but how different? I think the difference is in terms of parsimony.
Slightly disappointing for present purposes but not all that surprising that you are accepting of the idea that reality might be mathematical, since we seem to think alike. Including the idea that all possible worlds exist? I'm fairly convinced of it.
Here's where I lay out the parallels:
https://disagreeableme.blogspot.com/2022/02/applying-illusionism-to-physical-reality.html
Physicalism does not require ignoring an internal contradiction. Hardism does. Sure, there can be a lot of gravitas added to the act of ignoring the contradiction implied by epiphenomenalism, but it's still there. The physicalist has physical explanations for hardist errors. The hardist cannot appeal to non-functional extras to prove the physicalist wrong.
There is no hardist argument that stands scrutiny. Obviously, many disagree.
I don't see the contradiction in hardism. If the hardist goes along the route of denying that zombies have beliefs or that zombies can be deceived, then they end up with an unnecessarily bloated web of beliefs, not a contradiction.
One thing I skipped over earlier is your position that the physicalist refutation of the Zombie argument is circular. If (as you say) the zombie argument itself is circular, then it simply fails, and without presupposing that it has been refuted.
One can also challenge the supposition that the mere conceivability of zombies (a propositional attitude) entails their possibility (an epistemic claim). Unless they are careless, physicalists are under no logical obligation to accept that zombies are inconceivable.
I think you're replying to Disagreeable Me, here, but the initial charge of circularity came from me. I do think the Zombie Argument has an element of circularity, but I don't think that is its primary fault. I think it relies on an incoherent concept of what is missing in the zombie, and it is supported by a chain of reasoning that is shared with the zombie, step for step, and therefore necessarily flawed.
The bit that I suggested was circular is the idea that we are justified in ignoring the flawed chain of reasoning leading to our own belief in the human-zombie difference, even though the same chain leads directly to false conclusions in the zombie. We don't even have to be curious about that chain of logic or its cognitive sources. And why? The hardist defends this lack of curiosity by appealing to the fact that the zombie's mistakes are not really mistakes because they lack the human-zombie difference and, in lacking whatever it is they lack, they cease to be entities capable of making mistakes. And so, when we follow the same steps, we can get to a different truth value despite having isomorphic cognition.
This means we are imagining a difference that can have no valid cognitive motivation, and the thought experiment that hinges around the difference provides its own justification for ignoring the faulty chain of reasoning that leads to belief in the special difference.
The problem for the hardist is not just that the logic of why we can supposedly ignore the errors is circular; it is that if we stop ignoring the cognitive steps involved, and actually drill down to the conceptual processes the hardists are trying to ignore, we see the actual errors.
Those errors necessarily allowed a purely physical brain to form a belief in something non-physical and non-functional, with all the steps in the formation of that belief having to be physical and functional. but with a final step of disallowing interest in the very steps that got the hardist to that position.
Duh! You are right, I did intend my reply to be in response to Disagreeable Me.
There are many ways to dispute the zombie argument for hardism, and we can deploy any or all of them. They do not include simply calling the argument from conceivability circular, as it does not technically beg the question: it does not explicitly state its conclusion as a premise. Instead, it exploits the considerable semantic overlap of 'conceivable' and 'possible' in ordinary usage to encourage its readers to ride a slippery slope from an apparently reasonable ask ("surely zombies are at least conceivable?") to a conclusion they might otherwise doubt has any justification.
I feel this is an effective way to discuss the issue with people who are on the fence, but feel that the conceivability argument is strong, as, if you can raise doubts about that, they are likely to be more receptive toward further arguments for the unimagined preposterousness of zombies. There are others, however, who feel zombies are prima facie plausible even without being prompted by the conceivability argument, and for them, your approach is probably the better one.
One of the consequences of my conviction that zombie arguments are fatally flawed from inception is that if I have seen hardists arguing that zombies are infallible, I have probably just brushed it off as more epicycles and burden-shifting arising from an untenable basis. Can you point me to who is making these claims, and where? (I would not be surprised if it is in "The Conscious Mind" somewhere!)
Firstly,, I completely agree that the Zombie Argument relies on a conflation ramp across different modes of possibility. That’s its main rhetorical weapon… But that doesn’t make zombies impossible; that just means we can’t draw conclusions. That means we can ignore the Zombie Argument as unreliable; it doesn’t let us be confident that there is a conceptual error underlying hardism.
I think we can go further, and argue that they are either impossible or so meaninglessly different from humans that they don’t matter
With respect to infallibility, we might be talking at cross purposes here. I am not familiar with any idea that zombies are infallible. I think it is more the case that they are provably making errors, but those errors are ignored by hardists on the grounds that zombies are outside the scope of being judged as right or wrong. That’s the part that is circular: using the idea of a special human extra (what we’re trying to prove) to put zombies outside the reach of logical analysis, so the contradiction they embody is not available for scrutiny… Making them conceivable, which then justifies the special human extra that makes our logic judgeable when there’s is immune to scrutiny.
We need the special human extra during the argument to ignore the contradiction. It’s especially insidious because the conflation ramp across different meanings of “possible” appeals to the lack of any obvious contradiction as evidence of logical possibility, but then needs to be shored up with special pleading for ignoring the contradiction.
I intend to write a multipart series on this, but have three other series on the go, so it will have to wait.
This is going off on a tangent from a parenthetical comment, but under the assumption that this world is just a mathematical object, would we not need to show that any possible world is a mathematical object before concluding that all possible worlds exist in the same way as this one?
Getting back on track... I suspect (strongly) that all mental phenomena in this world are consequences of physical processes in the body, mainly on the basis of the evidence showing that physical and chemical intervention in the brain has mental consequences, and that mental activity has some consistent and measurable physical consequences, together with the absence of a plausible alternative.
This (I assume) is compatible with functionalism (though without any metaphysical commitment.) On the other hand, I have no idea what it would mean to say that this world is just a mathematical object, so I am incapable of seeing how my reasons for adopting the former should persuade me to also adopt the latter.
I am entirely agnostic about the source of the base ontology of the physical world. I agree one would need some confidence that the world was a mathematical object before drawing conclusions about other worlds. I am not enthusiastically agreeing with this suggestion, just conceding it cannot be ruled out.
I don't see how we could have any reliable intuitions on this ultimate metaphysical question, or ever solve it.
My own view is that physicalism with respect to consciousness has more in common with physicalism with respect to digestion or physicalism with respect to GPT4 than it does with the deep metaphysical questions.
Some of the suggested answers to the Hard Problem obviously have metaphysical implications, so rebuttals of those answers gets dragged into metaphysics, but I don't think there is any real substance to the idea that this puzzle is more than a cognitive misunderstanding. If we knew the world to be entirely physical, and brains like ours evolved, the Hard Problem would pop out of our cognition in the same way that misunderstanding of the Monty Hall Problem pops out.
Obviously these misunderstandings (HP and MHP) differ in complexity, and they differ in their implications for our understanding of ontology. But I think they don't differ in how they actually relate to real ontology, which is: not at all.
Few agree with me though.
Maybe there is some scope for disagreement then. Because you seem agnostic about the ontology of the physical world, but far from agnostic on zombies. And I think the two issues are directly parallel, but not obviously so. I would have to make the case (and I do so in the article I linked).
Being agnostic about the base ontology of the physical world is to me analogous about agnosticism about whether consciousness is substrate-dependent. If consciousness is substrate-dependent, then the basic stuff it is built from matters. If it isn't, then it doesn't, and all that matters is is the functional structure. I think the same is true of the world. But if the world itself is substrate-independent, there is no need to posit "stuff" as a substrate. The "stuff" is epiphenomenal. The structure is sufficient. And, yes, there are arguments you can make against that but all these arguments parallel hardist ones and have the same problems.
Well, did you like the article where I lay out the parallels?
If this world is just a mathematical object, and it exists in just the way that a mathematical object does, then all mathematical objects exist in the same way, including those that describe (or *are*) other possible worlds.
I guess you may be raising the suggestion that there could be possible worlds which are not so describable, and so could not be mathematical objects. OK, fair enough. I don't think such worlds are possible, but we'd need to have that discussion.
On what it would mean for the world to just be a mathematical object. OK -- briefly, the thinking is as follows. If naturalism is true (no magic, no God, no libertarian free will), then whatever happens in this world supervenes/emerges from the evolution of laws of physics which are describable mathematically. It follows that there is a mathematical object which mirrors the structure of this world. We could, in principle, explore this mathematical object by simulating it with infeasibly powerful supercomputers, the way we explore the Mandelbrot set. Within it we would find structural mirrors of ourselves.
Importantly, the existence of these mirrors does not depend on simulating them, any more than the existence of the Mandelbrot set depends on us exploring it. The simulation just allows us to see what's in there, no more. (But a little more on mathematical existence in a bit.)
Either these mirrors are Zombies or they are not. If you think Zombies are not a sensible idea, then they are not Zombies. They perceive themselves to exist in a physical world, but they are mistaken, as they are just substructures of an abstract world. But they're reasoning from the same evidence that we are, so we have no reason to think we are not just substructures of an abstract world. So the idea of an objective physical world is as redundant and incoherent as the idea of phenomenal consciousness.
Perhaps the most likely objection is that mathematical objects don't really exist. To me, this is like saying that Zombies don't have intentional states, that it's all just a void. OK, they don't "exist", but they still have all sorts of complexity and structure and features. Including even beliefs and intentional states in the case of our mirrors. So I'm OK with the idea that mathematical objects don't really "exist", but then I think nothing does, and the intuitive concept of existence is like the intuitive concept of phenomenal consciousness.
So anybody who thinks of Zombies as Zinbiel does should think the world is a mathematical object, and just one of an infinite multiverse of such.
I have had similar ideas, years ago, but I don't really know what to make of them. Mere abstraction might not be enough.
Hardism in disguise, I say! Mere functional structure might not be enough.
With regard to the first point, I'm not suggesting that there could be possible worlds which are not so describable, I'm merely saying that their possibility would have to be ruled out before the strong claim goes through.
I follow the argument you have presented for the universe being a mathematical object, and it seems reasonable for deterministic universes - but ours is apparently not, and I wonder if the Gods-eye view holds up in that case (maybe it's an illusion!) I also wonder about whether there are implications from undecidability for the mathematical universe view, though I cannot say what sort of problems it might give rise to. I guess I need to make another attempt to follow what Max Tegmark is saying on the issue.
I did indeed like your article about parallels, as I have reached the point where I often see the same issues being endlessly rehashed, and this is an approach I have not seen before. The applicability of your parallels to my position seems limited, however, as I don't feel the arguments for my form of physicalism commit me to the positions in the first column (I have to admit that maybe I'm just not seeing the implications.) In addition, whenever I see arguments by analogy, I think of some of Stephen Jay Gould's essays in which he discusses the many grand theories of life presented prior to Darwin, which were constructed out of analogy and appeals to elegance and parsimony. For that matter, supersymmetry has been criticized on the same grounds, though if evidence for it appears, I will have to admit that it sometimes works.
Beyond that, I do not accept the argument invoked in your closing paragraph, about a potential flaw in computationalism - but in the accompanying articles, you also conclude by rejecting it! I reject it on different grounds than you do, but that's not an issue here. I think we could, however, turn the argument of this last paragraph around, and say that this potential flaw looms larger for those attracted to the mathematical universe hypothesis (at least in the sense that they cannot dismiss the multiple isomorphisms as being merely in the description of something more fundamental.)
Plenty of people believe in deterministic interpretations for reasons that have nothing to do with Tegmark's idea. The three most popular of these are probably the many worlds interpretation (aka MWI), Bohmian mechanics (nonlocal hidden variables) and superdeterminism (batshit crazy).
MWI is sometimes described as random because it is effectively random from the POV of an observer, but from a God's eye view nothing random is happening. There is just the smooth, deterministic evolution of the wavefunction. The apparent randomness is an artifact of your POV within one branch of a constantly branching MWI multiverse.
But, in general, even In non-deterministic universes, then the different possible ways the universe can evolve and the probability of each of those constitute a mathematical object.
So we're already deep in many worlds territory if we're even entertaining Tegmark's idea, such that even if some usually non-deterministic interpretation like a collapse theory is proven to be true with some experiment, then if Tegmark is right many worlds is *also* true, because each outcome is a mathematical possibility which exists in its own right. So, again, from a God's POV nothing non-determinsitic is really happening.
I'm sorry I asked if you liked my article about parallels -- that was a bit gauche. I meant to ask if you had read it!
I don't think there is any flaw in computationalism, ultimately, but I think the only way to rescue computationalism is with the MUH. It would be interesting to see how you would address it.