I am enjoying these posts tremendously, working through them in order. What a fantastic resource, and one simply made available to us for free!
But I have to ask: are there plans to turn all this into a book? It seems like it would be very easy to do so. And people like me (philosophically trained, but working in a different silo, and without a background in the philosophy of mind) would definitely read it. (Advertising tagline: You've read and fallen in love with Dennett ... NOW CONFRONT THE ZOMBIE'S DELUSION!")
I have been trying to write a book, but still work almost fulltime clinically. The delays were what led me to try putting some of the material out as a blog, instead. I was hoping to see where I got pushback and where I needed to explain things better.
I recently had a go at writing an introduction to a book, and the last few posts have bene instalments of that work, but the length blew out. What started as a Prologue became an Introduction, and that turned into a major section.
I must admit, I have found it difficult to know how to sequence the thoughts. Each piece of my overall argument depends on the others, so I find myself adding explanations and everything gets too long.
I’m sure I’ll get there in the end, but I just need some clear head space and time. About to have three weeks off-grid; that should help.
Thanks for the encouragement. Just knowing one reader is getting what I am trying to do means a lot.
So I feel like I’m essentially reading a book already.
Honestly, I really don’t think it would require all that much to take the blog posts I have read so far and lightly edit them to be the opening sequence of chapters in an accessible, but philosophically serious, book. (I am working my way up from the bottom.)
Perhaps, once you’ve laid it all out, it will be easier to convert the whole of your picture into a more “traditional” book format in a way you’re happy with. But my sense is you are already much closer to that than you perhaps estimate yourself to be.
(FWIW I’ve written three books, reviewed dozens, and read thousands. I like to think that my judgement might be worth something here!)
I’m in a weird situation of really benefiting from everything you are writing being online, in nice sized chunks, because it’s literally physically hard for me to read books these days, and so having everything on Substack is just very helpful. But if this was a book, I’d make the effort to read it on Kindle, just like I did recently with Dennett’s Consciousness Explained.
My bread and butter is the history of political philosophy, and contemporary political philosophy. I dabble a bit in moral philosophy too. Basically, whilst I can’t give you critical feedback on whether or not your arguments are ultimately correct, I can tell you if they are at least comprehensible and educational for somebody sufficiently able to follow philosophical arguments
Great. Ideally I would like to reach people not trained in philosophy, though I obviously can't pitch it at all reader groups simultaneously. My first pass will end up being about the density of these blog posts.
Some of the stuff I have written for myself is considerably denser; it can end up a case of speaking to myself in a private code if I am not careful, and the blog format acts as filter for that sort of approach.
Fascinating. Full disclosure: I haven't read it all. Yet. it will take me some time to digest what I have read (about half.) This:
"The question he has made famous is not even consistently ill-posed; it is a confusing blend of legitimate concerns and conceptual errors, put together with persuasive eloquence in a way that has eclipsed potentially clearer approaches to the issues."
Ah, yes, the confusing tactics of some in academia. I look forward to reading more.
First, I’m not really seeing much air between what you say the HP is not and what you say it is.
“But the Hard Problem is not the challenge of explaining subjective consciousness”
“The Hard Problem is the challenge of explaining what Chalmers calls “experience”.”
I think what Chalmers calls experience is more or less subjective consciousness, so you lose me here.
Second point is that I was mildly surprised to find you quoting Pigliucci favourably on the HP. I’ve discussed the HP with Pigliucci extensively and I would put him firmly in the camp of the latent hardists who scoff at the hard problem. He’s basically in agreement with John Searle (who I would put in the same camp) on most philosophy of mind issues.
That doesn’t mean you can’t agree with his scoffing, but just FYI I doubt you would agree with his approach to the HP in general.
I have added this section. I hope that it makes things clearer:
“Most people, I imagine, are willing to treat the Hard Problem as a legitimate problem because they see it is as the challenge of explaining “subjective consciousness”, and they see “experience” as just another name for that explanatory target. The Hard Problem leans on this ambiguity, borrowing plausibility from less radical versions of our natural curiosity about consciousness.
In this post and the next, I will be arguing that Chalmersian experience, as targeted by the Hard Problem, is a very specific theoretical creature with built-in commitments to the possibility of zombies. Chalmers has been motivated by the subjective consciousness he finds on introspection, but he ultimately targets a messy, incoherent hybrid notion instead.
A key component of Chalmersian experience is that it is imagined to be functionless; this is not something that is necessarily true of subjective consciousness, conceived in a theoretically neutral sense. If the issue is approached without Chalmers’ particular conceptual framework, we still have the puzzle of consciousness, but we don’t have the Hard Problem as he has promoted it. This distinction is important, because defending the notion of experience as a non-functional extra is ultimately difficult or impossible, and Chalmers’ framework inevitably leads to a dead-end.”
I am not endorsing Pigliucci per se, just noting that he has disputed the validity of the Easy-Hard divide. His reasons for rejecting it are probably quite divergent from mine. I will see if I can quote him without seeming to endorse him.
As to your more substantial point, I think there is a big difference between explaining Chalmersian experience, which is an incoherent target that leans on impossible zombies, and explaining subjective consciousness, which is just whatever there is that puzzles us and needs explaining.
Subjective consciousness is a theory-neutral label for the legitimate explanatory target, Chalmers’ experience is nonsense. If this did not come through, I need to rephrase those paragraphs.
I had a longer version that made this more explicit, and I might have cut that bit too much.
For those of you wondering why I don’t just use the term “epistemological” for references to the Scientist, and “ontological” for references to the Subject… I’m getting there. As long as we all remember our epistemic organ has a blood supply and a range of physical constraints, I’m good with that.
Sorry folks, this is a long one. The concepts are difficult to explain, so if I have failed to make myself clear, please nudge me in the right direction.
Great post, and I agree. But it seems to me quite simple. Subjective consciousness is either an independent entity (dualism) or an emergent property (emergentism). There are no other possibilities.
If you're a dualist you can do the arithmetic: human - PZ = soul. If you're an emergentist, there's no such thing as PZ.
All the question does is ascertain which camp you're in. Why are we still arguing about this?
Thanks. I think we probably agree on the big question, which is whether anything really clashes with physicalism enough to constitute a legitimate Hard Problem.
Personally, I don't find emergentism to be specific enough. I think we need to distinguish between strong and weak emergentism, for a start. You're a weak emergentist?
BTW, what do you mean by PZ?
I think one of the reasons people are still arguing is that there is a barrier to the derivation of qualia, as I touch upon in some of my other posts, though I have not yet laid out the whole argument. One of the reasons I find this interesting is I have strong hardist intuitions myself; I just think they are invalid.
My point was that each fulfils everything that we take to be necessary for emergence of the emergent property, but said property doesn't emerge. That's my take on the core idea of zombiehood. (If my examples were exact functional copies they would just be those things, not zombies - I'm not sure maybe we're saying the same thing but I didn't express it properly - So the PC has all the electronics running normally, but the behaviour of the program doesn't manifest.)
(Elan vital is just part of dualism, altho a part that nobody - no scientist anyway - feels is necessary any more.)
If you're dualist you have to present your soul delivery system. These can only be supernatural or natural. The natural ones end up with nonsense like souls finding their way into universes and the navigating to habitable planets, then into suitable brains and they must mostly succeed or it's an infinity trap. And any natural system would give errors: 0 souls (ie real PZ), 2 or more souls... Or you go for panpsychism (infinity trap again).
Now I think about it, I'm weak (arguably weak is a form of strong in that there's no physical law that prevents it, which is another way of saying there is a law that permits it)
Actually the only model I can get to work is dualist with a single soul in the universe (thanks W of Occam) reused from a Boltzmann god.
All the rest fall into infinity traps whereby your consciousness is a single random sample from an infinite no of potential consciousnesses. This can create third person worlds but not a first person one.
Anyway, if you're reading this, it shows that purpose of the Universe wasn't to discover this simple truth :-)
I am enjoying these posts tremendously, working through them in order. What a fantastic resource, and one simply made available to us for free!
But I have to ask: are there plans to turn all this into a book? It seems like it would be very easy to do so. And people like me (philosophically trained, but working in a different silo, and without a background in the philosophy of mind) would definitely read it. (Advertising tagline: You've read and fallen in love with Dennett ... NOW CONFRONT THE ZOMBIE'S DELUSION!")
I have been trying to write a book, but still work almost fulltime clinically. The delays were what led me to try putting some of the material out as a blog, instead. I was hoping to see where I got pushback and where I needed to explain things better.
I recently had a go at writing an introduction to a book, and the last few posts have bene instalments of that work, but the length blew out. What started as a Prologue became an Introduction, and that turned into a major section.
I must admit, I have found it difficult to know how to sequence the thoughts. Each piece of my overall argument depends on the others, so I find myself adding explanations and everything gets too long.
I’m sure I’ll get there in the end, but I just need some clear head space and time. About to have three weeks off-grid; that should help.
Thanks for the encouragement. Just knowing one reader is getting what I am trying to do means a lot.
So I feel like I’m essentially reading a book already.
Honestly, I really don’t think it would require all that much to take the blog posts I have read so far and lightly edit them to be the opening sequence of chapters in an accessible, but philosophically serious, book. (I am working my way up from the bottom.)
Perhaps, once you’ve laid it all out, it will be easier to convert the whole of your picture into a more “traditional” book format in a way you’re happy with. But my sense is you are already much closer to that than you perhaps estimate yourself to be.
(FWIW I’ve written three books, reviewed dozens, and read thousands. I like to think that my judgement might be worth something here!)
I’m in a weird situation of really benefiting from everything you are writing being online, in nice sized chunks, because it’s literally physically hard for me to read books these days, and so having everything on Substack is just very helpful. But if this was a book, I’d make the effort to read it on Kindle, just like I did recently with Dennett’s Consciousness Explained.
I might get you to give feedback when i have it in book format.
What branch of philosophy are you working in?
My bread and butter is the history of political philosophy, and contemporary political philosophy. I dabble a bit in moral philosophy too. Basically, whilst I can’t give you critical feedback on whether or not your arguments are ultimately correct, I can tell you if they are at least comprehensible and educational for somebody sufficiently able to follow philosophical arguments
Great. Ideally I would like to reach people not trained in philosophy, though I obviously can't pitch it at all reader groups simultaneously. My first pass will end up being about the density of these blog posts.
Some of the stuff I have written for myself is considerably denser; it can end up a case of speaking to myself in a private code if I am not careful, and the blog format acts as filter for that sort of approach.
Fascinating. Full disclosure: I haven't read it all. Yet. it will take me some time to digest what I have read (about half.) This:
"The question he has made famous is not even consistently ill-posed; it is a confusing blend of legitimate concerns and conceptual errors, put together with persuasive eloquence in a way that has eclipsed potentially clearer approaches to the issues."
Ah, yes, the confusing tactics of some in academia. I look forward to reading more.
Great post, and I basically agree with all of it.
A couple of points though.
First, I’m not really seeing much air between what you say the HP is not and what you say it is.
“But the Hard Problem is not the challenge of explaining subjective consciousness”
“The Hard Problem is the challenge of explaining what Chalmers calls “experience”.”
I think what Chalmers calls experience is more or less subjective consciousness, so you lose me here.
Second point is that I was mildly surprised to find you quoting Pigliucci favourably on the HP. I’ve discussed the HP with Pigliucci extensively and I would put him firmly in the camp of the latent hardists who scoff at the hard problem. He’s basically in agreement with John Searle (who I would put in the same camp) on most philosophy of mind issues.
That doesn’t mean you can’t agree with his scoffing, but just FYI I doubt you would agree with his approach to the HP in general.
I have added this section. I hope that it makes things clearer:
“Most people, I imagine, are willing to treat the Hard Problem as a legitimate problem because they see it is as the challenge of explaining “subjective consciousness”, and they see “experience” as just another name for that explanatory target. The Hard Problem leans on this ambiguity, borrowing plausibility from less radical versions of our natural curiosity about consciousness.
In this post and the next, I will be arguing that Chalmersian experience, as targeted by the Hard Problem, is a very specific theoretical creature with built-in commitments to the possibility of zombies. Chalmers has been motivated by the subjective consciousness he finds on introspection, but he ultimately targets a messy, incoherent hybrid notion instead.
A key component of Chalmersian experience is that it is imagined to be functionless; this is not something that is necessarily true of subjective consciousness, conceived in a theoretically neutral sense. If the issue is approached without Chalmers’ particular conceptual framework, we still have the puzzle of consciousness, but we don’t have the Hard Problem as he has promoted it. This distinction is important, because defending the notion of experience as a non-functional extra is ultimately difficult or impossible, and Chalmers’ framework inevitably leads to a dead-end.”
Yes, good points.
I am not endorsing Pigliucci per se, just noting that he has disputed the validity of the Easy-Hard divide. His reasons for rejecting it are probably quite divergent from mine. I will see if I can quote him without seeming to endorse him.
As to your more substantial point, I think there is a big difference between explaining Chalmersian experience, which is an incoherent target that leans on impossible zombies, and explaining subjective consciousness, which is just whatever there is that puzzles us and needs explaining.
Subjective consciousness is a theory-neutral label for the legitimate explanatory target, Chalmers’ experience is nonsense. If this did not come through, I need to rephrase those paragraphs.
I had a longer version that made this more explicit, and I might have cut that bit too much.
For those of you wondering why I don’t just use the term “epistemological” for references to the Scientist, and “ontological” for references to the Subject… I’m getting there. As long as we all remember our epistemic organ has a blood supply and a range of physical constraints, I’m good with that.
Sorry folks, this is a long one. The concepts are difficult to explain, so if I have failed to make myself clear, please nudge me in the right direction.
Great post, and I agree. But it seems to me quite simple. Subjective consciousness is either an independent entity (dualism) or an emergent property (emergentism). There are no other possibilities.
If you're a dualist you can do the arithmetic: human - PZ = soul. If you're an emergentist, there's no such thing as PZ.
All the question does is ascertain which camp you're in. Why are we still arguing about this?
Thanks. I think we probably agree on the big question, which is whether anything really clashes with physicalism enough to constitute a legitimate Hard Problem.
Personally, I don't find emergentism to be specific enough. I think we need to distinguish between strong and weak emergentism, for a start. You're a weak emergentist?
BTW, what do you mean by PZ?
I think one of the reasons people are still arguing is that there is a barrier to the derivation of qualia, as I touch upon in some of my other posts, though I have not yet laid out the whole argument. One of the reasons I find this interesting is I have strong hardist intuitions myself; I just think they are invalid.
There's a whole series of emergent phenomena, each with its own philosophical zombie:
Conway's life with everything in place but no gliders.
A PC with all the atoms and electrons in place but not actually running a program.
A living cell with all the atoms and electrons in place but not actually alive.
A human brain with all the atoms and electrons in place but not actually aware (a sleeping brain has some atoms/electrons in different places).
I don't think any of those keep the core idea of zombiehood. They are functionally different.
I would accept any of them if you made them exact functional copies.
Think of a Frankencat. A perfect mimic of a living cat but composed of dead atoms with no elan vital.
My point was that each fulfils everything that we take to be necessary for emergence of the emergent property, but said property doesn't emerge. That's my take on the core idea of zombiehood. (If my examples were exact functional copies they would just be those things, not zombies - I'm not sure maybe we're saying the same thing but I didn't express it properly - So the PC has all the electronics running normally, but the behaviour of the program doesn't manifest.)
(Elan vital is just part of dualism, altho a part that nobody - no scientist anyway - feels is necessary any more.)
If you're dualist you have to present your soul delivery system. These can only be supernatural or natural. The natural ones end up with nonsense like souls finding their way into universes and the navigating to habitable planets, then into suitable brains and they must mostly succeed or it's an infinity trap. And any natural system would give errors: 0 souls (ie real PZ), 2 or more souls... Or you go for panpsychism (infinity trap again).
PZ = philosophical zombie.
Now I think about it, I'm weak (arguably weak is a form of strong in that there's no physical law that prevents it, which is another way of saying there is a law that permits it)
Actually the only model I can get to work is dualist with a single soul in the universe (thanks W of Occam) reused from a Boltzmann god.
All the rest fall into infinity traps whereby your consciousness is a single random sample from an infinite no of potential consciousnesses. This can create third person worlds but not a first person one.
Anyway, if you're reading this, it shows that purpose of the Universe wasn't to discover this simple truth :-)
Ah, okay. Thanks.