Answer 1: the zombies are just wrong about having phenomenal consciousness, so the meta-zombies which zombies imagine to be different are actually identical to the zombies. They're logic was correct, but they started from an incorrect premise ("we have phenomenal consciousness"), so no wonder their conclusion of some sort of dualism is incorrect.
Answer 2: actually, there still is something that the zombies are referring to when they say "meta zombies lack *this*", an attempt to gesture at their own version of phenomenal consciousness -- perhaps a virtual phenomenal consciousness or some sort of illusion. Then the premise "we have *this*" is correct. However, when they go to imagine meta-zombies, they are making a logical mistake: the physical duplication requirement implies meta-zombies still have the *this*, contradicting the requirement that they lack the *this*.
In answer 1, humans are different but zombies=meta-zombies. In answer 2, this leaves the possibility that actually humans = zombies = meta-zombies. I think a good metaphysical principle is "humility", which states that a metaphysical reasoner should, all else being equal, assume they are not special or unique in anyway. For example, we shouldn't assume the universe revolves around us, we should assume we're just in some random corner of the universe. Such a principle does support the physicalist answer of answer 2. But there is more to say on this I think.
I can see merit in both answers, but the zombie physicalist and the human physicalist say much the same thing, so it is the human hardist and zombie hardist who are violating epistemic humility.
Yes, I believe the principle of humility favors physicalism and not my own dualism. Panpsychism, which I also believe, helps temper the "arrogance" of dualism. The "all else being equal" is an important caveat to the principle of humility.
But I'm trying to keep an open mind, I think this meta-zombie idea might be a good argument (or at least a good rhetorical device to restate previous arguments). I'm curious to see if you incorporate it into one of your longer written pieces.
I think that, at a minimum, careful analysis of the meta-zombie scenario leads us to be much more specific about our definitions (without the distraction of whether special epiphenomenal consciousness is real or not in our own universe). It also should lead to recognition that the Zombie Argument can't achieve very much, not even on our own world, because it necessarily rests on unreliable premises or flawed logic, even under its own terms.
The real interest, for me, is understanding where the zombie hardist has gone wrong. Not just concluding that they are wrong, which is a given, but in considering what aspect of physical reality could lead to their mistake. Obviously I think that analysis has huge repercussions for how we should all think about hardist intuitions on our own world, where we don't have the luxury of simply stipulating that the special extra is missing, and where many of us do seem to have strong intuitions that we can sense/intuit/deduce the presence of an anomaly. For the Zombie Argument to have a shred of credibility, the hardist must believe that the source of those intuitions is entirely unreliable, but utterly convincing.
Hardism is necessarily built around an illusionist core.
Interesting question. It seems like if philosophical zombies are possible, then meta-zombies (zombies postulating zombies if I'm understanding correctly) have to be possible. A zombie is supposed to be, at a minimum, behaviorally indistinguishable from a conscious entity, including scenarios where some will pseudo-think (nice phrase) they're conscious but that there would be a type of being that behaved like them without being conscious.
Of course, zombies are only possible if we presuppose epiphenomenal dualism, which of course is what the argument sets out to demonstrate. So it doesn't seem like we should be surprised by this aspect.
I think the problem here is the ambiguity that I flagged in the post, but deliberately did not address.
You are just seeing a meta-zombie as a zombie, and since I stipulated that zombies are possible, it might seem that there can be no impossibility for meta-zombies; they get a free pass. I have already chosen to overlook the incoherence of zombies, and once we overlook the key issues in the set-up, we can't really protest that there are any grounds for saying meta-zombies are impossible. Whatever we said would undermine the set-up... (Which is, in some ways, my point.) Anything I have overlooked has handed zombie hardists the conditions to argue that physicalism is false on the zombie world, which is wrong, so I have created a paradox and could not really justify overlooking what I overlooked. It is a reductio absurdum. The set-up itself commits an error.
But what makes a meta-zombie a meta-zombie? It can't just be the lack of special human consciousness, because that merely defines a zombie, and meta-zombies are defined, by zombies, as beings who lack something of importance that zombies possess. What is it that they are supposed to lack? That entity can be defined on the zombie world, and depending on the definition it can be something zombies actually have, or as something they lack -- all the usual definitional difficulties apply.
I am not really proposing a set-up in which epiphenomenalist dualism is true of all universes; it is just true of our own human world and it is wrong by stipulation on the zombie world. Zombies don't actually have the thing they propose their twins lack (they have the source of this concept, but not the target).
If a zombie world existed, it would require incoherence on our part to propose it, but once we get past the implications on our own world, the zombie world itself might be quite straightforward. It would have an ontology that could be described correctly or falsely, and it would have logical arguments that were valid or spurious. We can judge those arguments. We know that the zombie hardist proposing the Zombie Argument must be making an error of some sort because they are concluding, falsely, that they have insight into the truth of epiphenomenalist dualism on their world.
That means what I overlooked in the set-up no longer matters. We basically have a hypothetical world with a purely physicalist ontology and it is logically consistent within its own domain. The attitudes of philosophers there can be divided into hardists and anti-hardists. The hardists on that world are wrong and so they must be making a mistake. Meta-zombies, from their perspective, cannot be beings who lack *our* special human consciousness, because that is not something in the ontology of the zombie hardists making this argument; they do not consider our world in their deliberations, and they would struggle to define or conceptualise what our world must be like.
Either the zombie hardists are proposing the existence of hypothetical beings that are impossible, or the existence of those beings does not actually falsify physicalism on the zombie world. Both interpretations are possible -- and Tyler has covered the main interpretations.
My own view is that, if meta-zombies are defined carefully enough by zombie philosophers, they would necessarily be beings that, if they existed, falsified physicalism on the zombie world. But physicalism is true on the zombie world, so meta-zombies must be impossible. They can't be physical duplicates of zombies and lack something that has the necessary properties that cumulatively falsify physicalism in zombies. Those properties include being something the zombies actually have, and also something that matters. Meta-zombies can't just lack a fiction.
Ah, thanks. I misunderstood what you meant by asking if meta-zombies could be possible. I took it to be a question of whether zombies could postulate zombies. But you mean whether the meta-zombie would actually lack something the zombies in zombie-world possess. But if the metaphysical glaze is already missing from the zombies, what then is left for the meta-zombie to be missing?
I agree. It doesn't seem like they could be possible in the sense of missing something the zombies have.
Well, unless we want to get silly and postulate that the zombies have pseudo-consciousness which the meta-zombies are missing, only having pseudo-pseudo-consciousness.
Exactly. It’s not really a misunderstanding. I was deliberately leaving the question open to see what interpretations come to mind in readers.
I think that, between your answer and Tyler’s, I got the three implicit definitions of phenomenal consciousness that I was expecting, which is good. I can see the need for all of them.
To summarise, we have three things that might be targeted by “this” when the zombie hardist says his twin lacks “this”:
1) Spice. An entity that would make hardists right on our world
2) A neural model that physical brains ostend to.
3) The implicit content of that neural model.
Considering each in turn:
1) Zombies lack spice, so we can arguably forget about this option if we are adopting the zombie’s perspective; their words can never refer to it anyway. On the other hand, this is still what zombie hardists are describing, so perhaps spice is still what they are proposing as missing in their meta-zombie twins. Their mistake is in thinking they have spice, or that spice matters in any way. Meta-zombies are possible or impossible based on how we disambiguate what zombies mean by “zombie”; we either get impossible meta-zombies or just pseudo-zombies, depending on whether we stipulate that the lack must matter, and must refer to something actually possessed by the proposer of the Zombie Argument. If meta-zombies are just beings who lack spice, then they are possible.
2) Zombies have the neural model, and if that is what they ostend to, then it is just plain impossible for that model to be missing in a duplicate.
3) This is the subtle possibility. Zombies do not have a vindicated version of the implicit content of their neural model, but the vindication is impotent anyway, so it makes no difference to how things seem. The zombies’ cognition engages with the content of their model, not the substrate. We can say that the content is fictional or virtual or illusory, or we can choose to emphasize that it is just a way of looking at the real neural model, so the content is real in an honorary sense. Depending on our linguistic strategy, this attitude will let us say that meta-zombies still have the same implicit content as zombies (so MZ violate the “lacking” requirement because they still have “this”) or that the zombies proposing them share the same “lack” (violating the idea that something has gone missing that was present in the proposer of the argument, because there was no “this” to begin with). We can disambiguate these if we are careful.
I don’t think there is a right answer, because the concept of phenomenal consciousness, the concept of a zombie, and my own question about meta-zombies are all badly underspecified.
Answer 1: the zombies are just wrong about having phenomenal consciousness, so the meta-zombies which zombies imagine to be different are actually identical to the zombies. They're logic was correct, but they started from an incorrect premise ("we have phenomenal consciousness"), so no wonder their conclusion of some sort of dualism is incorrect.
Answer 2: actually, there still is something that the zombies are referring to when they say "meta zombies lack *this*", an attempt to gesture at their own version of phenomenal consciousness -- perhaps a virtual phenomenal consciousness or some sort of illusion. Then the premise "we have *this*" is correct. However, when they go to imagine meta-zombies, they are making a logical mistake: the physical duplication requirement implies meta-zombies still have the *this*, contradicting the requirement that they lack the *this*.
In answer 1, humans are different but zombies=meta-zombies. In answer 2, this leaves the possibility that actually humans = zombies = meta-zombies. I think a good metaphysical principle is "humility", which states that a metaphysical reasoner should, all else being equal, assume they are not special or unique in anyway. For example, we shouldn't assume the universe revolves around us, we should assume we're just in some random corner of the universe. Such a principle does support the physicalist answer of answer 2. But there is more to say on this I think.
I can see merit in both answers, but the zombie physicalist and the human physicalist say much the same thing, so it is the human hardist and zombie hardist who are violating epistemic humility.
Agreed, I was assuming all parties involved were hardists.
I see. Doesn't that conflict with your own hardist views?
Yes, I believe the principle of humility favors physicalism and not my own dualism. Panpsychism, which I also believe, helps temper the "arrogance" of dualism. The "all else being equal" is an important caveat to the principle of humility.
But I'm trying to keep an open mind, I think this meta-zombie idea might be a good argument (or at least a good rhetorical device to restate previous arguments). I'm curious to see if you incorporate it into one of your longer written pieces.
Not sure if you saw this, but it covers some of the issues:
https://open.substack.com/pub/zinbiel/p/are-meta-zombies-possible?r=2ep5a0&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=144488829
I think that, at a minimum, careful analysis of the meta-zombie scenario leads us to be much more specific about our definitions (without the distraction of whether special epiphenomenal consciousness is real or not in our own universe). It also should lead to recognition that the Zombie Argument can't achieve very much, not even on our own world, because it necessarily rests on unreliable premises or flawed logic, even under its own terms.
The real interest, for me, is understanding where the zombie hardist has gone wrong. Not just concluding that they are wrong, which is a given, but in considering what aspect of physical reality could lead to their mistake. Obviously I think that analysis has huge repercussions for how we should all think about hardist intuitions on our own world, where we don't have the luxury of simply stipulating that the special extra is missing, and where many of us do seem to have strong intuitions that we can sense/intuit/deduce the presence of an anomaly. For the Zombie Argument to have a shred of credibility, the hardist must believe that the source of those intuitions is entirely unreliable, but utterly convincing.
Hardism is necessarily built around an illusionist core.
Interesting question. It seems like if philosophical zombies are possible, then meta-zombies (zombies postulating zombies if I'm understanding correctly) have to be possible. A zombie is supposed to be, at a minimum, behaviorally indistinguishable from a conscious entity, including scenarios where some will pseudo-think (nice phrase) they're conscious but that there would be a type of being that behaved like them without being conscious.
Of course, zombies are only possible if we presuppose epiphenomenal dualism, which of course is what the argument sets out to demonstrate. So it doesn't seem like we should be surprised by this aspect.
I think the problem here is the ambiguity that I flagged in the post, but deliberately did not address.
You are just seeing a meta-zombie as a zombie, and since I stipulated that zombies are possible, it might seem that there can be no impossibility for meta-zombies; they get a free pass. I have already chosen to overlook the incoherence of zombies, and once we overlook the key issues in the set-up, we can't really protest that there are any grounds for saying meta-zombies are impossible. Whatever we said would undermine the set-up... (Which is, in some ways, my point.) Anything I have overlooked has handed zombie hardists the conditions to argue that physicalism is false on the zombie world, which is wrong, so I have created a paradox and could not really justify overlooking what I overlooked. It is a reductio absurdum. The set-up itself commits an error.
But what makes a meta-zombie a meta-zombie? It can't just be the lack of special human consciousness, because that merely defines a zombie, and meta-zombies are defined, by zombies, as beings who lack something of importance that zombies possess. What is it that they are supposed to lack? That entity can be defined on the zombie world, and depending on the definition it can be something zombies actually have, or as something they lack -- all the usual definitional difficulties apply.
I am not really proposing a set-up in which epiphenomenalist dualism is true of all universes; it is just true of our own human world and it is wrong by stipulation on the zombie world. Zombies don't actually have the thing they propose their twins lack (they have the source of this concept, but not the target).
If a zombie world existed, it would require incoherence on our part to propose it, but once we get past the implications on our own world, the zombie world itself might be quite straightforward. It would have an ontology that could be described correctly or falsely, and it would have logical arguments that were valid or spurious. We can judge those arguments. We know that the zombie hardist proposing the Zombie Argument must be making an error of some sort because they are concluding, falsely, that they have insight into the truth of epiphenomenalist dualism on their world.
That means what I overlooked in the set-up no longer matters. We basically have a hypothetical world with a purely physicalist ontology and it is logically consistent within its own domain. The attitudes of philosophers there can be divided into hardists and anti-hardists. The hardists on that world are wrong and so they must be making a mistake. Meta-zombies, from their perspective, cannot be beings who lack *our* special human consciousness, because that is not something in the ontology of the zombie hardists making this argument; they do not consider our world in their deliberations, and they would struggle to define or conceptualise what our world must be like.
Either the zombie hardists are proposing the existence of hypothetical beings that are impossible, or the existence of those beings does not actually falsify physicalism on the zombie world. Both interpretations are possible -- and Tyler has covered the main interpretations.
My own view is that, if meta-zombies are defined carefully enough by zombie philosophers, they would necessarily be beings that, if they existed, falsified physicalism on the zombie world. But physicalism is true on the zombie world, so meta-zombies must be impossible. They can't be physical duplicates of zombies and lack something that has the necessary properties that cumulatively falsify physicalism in zombies. Those properties include being something the zombies actually have, and also something that matters. Meta-zombies can't just lack a fiction.
Ah, thanks. I misunderstood what you meant by asking if meta-zombies could be possible. I took it to be a question of whether zombies could postulate zombies. But you mean whether the meta-zombie would actually lack something the zombies in zombie-world possess. But if the metaphysical glaze is already missing from the zombies, what then is left for the meta-zombie to be missing?
I agree. It doesn't seem like they could be possible in the sense of missing something the zombies have.
Well, unless we want to get silly and postulate that the zombies have pseudo-consciousness which the meta-zombies are missing, only having pseudo-pseudo-consciousness.
Exactly. It’s not really a misunderstanding. I was deliberately leaving the question open to see what interpretations come to mind in readers.
I think that, between your answer and Tyler’s, I got the three implicit definitions of phenomenal consciousness that I was expecting, which is good. I can see the need for all of them.
To summarise, we have three things that might be targeted by “this” when the zombie hardist says his twin lacks “this”:
1) Spice. An entity that would make hardists right on our world
2) A neural model that physical brains ostend to.
3) The implicit content of that neural model.
Considering each in turn:
1) Zombies lack spice, so we can arguably forget about this option if we are adopting the zombie’s perspective; their words can never refer to it anyway. On the other hand, this is still what zombie hardists are describing, so perhaps spice is still what they are proposing as missing in their meta-zombie twins. Their mistake is in thinking they have spice, or that spice matters in any way. Meta-zombies are possible or impossible based on how we disambiguate what zombies mean by “zombie”; we either get impossible meta-zombies or just pseudo-zombies, depending on whether we stipulate that the lack must matter, and must refer to something actually possessed by the proposer of the Zombie Argument. If meta-zombies are just beings who lack spice, then they are possible.
2) Zombies have the neural model, and if that is what they ostend to, then it is just plain impossible for that model to be missing in a duplicate.
3) This is the subtle possibility. Zombies do not have a vindicated version of the implicit content of their neural model, but the vindication is impotent anyway, so it makes no difference to how things seem. The zombies’ cognition engages with the content of their model, not the substrate. We can say that the content is fictional or virtual or illusory, or we can choose to emphasize that it is just a way of looking at the real neural model, so the content is real in an honorary sense. Depending on our linguistic strategy, this attitude will let us say that meta-zombies still have the same implicit content as zombies (so MZ violate the “lacking” requirement because they still have “this”) or that the zombies proposing them share the same “lack” (violating the idea that something has gone missing that was present in the proposer of the argument, because there was no “this” to begin with). We can disambiguate these if we are careful.
I don’t think there is a right answer, because the concept of phenomenal consciousness, the concept of a zombie, and my own question about meta-zombies are all badly underspecified.
Came here to say this, and thankfully you said it more concisely.