Richard Brown

Ut vos es Bellator Victus Mortuus Tempus Fugit

By

Richard Brown
3–5 minutes

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Yes, indeed, time does flee when you are fighting the living dead!

It has been a year since the original zombies wars broke out around here, which led to all of the zoombie and shombie action. I was recently looking over some of these old posts and the debate between Richard Chappell and myself as I get ready to do the re-write for the Journal of Consciousness Studies (where this paper and others from Consciousness Online are slated to appear).

The basic claim that Chappell makes is that the zoombie argument is not really a parody of the zombie argument. The basic reason for this is his claim that there is an important dis-analogy between the zombie argument and the zoombie argument. This dis-analogy arises because the completed micro-physical description of the world contains qualitative facts, if it does at all, only implicitly. This opens up the conceptual gap between the physical and the qualitative in a way that leaves the physicalist susceptible to the conceivability argument.

The dualist on the other had think that the qualitative facts are primitive and must be added to a completed micro-physics explicitly. Since the qualitative is not reducible to any base facts that are not themselves qualitative the dualist is not susceptible to conceivability arguments in the same way that the physicalist is. Another way to make the point, and a way that I think Richard prefers to make the point, is in terms of asking what follows from a completed micro-physics. The original zombie argument tries to show that the qualitative facts do not follow from the complete physical facts. The zoombie argument doesn’t work this way. We do no build up the non-physical facts and then ask whether or not the qualitative facts follow from them. This is because the dualist claims that the qualitative facts have to added explicitly. There is no issue of whether the follow from any other kind of fact since they are taken to be primitive.

Now, clearly, there is this dis-analogy between the two arguments. But does it follow, as Chappell alleged, that this dis-analogy makes it “daft” to mount a conceivability argument against the dualist? Or, another charge from Chappell, does this dis-analogy make the zoombie argument a bad parody of the original zombie argument (actually he said that it was irrational to think so, but let’s not dredge that stuff up) or show that I have misunderstood the original zombie argument (yet a further gem from Chappell)?

To start with the first question, the answer is obviously ‘no’.  A conceivability argument just starts from the claim that something is conceivable and reasons to that thing’s being possible. If something follows from that possibility then fine.If not fine. In this case it is conceivable that NP, being the complete set of non-physical facts about the actual world, obtain without any qualitative properties included in NP. If this is conceivable then it is possible and if it is possible dualism is false. Is this a bad parody of the zombie argument? Only if you think a parody must be identical in every respect to the original. The point is that zoombie argument is like the zombie argument in the right respects; in particular in asserting the conceivability of p and reasoning from there. The fact that what is at issue in the zoombie argument is not “what follows from what” but is rather “what must be included in the complete non-physical description of a world that is non-physically identical to the actual world?” is irrelevant. All that maters is that the possibility of zoombies shows that qualitative properties are not non-physical properties.  Finally, does this show that the proponent of the zoombie argument misunderstands the zombie argument? I don’t think so. The zombie proponent holds that zombies are conceivable because there is a gap between our physical/functional concepts and our qualitative concepts; or in other words that there is no reason as of now to think that qualitative properties are physical properties. The physicalist like me will claim that this gap will be abolished as we reach the ideal limit and so zombies are prima facie conceivable but not ideally conceivable. The zoombie proponent holds that zoombies are conceivable because there is no reason to think that qualitative properties are non-physical and so no reason to think that they must be included in a complete description of a non-physical duplicate of our world. Clearly both of these (zombies and zoombies) can’t be ideally conceivable so a priori arguments won’t help us decide between theories of consciousness.

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Comments

22 responses to “Ut vos es Bellator Victus Mortuus Tempus Fugit”

  1. Richard C Avatar
    Richard C

    An important clarification. You write: “Is this a bad parody of the zombie argument? Only if you think a parody must be identical in every respect to the original. The point is that zoombie argument is like the zombie argument in the right respects; in particular in asserting the conceivability of p and reasoning from there.”

    Careful now, my objection was never that your parody fails to be “identical in every respect” to the original argument. (That would indeed be silly!) Rather, I was precisely disputing that it’s alike “in the right respects”. (This comes out very clearly in our discussion here.) So this is the real point of contention: how best to understand the original zombie argument, and whether your analogy is alike in the respects that ground the cogency of the original.

    In particular, I claim that we must take care not to be overly hasty in “asserting the conceivability of p and reasoning from there”. I think it would be sloppy reasoning for the dualist to simply assert “it’s conceivable that there could be a world physically like ours but absent all qualia”, and reason from there. Conceivability arguments require greater care to ensure the transparency of what is being conceived. In particular, the careful dualist will need to replace the opaque phrase ‘physically like ours’ with an explicit specification P of the distribution of properties they are talking about. This was the point of my post ‘How To Imagine Zombies‘. (No such careful instructions would be necessary if I thought it was okay to “conceive of p” any old way!)

    So, I absolutely agree with you that sloppy conceivability arguments (as exemplified by your parody) are no good. Anyone who thinks the zombie argument cogent merely because it has the general form of “asserting the conceivability of p and reasoning from there” is indeed in error. But it doesn’t follow that the zombie argument is bad, for it may have other features (or exemplify another – more specific – form) in virtue of which it is cogent. And this is precisely my claim: that the zombie argument works because it is a specific kind of conceivability argument — roughly, one that ‘builds up’ or explicitly specifies the claim to be conceived (without using any opaque terms like ‘physical’ or ‘non-physical’) and uses this to establish a non-identity claim, e.g. that the property Q is not reducible (identical) to any of the properties specified in P.

    Your parody does not have this feature, or share this form, since you cannot replace the opaque ‘non-physical properties’ with an explicit specification NP the way the dualist can with P. (Or if you do, the cogently obtainable conclusion — that Q is not reducible to any of the properties neutrally specified in NP — is no threat to dualism. For remember that ‘NP’ here is just a placeholder for a list of non-physical properties; when you fill it out there is nothing that guarantees that there aren’t other non-physical properties in addition!)

    That is to say: your attempted parody lacks the feature which dualists take to ground the cogency of their argument. So we can agree that the parody is a bad argument without this reflecting on the quality of the original argument.

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  2. GNZ Avatar
    GNZ

    Putting my devils advocate hat on – two points as I remember it

    1) There is a certain intuition being triggered by the zombie argument and the argument reminds us that we have that intuition (even if the argument itself is circular) and the zoombie argument lacks this.
    This could rest on the fact that it isn’t ‘clear’ what “all the non physical facts” means. And thus it doesn’t drive intuitions very well.

    2) RC’s favourite form of the zombie argument is about reductionism. In fact, RC is ‘OK’ with the idea that Qualia might be ‘physical’ but non reducable and therefore your zoombie argument doesn’t directly address one of the possible positions – potentially the most difficult to defeat one, and thus the biggest prize.

    Reply
  3. GNZ Avatar
    GNZ

    Looks like I cross posted with RC,

    anyway as to the latest comment – The zombie reduction argument seems to run into similar issues.

    In this model it is somthing like
    “Q is not reducible to P”

    But surely here P is not “the physical world”, that only aplies in the normal zombie argument – here we are building up from a base – so it is “the base P fact”.

    Now noone knows that fact. No matter how I specify a ‘base fact’ there can always be a lower level that might make up Q and if that was true Q would be part of P.*

    That being said – I note Richards version stated
    “1. (P & ~Q) is ideally conceivable [can’t be ruled out a priori]”
    the braketed section seems to imply RC actually set the lowest possible standard for the equivilent scenario to (NP ~ Q)

    *I also note Q gets rather hard to concieve of when you start thinking in terms of anything close to base fact candidates.

    Reply
  4. Richard Brown Avatar
    Richard Brown

    Hi Richard, thanks for the follow up.

    the careful dualist will need to replace the opaque phrase ‘physically like ours’ with an explicit specification P of the distribution of properties they are talking about.

    I take it that P must be a complete specification of the structural/functional properties of the world in question; since we don’t know what that specification is at most we can infer that the zombie world is negatively conceivable not positively conceivable (I think you grant this…is that right?)…If so, then one way of putting my complaint is as follows: The fact that we cannot seem to find a contradiction in the imagined scenario is not evidence that this scenario is ideally conceivable. We do not have all of the structural/functional facts yet and so for all we know now it may turn out that the world we are conceiving is not really a complete structural/functional duplicate of the actual world. If so then the zombie world is only prima facie negatively conceivable not ideally negatively conceivable. I grant for the sake of argument that at the ideal limit we will be able to tell a priori whether or not physicalism is false since then we will be in a position to know which a priori conditional holds (that is either (P–>Q), or ~(P–>Q) is necessarily false at the ideal limit) but the point is that, given our current lack of a completed micro-physics, we can’t yet tell which is which…

    Your parody does not have this feature, or share this form, since you cannot replace the opaque ‘non-physical properties’ with an explicit specification NP the way the dualist can with P.

    But I can do this. NP is an explicit specification of all of the non-structural/non-functional properties (and their distribution) of the actual world plus a “that’s all” clause just like your P. Again, just like your way of doing it, we give a complete non-microphysical description of the world and specify “that’s all”.

    (Or if you do, the cogently obtainable conclusion — that Q is not reducible to any of the properties neutrally specified in NP — is no threat to dualism.

    A quick point about this, and maybe this is one place where we have been talking past one another…you seem to take the conclusion of the zoombie argument to be that qualitative properties are not reducible to some other set of properties and object to that but that is not supposed to be the conclusion. The conclusion is supposed to be that dualism is false, or that qualitative properties are not non-structural/non-functional properties and thus are not irreducible non-physical features of our world. That’s why I said the following in my post:

    The fact that what is at issue in the zoombie argument is not “what follows from what” but is rather “what must be included in the complete non-physical description of a world that is non-physically identical to the actual world?” is irrelevant. All that maters is that the possibility of zoombies shows that qualitative properties are not non-physical properties.

    For remember that ‘NP’ here is just a placeholder for a list of non-physical properties; when you fill it out there is nothing that guarantees that there aren’t other non-physical properties in addition!)

    But there is! The zoombie world is a COMPLETE non-structural/non-functional duplicate of our world. NP is not just some random list of non-physical properties! It is a complete list of the actual non-physical properties. So, if there are no non-physical qualitative properties in NP then the actual qualitative properties that you and I enjoy are not non-physical properties (there may be other non-physical properties that are possible but theses properties don’t figure in a complete description of our world and so don’t matter for the argument at hand.)

    Now granted that this complete specification of the non-functional/non-structural properties of the actual world will not be uncontroversial to the dualist. They will complain that such a description must include qualitative properties. But there is no a priori contradiction in conceiving zoombies so they must be wrong. This is where the similarity to the original zombie argument comes in. I question whether you are really succeeding in conceiving a world that is microphysically identical to the actual world, you question whether I am actually succeeding in conceiving of a world that is non-microphysically identical to the actual world. So, the ‘non-controversial’ specification of P that you need is in fact controversial. Sure, I grant that there are structural/functional facts in your conception and that a complete description of the world in such terms will include just ‘more of the same’ but that is not enough to get you your conclusion since I insist that there is no contradiction in the idea that adding more of the same will allow us to make the required deductions…just as in the zoombie case you grant that there are non-functional/non-structural facts in NP and that a complete description of our world in such terms will include just ‘more of the same’ but you claim that that doesn’t get me my claim that such a completed NP will lack qualitative properties. So the two arguments are alike in just the right respects.

    Hi GNZ,

    RE 1: I agree that a certain intuition being triggered is the point of the zombie argument but deny that the same isn’t happening in the zoombie argument. My intuition that qualitative properties are not non-physical properties is triggered very strongly by the zoombie argument…I suspect it is that way with others sympathetic to physicalism as well…

    RE 2: I grant that the original zombie argument should be taken as about reduction in RC’s terms, but the zoombie argument is about irreduction and so is precisely supposed to show that qualitative properties are NOT non reducible…that’s why I think it does get the biggest prize!

    Reply
  5. Richard C Avatar
    Richard C

    “you seem to take the conclusion of the zoombie argument to be that qualitative properties are not reducible to some other set of properties and object to that but that is not supposed to be the conclusion.”

    No, I understand that your zoombie argument has a different form. My claim was instead that this is the only cogently obtainable conclusion — that is, the only conclusion that can be reached using the specific kind of conceivability reasoning that I consider cogent. (Your zoombie argument relies on much looser reasoning, which is why I think it’s no good.)

    What specific kind of conceivability reasoning do I allow? To repeat:

    roughly, one that ‘builds up’ or explicitly specifies the claim to be conceived (without using any opaque terms like ‘physical’ or ‘non-physical’) and uses this to establish a non-identity claim, e.g. that the property Q is not reducible (identical) to any of the properties specified in P.

    Here’s another way to highlight the disanalogy. The zombie argument begins by noting that the physicalist believes that there is some P (making no explicit reference to qualia) that metaphysically suffices for Q. The zombie argument begins by taking that very ‘P’, chosen by their opponent, and running a specific kind of conceivability argument to show that Q is not identical to any property in P. (The type-A materialist might not be convinced, since they think that P conceptually implies Q, but this at least isn’t a narrowly logical deduction, so there’s plenty of room for the argument to at least “get off the ground” in this minimal sense.)

    Now, your reverse-zombie argument does not share this form. You cannot take an ‘NP’ chosen by a dualist, because the dualist will want to give you a list of properties that explicitly includes Q, and hence the given NP & ~Q will be straightforwardly inconsistent as a purely logical matter, no complicated conceptual analysis required.

    Alternatively, you might ask the dualist to give you a list of non-physical properties that doesn’t explicitly mention Q, but then they aren’t committed to thinking that this NP exhausts the non-physical properties. You might try to insist that it does, but you’re then making a very different kind of dialectical move from what’s made in the original zombie argument (which at no point disputes the physicalist’s proposed specification P, or adds extra stipulations about whether there could be other physical properties in addition, or any of that.). So then your parody argument might be a bad argument due to this feature — a feature which does not carry over to the original zombie argument.

    I hold that eligible (legitimate, cogent) conceivability arguments must start from a precise, uncontested specification of what is to be conceived. The reverse-zombie argument clearly fails to meet this condition. You want to claim that the original argument shares this failing, but this I dispute. It is easy to see that there is a possible zombie argument which meets this condition. This is the possible zombie argument which replaces ‘P’ with whatever physical specification the physicalist wants to provide. Since the physicalist can provide whatever specification P they like, it is not going to be contested by the dualist, and hence is “uncontested”.

    [P.S. Perhaps it’s worth noting that there’s an important sense in which we do not yet have the concrete zombie argument, since no physicalist has yet provided any such P. But I do not think this is an insuperable problem. We must simply extrapolate (or make an educated guess) as to how the argument might work given any P the physicalist might try to provide. It seems prima facie plausible that the zombie argument could get off the ground whatever P the physicalist might try to provide (given what we know about the sorts of properties they are likely to want to include in P). This is what sets it apart from your parody, which never had the faintest hope of “getting off the ground” in this way.]

    Reply
  6. Richard Brown Avatar
    Richard Brown

    Richard, you can’t be serious that this is the only kind of conceivabily argument that you allow! I certainly agree that the kind you talk about is appropriate fir trying to show that some property is not reducible to some other property but that is not what I am trying to show. I am trying to show that a certain property is in fact reducible (or at least is concievably so) to some other property or that there is no such nonpbysical property as you suggest. The zoombie argument has a form that is appropriate for that task. In that sense it hasmore in common with the argument that it is conceivBle that there is no god. To show that we conceive if a world that is nonphysically identical to ours but which doesn’t have a certain nonpbysical entity in it. This is used to show that something is epistemically possible but may not be metaphysically possible. Even so there is a relevant similarity to the zombie argumeent in that the thing actually claimed to be conceivable is controverial (as you in effect admit in the post script.). In the original arg it is whether the Q facts follow from the P facts in my arg it is whether you can have all
    NP facts without the Q facts

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  7. Richard Brown Avatar
    Richard Brown

    Sorry about the last comment…I wrote it on my iphone in the theatre waiting for the new Star Trek to begin…let me try and restate thge point really quick,

    You say:

    I hold that eligible (legitimate, cogent) conceivability arguments must start from a precise, uncontested specification of what is to be conceived. The reverse-zombie argument clearly fails to meet this condition. You want to claim that the original argument shares this failing, but this I dispute.

    No, this is not what I want to say. I do NOT say that the original zombie argument starts from a contested physical description! What is contested is whether or not the world you are imagining lacks qualitative properties or not. If it really is a microphysical duplicate then it will have qualitative properties. Furthermore since we do not have a completed microphysics we cannot be sure that the world that does lack qualitative consciousness is a microphysical duplicate of ours or not. I grant that we can conceive of a world that lacks qualitative consciousness and which looks like the actual world. I dispute whether this world is the zombie world or not. Just like you grant that we can conceive of a world that lacks non-physical qualitative properties but deny that it is non-physically identical to our world. So what I contest is wether it is actually consistent to say “yeah, I can imagine having the P that you specify but no qualitative properties” since if physicalism is true you can’t be imagining that.

    Speculating about what the argument would look like when we do have a completed microphysics doesn’t do you any good sonce it DOESN’T seem prima facie plausible to me to think that whatever P I specify the argument goes through. In fact, what seems prima facie plausible to me is that I can specify a complete list of the non-physical properties of our world and there will not be any qualitative properties on that list. The fact that this list is controversial to the dualist is irrelevant for the reasons I have mentioned already. The fact is that I can conceive of the zoombie world and that is enough to show that dualism is false. End of story.

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  8. Richard C Avatar
    Richard C

    “No, this is not what I want to say.”

    Wonderful! Then you agree with me that your parody differs in form from the original argument in precisely the respect which the dualist takes to ground its cogency (i.e. the “right respect”). Which is to say, it is a bad analogy.

    P.S. I’ve written up a new post elucidating my objection: Understanding (Zombie) Conceivability Arguments: Part II

    Reply
  9. Richard Brown Avatar
    Richard Brown

    Not so fast! There are two things to say.

    First, I agree that my argument differs from the original in the respect that would make it a good argument against a reductive theory but since the zoombie argument is not intended to show that some property is not reducible/identical to another that doesn’t matter. My argument IS alike in the respect that matters for exposing the futility of the original zombie argument. The fallacy lies in asserting, without argument, that some highly controvesial thing is conceivable and then using that to establish the falsity of physicalism. Again, the controversial thing is whether or not you can really imagine a complete P without it implicitly containing qualitative properties. There may not be an obvious contradiction in such an imagined scenerio but if physicalism is true then there is. The reverse argument exactly parrallels this feature of the original argument. I assert that I can conceive of a complete NP that lacks qualitative properties and use that to show that dualism is false. You then respond that I cannot really be conceiving that since if dualism is right there is a contradiction. So the two arguments are alike in just the right respects. That they are not alike in the respect that makes one a good argument against physicalism is just not to the point, which shows why all of your jumping up and down about this is misguided…

    Second, I do claim that you do not succeed in conceiving of what you thinkl you are conceiving. You think that you are conceiving of a microphysical duplicate of our world that lacks consciousness. I claim that you are really (or probably) conceiving of a world that looks like ours, lacks consciousness but is NOt microphysically identical to ours. That is probably why you thought that I was contesting the specification of P but really I offer this as an explanation for why it is that zombies are prima facie conceivable. I then further claim that you need to be able to rule out my alternative suggestion in order to establish that you really do succeed in conceiving of zombies.

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  10. GNZ Avatar
    GNZ

    What RC has there is less a dis-analogy and more of a rediscovery that the whole argument is circular (begs the question).
    Seems to me that for a reductionist physicalist Q IS explicitly mentioned in the micro facts of P (because it is mentioned in P), and Q and the facts that define Q have an identity relationship just like 1+1=2.

    BTW – I’m wondering… if we discovered that there were multiple base non reducible facts – eg “1 exists” and “the manifold exists” and for arguments say “black things weigh more than white things”. and that explained everything including qualia would the dualist still argue that he was proven correct because 3 doesnt reduce to 1 and 2, and without 3 because 2 doesn’t reduce to 1? is it a matter of how ‘wacky’ the principle must be? or is RC making a stronger claim that it can be distinguished by the fact that it is epiphenominal?

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  11. Richard C Avatar
    Richard C

    “The fallacy lies in asserting, without argument, that some highly controve[r]sial thing is conceivable and then using that to establish the falsity of physicalism.”

    But you can’t establish that this is a general fallacy just by showing that one example of a “controversial” conceivability claim is fallacious. There are different kinds of “controversy”, after all, and some might be legitimate when others are not. In particular, I have highlighted the need to distinguish:

    (i) Contested initial specifications of what is to be conceived (e.g. what is to replace the placeholder ‘NP’)

    (ii) An uncontested specification (e.g. ‘P and ~Q’) for which it’s contested whether it is ideally conceivable.

    I agree that type-(i) contestations immediately render a conceivability argument illegitimate, as seen in the zoombie case. But that doesn’t show that there’s anything wrong with conceivability arguments that are controversial in the second sense. The latter condition merely implies that not everyone will be convinced by the argument, but we already knew that 🙂

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  12. Richard Brown Avatar
    Richard Brown

    Ah, but the specification in type-(ii) is contested! As I have tried to make clear in my comment over at your latest entry, what is uncontested is P NOT (P & ~Q) so in THAT sense the zombie argument is an instance of type-(i) illegitamcy. If that is what you meant by letting the physicalist build up a non-controversial specification then I misunderstood!

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  13. Richard Brown Avatar
    Richard Brown

    GNZ, the point is that P does not mention any qualitative facts as such; i.e. no where in a completed microphysics will it say ‘Richard is now seeing red’ or ‘…feels pain’. Yet I hold that these facts are identical to certain physical facts and so will be a priori entailed by a completed P…that is what RC means when he says that Q is not mentioned explicitly in P…

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  14. Richard C Avatar
    Richard C

    “…then I misunderstood”

    Yep, though you still are misunderstanding a bit. Let me say more. I meant to define “type-(i)” contestation as a purely semantic contestation, i.e. contesting what has been said. When you write ‘NP’, we contest what you are even referring to. (The physicalist thinks ‘NP’ stands for nothing, I think it stands for the qualia facts.) Clearly productive discussion is impossible when the two sides are so blatantly talking past each other. A legitimate argument must at least start from a common vocabulary!

    A type-(ii) contestation, by contrast, is a substantive philosophical dispute about whether some claim (e.g. P & ~Q) is ideally conceivable, or whatever.

    Now, the specification “P & ~Q” is not contested in the type-(i) sense. You can provide whatever semantics / specification for P you like, and I will go along with it. So we will be starting from a shared (uncontested) understanding of what the argument says. This is all I demand. We then dispute whether the argument succeeds or not, which is a substantive question.

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  15. Richard Brown Avatar
    Richard Brown

    But that is just the opposite complaint that I have! When you say ‘Q’ you think it refers to some non-physical property, where as I think it refers to some physical property since ‘being in pain’ refers to whatever is picked out by that phrase in the actual world and that is a physical property. So you cannot let me have whatever semantic theory I want with respect to Q and so the zombie argument is type-(i) contested.

    You cannot invoke your response to the Kripkean line. You argue that ‘the watery stuff is not H20’ is a metaphysical posibility, and I agree, and the analog ‘the painful stuff is not c-fiber firing’ is also a metaphysical possibility but that is no threat to physicalism, since as I have shown the world where that is true is not a physical duplicate of this world. It is a world where some other property is picked out by the the contingent way we identify c-fiber firing here.

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  16. Richard C Avatar
    Richard C

    It’s true that we contest the deep nature of Q: whether or not it is ultimately constituted by properties in P. So in that sense you could translate the substantive dispute into a dispute about semantics, just like I could translate a substantive dispute about whether Bob is bald into the semantic question whether {Bob} is in the extension of ‘bald’. But if you want to understand the distinction I am trying to draw, you are going to have to be a bit more co-operative than that.

    P.S. Who ever thought the possibility of ‘the painful stuff is not c-fiber firing’ was a threat to physicalism? That’s to appeal to ghosts, not zombies. The relevant possibility to consider here is the converse: ‘c-fiber firing without painful stuff’.

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  17. GNZ Avatar
    GNZ

    RB,
    It seems erronious, or a misleading aspect of language, to say the complete description of X doesn’t explicitly contain Y if X contains a set of facts that a priori entail Y.

    So should I then be thinking of P as the description of the universe in only quantitative terms minus obviously anything that doesn’t describe (as opposed to any of the other ways it could be described)?

    Actually I’m not sure that distinction will make sense at the base fact level where Quantitative and qualitative are jointly described… That is usually how these things work UNLESS the argument is that qualitative facts are entirely illusionary.

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  18. GNZ Avatar
    GNZ

    It also seems a bit odd that RC seems to say the zoombie argument falls flat (etc) – but even if the only thing it does is force zombie philosophers to use Richard’s reductionist version surely it hasn’t fallen flat by his standards of an argument being worthwhile if it advances the dialect.

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  19. Richard Brown Avatar
    Richard Brown

    Richard C: right, just like you could translate a substantive dispute about whether there are non-physical properties into a semantic question whether NP refers. Of course, if you want to understand the complaint that I am making you will have to be a bit more cooperative than that…The question, I thought, was whether the description (P & ~Q) is contested or not; I claim that it is. Not because of P but because of Q…the semantics I will give to terms in Q will have them referring to (not just being contituted by) physical properties, the semantics you give to them has them referring to non-physical properties. The sense in which we can agree (c-fiber firing=the painful stuff) doesn’t help you since being the painful stuff is a contingent property of c-fiber firing (though being a pain isn’t)…

    The relevant possibility to consider here is the converse: ‘c-fiber firing without painful stuff’

    That possibility, as it turns out, is actual as shown by pain asymbolia and unconscious pains but, again as I have argued, that doesn’t threaten physicalism. There are possible worlds where c-fiber firing and the painful stuff come apart but those worlds are not obviously physical duplicates of our world so had those worlds been actual it would be true that c-fiber firing was not the painful stuff but that is no threat to physicalism.

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  20. GNZ Avatar
    GNZ

    as to why NP must include Q.

    I was under hte impression origionally that it had been redefiend as exactly “those things not reducible to the same thing matter is reducible to” and thus if Q is not reducible (which is what we are arguing over) it must be in NP. And that RC would settle for that definition even if you found a quantitative explination for any or all qualitative things (he just doesn’t expect this to be possible). But maybe I was mistaken.
    Otherwise maybe it rests directly on the intuition that qualitative facts can’t be reduced to quantitative. Which RC has argued for before.

    Anyway thats one of the things I was trying to get elaborated.

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  21. Richard Brown Avatar
    Richard Brown

    It seems erronious, or a misleading aspect of language, to say the complete description of X doesn’t explicitly contain Y if X contains a set of facts that a priori entail Y.

    Maybe you are making the same kind of point as I was over at RC’s post? If so, I think you’re right…

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  22. GNZ Avatar
    GNZ

    Yes – I note you keep saying points that I am saying except (not surprisingly) much more precise/philosophical language.

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