That's true, but that forces proponents of the conceivability of p-zombies to basically use the "god did it" explanation. — RogueAI

When a modest little argument becomes a devastating wedge, it's a thing of beauty. It's unfortunate that there isn't enough interest in philosophy of mind on this site to follow Chalmers' artistry. But there isn't.

No, I do not mean physicalism. I'm saying that all behaviour, including language, can be predicted from physics.
— GrahamJ

As far as I'm concerned, that is physicalism pure and simple. Sorry, but I don't rate Carroll as a philosopher. — Wayfarer

What is physicalism, if not everything coming from physics?

What is physicalism, if not everything coming from physics? — Patterner

Exactly! Although in practice, it most often turns out to be an appeal to scientific method as the arbiter of reality.

This comment I made in another thread seems apropos:

I don't see it as a case of the "feeliness" of experience "affecting neurons", but since that would be to espouse dualism, I would rather say the felt quality of experience must be causal (if neuronal processes are) since it too would be a neuronal process. If the felt quality were not present then the neuronal processes would be different and thus different causally. That's why I think epiphenomenalism makes no sense.

The same goes for the p-zombie notion; the idea that our neuronal processes could be exactly as they are when felt experience is present and yet we could nonetheless have no felt experience seems completely absurd to me. Ironically it presupposes dualism, because it imagines the felt quality of experience as something "ghostly" that exists over and above the neuronal processes.

So, all the behavior can indeed "be accounted for by the low-level physical causes", but why should we think that the low-level physical processes should be the same regardless of whether they were associated with consciousness or not? And if they differ, why would they not differ causally?

It doesn't follow that the p-zombie is "inconceivable" merely that it is implausible, and even incoherent in the sense that we cannot find any cogent explanation for how it could be possible.

Ironically it presupposes dualism, because it imagines the felt quality of experience as something "ghostly" that exists over and above the neuronal processes.

:100:

So many of the arguments against physicalism presuppose dualism, and are simply question begging. I think we are so encultured to thinking dualistically about mind and body that (at least in the West) it is hard for people to recognize that they are begging the question.

Exactly right. The argument makes two assumptions: there is a property of persons called “conscious experience”, and that we can conceive of beings identical in both biology and behavior without this property. Something, whatever that may be in fact, is missing in the p-zombie, which is an odd stretch because both are physically identical.

It seems to me the existence this property must be proven of the former before it can be said to be missing from the latter. But I’ve never seen anyone able to say exactly what it is. Until the fact of conscious experience is proven, p-zombies will remain inconceivable.

in the end it all appears a clever trick to smuggle dualism past the customs.

I'm sure I read in the past that while Chalmers considers various options possible, he has leaned towards dualism. I'm not sure how reliable that source was though or why he does or did.

A specific subset of the p-zombie challenge is speech about having consciousness. I recall there's a name for that puzzle, perhaps even from Chalmers or he just used it. I don't know if the p-zombie helps unpack it and I find it very confusing to think about. I'm not sure how to make any progress on it, under monism or whatever.

Until the fact of conscious experience is proven — NOS4A2

Most people have conscious experiences, and so take that as a given. Do you have conscious experiences?

Most people have conscious experiences, and so take that as a given. Do you have conscious experiences?

Experience is an act, not a thing. So while people are conscious and do experience, they do not have conscious experiences. There is no need to invoke other things and substances with noun phrases.

From what I’ve read he leans towards “property dualism”. I’m not sure what his views are these days.

But yes the language used to abstract the description of things from the things themselves has led to the confusion in philosophy of mind, in my opinion.

Most people have conscious experiences, and so take that as a given. Do you have conscious experiences?

Experience is an act, not a thing. So while people are conscious and do experience, they do not have conscious experiences. There is no need to invoke other things and substances with noun phrases. — NOS4A2

I sang a song.
I went for a run.
I had a thought.

Are song, run, or thought nouns in those sentences?

RE: What is a strong argument against the concievability of philosophical zombies?
SUBTOPIC: Split Thoughts
⁜→ Patterner, et al,

ON THE TOPIC: against the concievability of philosophical zombies
(COMMENT)

There are many facets to philosophy. A "philosophical zombie" is a philosopher with no independent thought on the subjects of knowledge, consciousness, anomalies or nature in reality, and existence. It is a philosopher that can only regurgitate the thoughts of others or what they have been taught.

The use of "zombie" in this manner is cute. In this case, to appreciate the descriptor relative to the philosopher. One has to mentally conjure the characteristics of the unreal (zombie). Whatever the capacity one assigns to the zombie is strictly fantasy. Yet, the idea of a zombie being real is a metaphysical notion.

∴ cute

I sang a song.
I went for a run.
I had a thought.

Are song, run, or thought nouns in those sentences?[/reply]
(COMMENT)

SHORT ANSWER: Yes!

Technically, they are the "object" (noun) of each sentence for the "verb."

• sang (verb) → song (object)
• went (verb) → run (object)
• had (verb) → thought (object)

Most Respectfully,
R

Yes.

It doesn't follow that the p-zombie is "inconceivable" merely that it is implausible, and even incoherent in the sense that we can find not any cogent explanation for how it could be possible. — Janus

Whew!! Thanks for the addendum, the add-on. I was having trouble with the post, but…..hey, no worries…..I’m all better now.

The abstractions vs actual is another relevant issue. I was meaning the causal issue, like how qualia can cause physical speech about having qualia (a problem if they're passive as Carroll pointed out, but also for monism? And for p-zombie).

Per Wikipedia, Chalmers' naturalistic property dualism involves "psychophysical laws that determine which physical systems are associated with which types of qualia. He further speculates that all information-bearing systems may be conscious, leading him to entertain the possibility of conscious thermostats and a qualified panpsychism he calls panprotopsychism."

Whether something's information-bearing would seem to depends on the context though, like needs to be assessed from the outside and over time maybe. Similar to something having a 'function'. How can that objectively in itself trigger qualia. But it does seem like we experience functions, like vision overall rather than like optical electrical pathways inside the brain.

Cool!

Yes — NOS4A2

Music is vibrations in the air, over some period of time. Certainly an action. How do you know under which circumstances actions are nouns?

so you don't feel like there's anything beyond an act when you see a colour, for example. Look at something vibrantly red or blue or green. It's that summed up entirely in the act of how you respond to it?

Music is vibrations in the air, over some period of time. Certainly an action. How do you know under which circumstances actions are nouns?

Things act; acts are not themselves things. We can see this empirically.

Though we treat acts as things in language (and it’s extremely difficult to do otherwise), we ought not to include them in our ontology as existing things because we risk reifying them. So though it may be necessary for linguistic purposes, acts are unnecessary and even confusing for any species of ontology. This applies also to the qualities, properties, characteristics, or attributes of things, which often take the form of adjectives.

so you don't feel like there's anything beyond an act when you see a colour, for example. Look at something vibrantly red or blue or green. It's that summed up entirely in the act of how you respond to it?

I don’t believe there is anything beyond the things or objects involved. For example, I don’t see a color, I see a colorful thing.

Things act; acts are not themselves things. We can see this empirically.

Though we treat acts as things in language (and it’s extremely difficult to do otherwise), we ought not to include them in our ontology as existing things because we risk reifying them. So though it may be necessary for linguistic purposes, acts are unnecessary and even confusing for any species of ontology. This applies also to the qualities, properties, characteristics, or attributes of things, which often take the form of adjectives. — NOS4A2

I really don’t know how you mean this. It sounds like you’re saying we shouldn’t acknowledge them. That they don’t exist. I don’t know much about ontology. It seems there is not agreement on what categories of ontology there are, or even if there are different categories. So I couldn’t argue what species of ontology acts are in. But here we are, talking about them. And, as you’re posting in TPG, I assume you put a lot of thought into these things. I I would think they have some form of existence?

I don't think that answers my question.

I don’t know much about ontology. — Patterner

Ontology is the broad categorisation of types of beings, derived from the Greek root, ōn, ‘being’. In traditional philosophy it was often paired with metaphysics - you would study metaphysics and ontology side by side. And as metaphysics has fallen out of favour so too has ontology in the classical sense. Nowadays you encounter it in computer science where an ontology defines a set of representational primitives with which to model a domain of knowledge or discourse. I like to think of it as distinguishing the kinds of beings there are, and also to distinguish between beings and things (this usage is not considered standard but I think it’s defensible.)

In the context of philosophical zombies and the nature of consciousness, the question revolves around the kind of being or existence that consciousness has. Materialists are compelled to argue that it has the same kind of being or existence as physical objects, as their ontology is monistic (only matter or matter-energy is real), meaning that consciousness (or mind) must be a product of (epiphenomenon of, emergent from) matter. Dualists argue that mind and the physical are a separate substances (and note, ‘substance’ has a different meaning in philosophy than in everyday speech), idealists that everything is in some sense explicable to or reducible to mind or states of being.

I tend to side with the idealists although I won’t divert this thread with that argument (for which see the OP Mind Created World.)

Thank you!

I really don’t know how you mean this. It sounds like you’re saying we shouldn’t acknowledge them. That they don’t exist. I don’t know much about ontology. It seems there is not agreement on what categories of ontology there are, or even if there are different categories. So I couldn’t argue what species of ontology acts are in. But here we are, talking about them. And, as you’re posting in TPG, I assume you put a lot of thought into these things. I I would think they have some form of existence?

Sorry for the silly jargon. By ontology I mean our beliefs about "the nature of being" or "that which is". It's like a list of that which exists, and accordingly, that which demands consideration.

It’s quite simple, in my mind. The act and that which acts are the exact same thing. So when you observe the act of a punch or a kick, for example, you're observing a particular person moving in such a fashion. Despite our use of two or more nouns which imply that we are considering two or more things, there are not two or more persons, places, or things that we are observing. We can observe only one.

So in my opinion only one deserves a place in the pantheon of being while the rest, like acts, abstract objects, fomrs, qualities, properties, are merely conventions of language.

What is a strong argument for the conceivability of philosophical zombies? — dylspinks

Well there’s only a few ways to make this question intelligible, one being: whether there is a good reason (for philosophy) to imagine how we might not know other people are dead inside? What philosophy is conceiving is someone who looks and acts like a person, but is… (and here we are to imagine as full a context as we can, and really get specific about what the criteria would have to look like, in order for this fantasy to make the most sense it can (to make this depiction the “strongest” it can be)). The reason it is important is that learning about what can go wrong, how we might fail to know, tells us about how we—and how to—see others as human and themselves, as in: how being human matters to us.

Now we’d have to read a looooot of philosophy about robots and automatons, etc. I’ll just spoil Wittgenstein’s ending. The fact is that we do not know the other is human, because that is just not how “knowing” works here. Knowledge in other cases is different, but the way knowing another person works is that we act towards them as a person, or do not. We accept them as a person in pain or we ignore them. We acknowledge their life as different than ours, or we reject what matters to them. Wittgenstein, in the Investigations #420, would say (as would Marx) we see them only as a lawyer, or a pawn, or a hero, or a junkie, instead of any more or different than that, as we might see them as without color, avoiding the effects on them of racism.

The other question (analogy) this could possibly be, would be answered: yes, you can be dead to yourself, driven by a desire that is not your own.

Sorry for the silly jargon. By ontology I mean our beliefs about "the nature of being" or "that which is". It's like a list of that which exists, and accordingly, that which demands consideration.

It’s quite simple, in my mind. The act and that which acts are the exact same thing. So when you observe the act of a punch or a kick, for example, you're observing a particular person moving in such a fashion. Despite our use of two or more nouns which imply that we are considering two or more things, there are not two or more persons, places, or things that we are observing. We can observe only one.

So in my opinion only one deserves a place in the pantheon of being while the rest, like acts, abstract objects, fomrs, qualities, properties, are merely conventions of language. — NOS4A2

Thanks. That's about what I was thinking you meant with the word.

I'm entirely on board with your second paragraph. Our language doesn't differentiate between nouns of different ontological types. I really don’t know if it’s true, but the story has always been that an Inuit language has twenty different words for "snow." Which makes sense, since snow has played such a huge roll in their lives and culture. They literally needed the specific information, so the language has it. We don't need different words for nouns of different ontological types, or we'd have them. Still, it would be nice. Not just q because it would be interesting. Our language plays a role in how we think. Change the language, and you never know what will happen.

But that's only how we label things when discussing language. The sentence "I had a conscious experience of the song" remains the same, regardless of how we analyze the sentence, and label "conscious experience" and "song." Both things? Both acts? Whatever. The important thing is that something different happens when the vibrations in the air envelop me than when they envelop a rock. Or when they envelop a robot that we have programmed to dance, emit drops of liquid from the structures we gave it that resemble human eyes, or reproduce the vibrations in the air if the patterns of those vibrations have been previously stored in the robot's memory.

The difference between the scenario of vibrations enveloping you and vibrations enveloping a rock are the objects involved. The same difference occurs in the scenario of a human vs a robot, or person vs another person—the objects are different, thus they move differently and respond differently to the vibrations in the air.

And that, to me, is why p-zombies are inconceivable. Given two persons physically and operationally identical, how can one be missing "conscious experience"? It's incoherent and impossible to consider, and only question-begging can push the argument a little further.

Well yeah. I resurrected this thread after 2 years to say I think they're inconceivable.

But you said this:

Until the fact of conscious experience is proven... — NOS4A2

After several exchanges, I believe you're saying conscious experience doesn't exist because it's not a thing that someone can have. It's an act, but our language treats it like a physical thing. While I agree that language could be more precise, in everyday usage and in discussions of language, I don't know why considering a conscious experience to be a response instead of a thing means they don't exist, or we don't have them.

I just mean we literally don't have them, ontologically speaking, that we are not in fact considering "conscious experience" as such, we are only considering the physical body in a roundabout way. It is my contention that thought experiments such as p-zombies are exercises in dancing around the facts of biology.

Is my response to X ... how to word it ... the biological equivalent of the robot's mechanical/electronic response to X? And is it possible, at least on theory, to build robots that make the same mistake (if that's the correct word) we have always made, and come up with thought experiments that are exercises in dancing around the facts of electronics?