Consciousness

A Couple More Thoughts on Shombies and Illuminati

Richard Brown 1 Comment

Towards the end of the discussion we began to discuss what was involved in conceiving of the shombie world. Dave seemed to think that doing so involved conceiving of a possible world where physicalism was true. This amounts to the claim that <>[](P–>Q), i.e. that it is possible that it is necessary that the physical facts of our world entail that there are qualitative facts. In S5 if something is possibly necessary it is necessary (this is intuitive since if there is one possible world where a necessary truth is true then, if it is to be necessary, it must be true at all worlds including the actual one). This way of reading the shombie/illuminati argument has it more like contemporary versions of the ontological argument.

This is a bad way of thinking about the shombie argument since once we start to think about the possibilities of necessities we have to think about the entire space of possible worlds and our intuitions about how this space will turn out become very untrustworthy. I agree with Dave that we are better off just trying to conceive of one specific possible world. So to conceive of the shombie world all we need to do is to conceive of one possible world where physical facts entail qualitative facts (or alternatively where qualitative properties just are physical properties). That world is negatively conceivable (call this the illuminati claim) and plausibly positively conceivable (call that the shombie claim). Now is this a world where physicalism is true? Well that depends on your views about the necessity of identity statements. As is well know there is a very simple proof of the necessity of identities. The following is taken from Kripke’s Identity and Necessity,

1. (x)(y)(x=y)–>(Fx–>Fy)

2. (x)[](x=x)

3. (x)(y) (x=y)–>([](x=x)–> [](x=y))

4. (x)(y) (x=y)–> [](x=y)

The first premise says that if x and y are the same thing then if x has a property y has that property also. The second premise just says that it is necessary that every object is self identical. The third premise is a substitution instance of 1. What it says is that if x and y are the same thing then if x has the property of being necessarily self identical then so does y. From that we get four since we know that [](x=x) is true (though I suppose one could block the argument if they denied this…maybe someone like Dave will do this?)

At any rate 3 makes clear the point I am trying to make. The postulated identity in the antecedent is one thing and the hypothesis that if there is an identity then it is necessary is another. Thus we do not have to conceive of the shombie world as one where it is possible that some necessary truth is true. We simply need to conceive of a world where P=Q for some subset of the total physical facts and some qualitative fact. It is true that this by itself will not rule out dualism. The dualist might counter that the shombie world is conceivable but dualism still might be true of our world (though as a side note this is a much less attractive view for the dualist since if they admit that it is possible to have shombies then we probably should be focused on empirically finding out which is true) but this can be ruled out independently with the above argument.

Towards the end of the discussion Barbara Montero brought up the possibly of what she called “blocker worlds”. A blocker world is one where there are illuminati, or shombies, but in addition there are nonphysical properties or entities that ‘block’ the qualitative properties. Thus in this world there are physical duplicates of us, the physical facts entail that there are qualitative facts, but the nonphysical blockers block these facts. Barbara and dave seemed to think this was a problem for physicalism. Jim Pryor suggested that it wasn’t since even though in this world there were no qualitative properties if one just took the physical facts by themselves we would get qualitative facts. Kati seemed to think that this world wouldn’t be a world where there was a minimal physical duplicate of me since a minimal physical duplicate is one that has only the properties that I do and nothing else. Others were pressing here suggesting that blocker world folk are minimal physical duplicates because they have all of the very same physical properties as I do. I seemed to think that these creatures wouldn’t really even be physical duplicates of me since the blockers were interfering with the physical processes in such a way as to make a physical difference (how else could they block the qualitative properties? Barbara suggested that the blockers were like aspirin, but this works by effecting physical processes…I mean clearly there is a physical difference between someone who took aspirin for a headache and someone who did not.)

Anyway, I have to get ready to head out to Benji Kozuch’s cog sci talk at the Graduate Center….

Shombies & Illuminati

Richard Brown 3 Comments

On Tuesday I attended a discussion with Kati Balog of her paper Zombies, Illuminati, and Metaphysical Gridlock which was very interesting.

She begins by thinking about zombies and the things they say. If there really is a world that is microphysically identical to ours but that lacks consciousness and one of those creatures is a microphysical duplicate of David Chalmers then it is reasonable to think that Zombie-Dave will be giving zombie versions of the zombie argument. Zombie-Dave will say things like that he doesn’t see how structure and function could suffice for phenomenal experience even though all the while he doesn’t have any phenomenal experience (he is a zombie after all). Zombie-Dave will even say things like from the fact that he can conceive of all of the physical facts without the phenomenal facts obtaining it follows that physicalism is false.

The response to this argument hinges on the distinction between negative and positive conceivability. To negatively conceive of something is simply to be unable to rule it out a priori. Positive conceivability involves something more. For Kati positive conceivability is just negative conceivability (i.e. not being able to rule something out a priori) plus the application of standard everyday concepts. This is a modest notion of positive conceivability that leaves no room for an act of the imagination or a special act of conceiving. At any rate, the response to the Zombie-Dave objection then becomes the claim that while Zombie-Dave might be able to negatively conceive of P & ~Q* (where Q* is Zombie-Dave’s conception of what a phenomenal property is) he cannot positively conceive of it.

One of the interesting things that came up at this point was whether or not zombie phenomenal concepts have any mode of presentation. Kati seemed to think that they did not. Since Zombie-Dave denies that phenomenal properties are physical/functional properties it seems right to say that the zombie phenomenal concepts do not present phenomenal properties as physical/functional properties. Given that zombies actually lack phenomenal properties then there doesn’t seem to be anything else that could be a mode of presentation. So Kati thinks that a zombie’s phenomenal concept refers to a physical state of the zombie’s brain but it doesn’t present that property to the zombie in any way. While this seems right, it also seems right to say that there is some way in which the zombie thinks about, discriminates, or is rationally responsive to things it would call red, blue, green, etc. If all one means by mode of presentation is something like ‘a way of thinking about the referent’ then there doesn’t seem to be any problem in saying that the zombie’s phenomenal concepts present the brain states in a certain way.

Kati then introduces Illuminati as an answer to the positive conceivability argument. Illuminati are creatures that are completely and only physical and which have phenomenal properties. I call illuminati ‘shombies’ Keith Frankish has called them ‘anti-zombies’. Are such creatures conceivable? Well, clearly they are at least negatively conceivable. As Kati argued, illuminati are negatively conceivable for the same reason that zombies are. There is nothing in our grasp of phenomenal properties that tells us one way or the other whether they are physical or not. This is an important point. Someone who denies this is what I call a type-A dualist. Type-A dualism seems to me to be clearly an unattractive view since it amount to no more than defining phenomenal properties into nonphysicality. The response to this negative conceivability argument is again to invoke positive conceivability and the a priority of the zombie intuition. if it is a priori that zombies are positively conceivable then it cannot be the case that illuminati are negatively conceivable.

At this point there are two ways one can go. Kati’s preferred way is to try and bolster the negative conceivability of illuminati by offering a coherent physicalist metaphysics and ontology. If one can give a coherent philosophical account in completely physicalist terms then it would seem to bolster the case for the negative conceivability of illuminati. Another way to go would be to invoke positive conceivability of shombies. The shombie argument starts from the premise that shombies are positively conceivable (or what I really think is that it starts from the premise that they seem positively conceivable). Kati is skeptical of this move since she thinks that someone like Dave might be working with a notion of positive conceivability that is strong enough to make shombies inconceivable. My feeling is that any such notion will also make zombies inconceivable. But we would have to see the actual account of positive conceivability in play. According to the one I have been working with, shombies certainly seem positively conceivable. I can actually imagine discovering that we are shombies via the use of a philosophical theory of consciousness (like a higher-order theory) and relevant brain science discoveries.

Dave’s objection was that zombies are more intuitively conceivable than shombies. Perhaps after the acquisition of a bunch of theory one could have the shombie intuition but regular people have the zombie intuition quite strongly and pre-theoretically. I wonder whether if some experimental philosopher actually asked a bunch of undergraduates whether Dave would be right. My experience is that at least some of my students have the shombie intuition quite strongly and seemingly pre-theoretically. But I really don’t see why this matters. That one theory is taken for granted doesn’t show that it is true. I can’t imagine that someone who objected to the heliocentric view of the universe by complaining that one needed a bunch of advanced physics under your belt to see how it could be true would be taken seriously. It might be true that our natural inclinations run towards dualism; I admit that mine did when I was an undergraduate…but I also thought that the structure of the atom mirrored the structure of the solar system.

So I think that the shombie argument is the natural next move in the debate, but Kati does not. She then wonders what we are to say if at the end of the day we end up with two theories that are mutually incompatible but equally simple, elegant, predictive, and supported by the empirical evidence? If the physicalist and the dualist are each able to offer complete metaphysical and epistemological frameworks that are both compatible with the totality of the findings from science then what are we to say? Do we say that there is a fact of the matter about which theory is correct? Or do we say that there is no determinate fact of the matter about which is true? Or finally do we say that the issue is merely terminological? Kati seems to think that the answer is indeterminate. I think it is probably just terminological at that point, though as I have been arguing recently, I wonder if the dualist can even give a coherent account of what nonphysical properties are and so I doubt that we will end up with two equal theories at the end of inquiry. It seems to me that if the debate between the dualist and the physicalist comes out to be indeterminate then there are no determinate facts at all. That is, once we go Quinian we can’t stop the backslide all way to the inscrutability of reference. I for one just can’t bring myself to believe this. I mean if it were true then the fact that there are no determinate facts is itself indeterminate; but what could that mean?

…or so it seems to me at first glance as I run out of the house to class…

The Matrix & Nonphysical Properties

Richard Brown 3 Comments

(cross-posted at Brains)

I have long wondered what dualists mean when they speak of nonphysical properties. Today I was reading Chalmers’ paper The Matrix as Metaphysics and he says something that may shed some light on the way in which he thinks of nonphysical properties. He argues that the matrix scenario can be construed as a metaphysical hypothesis about the ultimate nature of the physical world. If this is right then there is a sense in which dualism is true. The mind is a distinct entity that exists outside of physical space-time and causal interacts with the physical body. This is because the physical theory that is true of reality in the matrix is a computational theory on which the ultimate things which exist are bits (zeros and ones). Thus brains in the matrix are ultimately composed of bits and when people in the matrix talk about brains they ultimately are talking about bits. The brain which is outside of the matrix is not composed of bits (let us assume). It is ultimately composed of something else (let’s say strings). Thus the brain outside the matrix, when viewed from the perspective of someone who is in the matrix, is nonphysical. It is not something that could be deduced from a completed matrix microphysics (which would be phrased in terms of ones and zeros).

One might wonder whether a completed matrix physics would have to be supplemented with (from the perspective of the matrix) nonphysical laws in order to capture outside the matrix facts or whether we might view the truly completed matrix physics as being expanded to include the outside the matrix physics. On this latter view the laws of matrix-physics would be a special subset of the laws of outside-physics. If this were true then the matrix-physics would not be complete until it was expanded to include outside-physics and physicalism could still be true. One might also wonder whether people in the matrix had largely true outside-physics beliefs since the matrix world is a deliberate simulation of outside-physics.

But even setting aside these issues there are strange results. Suppose that physicalism is true and that consciousness is a purely physical property of the brain. Let us also assume that this is true of a brain that is not in a matrix scenario. Call this scenario 1. Now imagine that a physical duplicate of this physicalist brain that has been in a matrix scenario since birth Call this scenario 2). Then physicalism is true in scenario 1 and dualism is true of scenario 2. But these brains are physically identical! Furthermore this shows that we could not resolve the dispute between the physicalist and the dualist until one was in a position to determine whether or not one is in a matrix scenario. Since Chalmers himself admits that he cannot a priori rule out that he is not in a matrix scenario he must also admit that he is not in a position to a priori tell if physicalism or dualism true. So, suppose that we are actually in a matrix scenario then conceiving of zombies is just conceiving of a computer simulation composed completely of NPCs (non-player characters). But this doesn’t show that physicalism is false, since physicalism is best construed as the claim that lines up with the first brain; since with this understanding of nonphysical physicalism turns out to be nothing but the hypothesis that we are not in the matrix.

But even if we were in the matrix there is a sense in which we can say that physicalism is still ultimately true since in the above envisioned world qualitative properties turn out to be identical to properties which are physical in terms of outside-physics (since these properties are the very same as the ones in the world where physicalism is true).

Zoombies are creatures that are nonphysically identical to me in every respect and which lack nonphysical qualitative properties. I have in the past suggested that one way to conceive of zoombies is as Cartesian minds that only have thoughts but no qualia but now we can put it in terms of matrix scenarios. A zoombie has all of the same nonphysical properties that I in fact do. Suppose that I am in fact in scenario 2 above. Then a creature that has all of the nonphysical properties that I in fact do will have a brain that is identical to my outside-brain. This is to imagine scenario 1.

The traditional zombie is a creature that is physically identical to me and lacks consciousness. Now suppose that I have a zombie twin who is in a matrix scenario since birth. My matrix zombie twin has nonphysical properties (which are the very same properties that I physically have) but no qualitative properties. So, whether one has nonphysical properties or not is simply a matter of whether one is in the matrix or not. Chalmers’ defense of nonphysicalism can thus be seen as a defense of the claim that we are in the matrix.

Busy Bees Busily Buzzing ‘Bout

Richard Brown 1 Comment

This last week was a very busy one. As you may have noticed from the side bar the call for papers for Consciousness Online is now out…spread the word!

Tuesday I attended a talk/discussion of a paper by Ned Block on Attention and direct realism. Direct realism, roughly, is the view that when one has a veridical experience, say of the subway train coming into the station, the phenomenology of one’s experience is is determined by, or is constituted by, the properties that the object actually has. So on this view when one sees the subway one is somehow directly in contact with the physical object. This is contrasted with the view that one’s phenomenology is instead determined by, or constituted by some kind of mental representation that is perhaps caused by a physical object but which represents the physical object with a set of mental properties.

Block was arguing that direct realists can’t explain a certain fact about attention. His argument revolved around an interesting phenomenon discovered in attention research. If one is staring at a fixed spot and while doing that focuses one’s attention on one of three circles that are interlocked (something that is hard but can be done) one sees the circle one is attending to as brighter than the others. With practice one is able to move ones attention around the three circles and light them up as one goes. Given this some researchers took two gratings one of which was slightly dimmer than the other and what they found was that when the subjects attended to the fixation spot they could tell which of the two gratings was actually brighter than the other. But when they attended to the fixation point and shifted their attention to the dimmer patch they judged it to be the same brightness as the other patch; that is the two patches looked equally luminous. Block’s argument was then that the direct realist did not have any objective thing in the figure that they could point to to explain the difference in phenomenology. the figures stayed the same. Nor did they have any principled reason to say that one of the two perceptions was illusion and the other veridical.

On Friday I went to Jeremy Grey’s talk at the cuny cog sci speaker series. he was presenting data on the relationship between intelligence, as measured by standard psychological measures correlates with self-control. He was arguing for what he called the Individual Differences view. He started with a famous and intriguing study that found a correlation between self-control in 6 years olds and their subsequent performance on the SAT’s. Kid were given the following two options. They could either take a marshmallow that sitting on the table in front on them right now or they could wait until the experimenter returned and have two marshmallows. The experimenter then left and the children were videoed. Some of the kids were able to wait for the two marshmallow reward while others gave in immediately and ate the one that they had in front of them. What was surprising was that 12 years later when they took their SATs the ones who did best were those that waited longest for the two marshmallow reward. That is, the longer they were able to resist the marshmallow in front of them and wait for the return of the experimenter (some made it others didn’t) the higher their SAT scores were. Grey did a series of studies on adults to test the relationship between intelligence and self control and he found that there was indeed this relationship. There were, however, some people who scored high on the standardized tests but also scored high on impulsivity tests (that is they would be classified as high intelligence and low self control). The even more surprising thing was that if you factored in a certain kind of genetic variation which results in a variation in the dopamine receptors one saw that the outliers had this variation while those who conformed to the model did not. He also pointed to a study which suggested that pre-school children who participated in daily self-control exercises improved their performance on standardized IQ tests and so there is room for optimism that one is not stuck at one’s current IQ/self-control level.

Attributing Mental States

Richard Brown 1 Comment

Friday I attended James Dow‘s talk at the CUNY Cogsci Speaker Series. He was concerned with answering the question of how people are able to ascribe various mental states to themselves. In particular he was interested in critiquing the account offered by Bermudez and developing an alternative account inspired by P.F. Strawson.

The standard account has it that we first come to see that we have certain mental states like belief, pain, etc and that these result in various behaviors (e.g. utterances as well as other behavior). We then notice that other people engage in these kinds of behaviors and then reason by analogy that since they exhibit behaviors like the ones that I do when I have a, say, pain these people must also be in pain. Thus the standard account has that we start with ascribing mental states to ourselves (I am in pain) and then use that ability to ascribe mental states to others (Doug is in pain).

Bermudez criticizes the standard account using a posteriori evidence from developmental psychology. In particular Bermudez uses data from the phenomenon of joint attention. In joint attention you have two observers each attending to some object, say a piece of fruit, and each aware that the other one is attending the same object. Bermudez argues that in order to be able to do this (and infants do it as early as 9 months old) the child must be representing the mother as seeing the object and attending to it. This, in turn, must mean that the child represents the mother under a psychological sortal; that is as seeing x and attending to x. This together with other evidence that suggests that the child does not at this point attribute mental states to itself  shows that the standard account can’t be right. Bermudez then argues that the best explanation of what is going on here is that the ability to attribute mental states to others constitutes the ability to attribute mental states to oneself.

Dow wanted to criticize Bermudez for using an a posteriori argument to establish something like logical dependence. Whatever that turns out to mean Dow’s basic concern was to develop the Strawsonian alternative and to argue that none of Bermudez’s arguments decide between his account and the new alternative. In short the Strawsonian alternative postulates that the child simply has the ability to pick out other persons. ‘Person’ here is used in the Strawsonian sense as of something which has both mental and physical attributes. Dow claims that in representing the mother as a person the child is neither representing their mother under any kind of sortal. They simply attend to the eye and where it is focused. This Strawsonian view is what Dow called a ‘no-priority’ view in that it holds that there is a logical dependance (whatever that is) between self and other ascriptions (at the very least it seems to mean that in order to have the one ability one must also have the other ability (and vice versa?) but that neither one develops before the other.

We were promised a transcendental argument that was supposed to establish this but we ran out of time.

Over drinks I had an interesting discussion with Josh Dulberger who was proposing a novel take on the simulation theory/theory theory debate. Traditionally these are thought to be opposed but Josh suggested that they need not be. He thought that the simulation might be used to generate data for the theory one employs of other people and their mental states. This is an interesting idea. He then suggested that if one thought this then one might be able to argue that the function of consciousness lay in enriching the data that one gets. Intuitively the idea is that consciousness gives one better access to ones own mental states and so boosts the amount of data that one has for one’s theory thus making the theory richer. He thought this was nice since one could adopt David Rosenthal’s higher-order thought theory of consciousness and then argue that Rosenthal is wrong that there is no function of consciousness using his own theory against him, so to speak. But there is a problem here. In Rosenthal’s account there must have been a time when there were people who were able to infer what mental states they were in from observing their own behavior (which includes verbal utterances). But since these people are not able to have these higher-order thoughts in a way that seems unmediated by inference they do not have conscious mental states yet. As they get better and better and attributing these kinds of states to themselves they get to the point at which these attributions no longer seem to be mediated by inference at which point they come to have conscious mental states. At the point just before they have conscious mental states their access to their unconscious mental states is just as good as it will be when they do have conscious mental states. They will have what seems to them to be a different kind of access to their mental states but they really just have the same access as before (only now it seems to them to be immediate and non-inferential). If this is right then Rosenthal’s account ia not committed to Dulberger’s claim that consciousness produces more data. Our Rosenthalian ancestors have all of the same data that we do even though all of their mental states are unconscious.

On an interesting side note Daniel Shargel pointed out an interesting difficulty for Rosenthal in this story. The Rosenthalian ancestors do not have any conscious mental states. At some point they acquire the appropriate concepts which enables them to have higher-order thoughts attributing (theoretical) mental states to themselves. On Rosenthal’s account the fact that these higher-order thoughts are mediated by inference means that they do not result in the target states becoming conscious. It is only once the higher-order thoughts are seemingly unmediated by inference that we get consciousness. But Shargel argues that when these Rosenthalians have their very first higher-order thought, whether mediated by inference or not, it will not seem to them to be so mediated since nothing seems any way to them (all of their mental states are unconscious). Shargel suggested that Rosenthal response to this was that the inference needs to be the product of some internal mental state. Since the Rosenthalians always make inferences based on external perceptions the higher-order thoughts they have are not of the right kind. I wonder if there is some other response he can give, but this is already too long!

Unconscious Trait Inferences

Richard Brown 1 Comment

Friday I attended social psychologist James Uleman‘s talk at the CUNY Cogsci Speaker Series. His topic was unconscious trait inferences. A trait inference is exemplified by the following. Subjects are presented with a sentence, for instance, “she solved the mystery half-way through” which reliably produces subjects to infer a trait. In this case the trait is something like clever or smart. Combining his interest in trait inference with a generally accepted paradigm in social psych that contrasts traits with actions as being more abstract Uleman designed an experiment to test whether or not people make unconscious trait inferences. His experimental setup is as follows. He presents subjects with a picture of someone engaged in an activity (say reading a book) and underneath has a sentence like the one previously mentioned, though in some of the trials he includes the trait explicitly (i.e. “she was so clever she solved the mystery halfway through”). He lets subjects look at the picture and the sentence for up to 8 seconds. Then they are presented with the picture and asked whether or not the trait was explicitly mentioned in the sentence which described that picture. So, to take our earlier example, if a subject is presented with a picture of a women reading a book described by the sentence “she solved the mystery halfway through” and then later presented only with the picture and asked if the trait term appeared explicitly or not. The interesting thing is that he is able to show that people falsely remember the trait being explicitly stated in sentences where it did not explicitly appear. This is taken as evidence that the inference to the trait is made unconsciously.

Even more interestingly, Uleman was able to show that if one simply varies the geographical distance one is able to show that people make less trait inferences about people who are near to them than they do about people who are distant from them. To show this he presented subjects with the same pictures of the same women reading the same book. The only difference is that before the picture was presented subjects either saw a picture of Washington Square Park (these are NYU students so this is the near condition) or a picture of something in Florence Italy (with ‘Florence’ explicitly stated in the picture. Subjects in the distant condition made a statistically significant higher number of false recognitions (i.e. they said that the trait term explicitly occurred in the description when it actually did not more times) than did those in the near condition. What this is taken to show is that people make more unconscious trait inferences about more distant people than they do about near people.

But why? The explanation offered went as follows. When a person is distant it is not a good strategy to focus on what they are doing at the moment as that can change. Rather what one wants to do is to focus on central, relatively stable attributes of the person. On the other hand when a person is near it is important to focus on what they are currently doing rather than on abstract stable traits. This is a curious finding (many people resisted it) but it makes sense to me. These inferences are ‘unconscious’ because subjects are not instructed to make them. They are not given a rating task (i.e. rate the following pictures on how clever they are) which requires them explicitly to make the inference.

Perhaps even more interestingly Uleman was able to show that the notion of distance in play is not simply geographical. You get the same results when the distance is social (i.e. class related) or even in terms of power. People who are asked to remember a time when they had power over someone else (defined as ability to give or deny something to someone) make more unconscious trait inferences than people who were asked to remember a time when someone else had power over them. The idea here is that when one feels powerful one feels “above it all” and when one is powerless one has the issues “hanging over them”.

In the second half of the talk Uleman presented data on the issue of whether or not people treat traits as causes or descriptions. That is, do people treat, say cleverness, as a cause of the women solving the mystery halfway through. I did not really follow this half of the talk, but I did pick up on one interesting tidbit. He seemed to be suggesting that people who are asked to make these kinds of trait inferences explicitly are more likely to stereotype and scapegoat an out group than those that make these kinds of inferences unconsciously…this is interesting, though I am not sure what to make of it…in fact I may be misremembering it….

Zoombie Round-Up

Richard Brown 3 Comments

There has been a bit of discussion of zoombies in the blogosphere of late and I want to keep track of them all so that I can respond to them so I am posting links to them.

1.) Intentional Objects‘ David Gawthorne

Richard Brown’s Zoombies and Shombies

2.) Brain Scam‘s Tony Alterman:

Zombie, Scmombie –Richard Brown’s Efforts to Ressurect Materialism

(and his reply to my reply) Return of the Zombie

3.) And then there’s Richard Chappell’s responses.

In our latest exchange he has acknowledged that the primary and secondary intensions of statements in Q may diverge but seems to think that translating those statements into “semantically neutral” language will still let the argument go through. So, just was “the watery stuff isn’t H2O” comes out true at Twin Earth, “the painful stuff isn’t C-Fiber firing” comes out true at the zombie world. But this move won’t work. Here is what Chalmers has to say about this:

Given the discussion above, one might try generating an anti-materialist argument by simply substituting primary possibility for metaphysical possibility in the original argument.

(1) P&~Q is conceivable

(2) If P&~Q is conceivable, P&~Q is 1-possible

(3) If P&~Q is 1-possible, materialism is false.

_______________

(4) Materialism is false.

On this reading, (1) and (2) are both plausible theses, but (3) is not obviously plausible. The reason is that materialism requires not the 1-impossibility of P&~Q but the 2-impossibility of P&~Q. That is, materialism requires that it could not have been the case that P were true without Q being true. This is a subjunctive claim about ordinary metaphysical possibility, and so invokes 2-impossibility rather than 1-impossibility.

A materialist might reasonably question (3) by holding that even if there is a world W verifying P&~Q, W might be a world with quite different ingredients from our own. For example, it might be that W does not instantiate true microphysical properties (those instantiated in our world), such as mass and charge, but instead instantiates quite different properties: say, pseudo-mass and pseudo-charge, which stand to mass and charge roughly as XYZ stands to H2O. Likewise, it might be that W does not lack true phenomenal properties, but instead lacks quite different properties: say, pseudophenomenal properties. If so, then the possibility of W has no bearing on whether true microphysical properties necessitate true phenomenal properties. And it is the latter that is relevant for materialism.

Still, it may be that the gap between 1-possibility and 2-possibility could be closed. In particular, when a statement S has the same primary intension and secondary intension, then a world will verify S iff it satisfies S, so S will be 1-possible iff it is 2-possible. If P and Q both have primary intensions that coincide with their secondary intensions, then so will P&~Q, and we could run the following argument:

 

(1) P&~Q is conceivable

(2) If P&~Q is conceivable, P&~Q is 1-possible

(3) If P&~Q is 1-possible, P&~Q is 2-possible.

(4) If P&~Q is 2-possible, materialism is false.

_______________

(5) Materialism is false.

Here, the truth of (3) requires that both P and Q have primary and secondary intensions that coincide. (from The 2-D Argument Against Materialism)

The Contestability of (P & ~Q)

Richard Brown 37 Comments

The discussion of Richard Chappell’s post Understanding (Zombie) Conceivability Arguments: Part II over at Philosophy, etc has prompted me to clarify the sense in which I take (P & ~Q) to be contestable and the reasons whyI take  the primary and secondary intensions of statement in Q not to be  identical; as it turns out the two claims are related.

We first start with the primary and secondary intensions of a statement. Let’s take our old standby ‘water is H2O’ and our two ways of considering possible worlds as either actual or counter factual. So, ‘water is H2O’ is true when we consider any possible world as counter factual. This is because  ‘water is H2O’ is an a posteriori necessity. There are no worlds, considered as counter-factual, where water isn’t H2O. But there are possible worlds, which if we consider as actual instead of counter factual, ‘water is H2O’ comes out false. So, take Twin Earth. On Twin Earth ‘water is XYZ’ is true and so when we consider Twin Earth as actual ‘water is H2O’ is false. That is to say that if Twin Earth were the actual world ‘water is not H2O’ would be true (because ‘water is XYZ’ is true there). What we have here is the makings of the distinction between primary and secondary intensions. The primary intension of a statement is given by asking whether it is true or false at possible worlds considered as actual while the secondary intension of a statement is given by asking whether it is true or false at possible worlds considered as counter factual. In effect then the primary intension of a statement is given by some kind of reference fixing description and then we determine whether the statement is true or not by taking a possible world and letting the description fix the reference at that world and the secondary intension of a statement is given by assigning the actual reference of the terms in question and holding that fixed as we vary our counter factual worlds.

Primary and secondary conceivability are then defined in terms of the kind of intension at work. So, take ‘water is not H20’. Chalmers accepts that there is a sense in which this is not conceivable. This is the sense in which we give ‘water’ the reference that it actually has. Then ‘water is not H20’ is equivalent to saying ‘H20 is not H20’ which is a contradiction. But this is to use secondary conceivability. ‘Water is not H2O’ is still primarily conceivable since if we consider Twin Earth as actual it will be true. This is because we assign ‘water’ just the reference fixing description and so to say that water is not H2O is just to say that ‘the stuff picked out in the same way we pick out H2O is not H2O’ which is true at Twin Earth. This captures Kripke’s way of putting it. When we think that we are conceiving of water not being H2O were are really conceiving of a person who is in the same epistemic situation as we are when we pick out H2O but isn’t picking that stuff out (i.e. Twin Earth).  Now, Chalmers continues, the zombie argument relies only on primary conceivability, not secondary conceivability; in fact Chalmers himself accused my zoombie argument of relying on secondary conceivability and not primary conceivability. I think my response at the time isn’t as good as it could be because it focused on P and not Q So let me try and restate the case.

A crucial premise of Chalmers’ argument is that when it comes to pains and other phenomenal properties their primary and secondary intensions are identical. What that means is that the statements in question pick out the same property no matter whether we consider the world as actual or counter factual. This is supposed to capture Kripke’s claim that it is impossible for there to be someone in the same epistemic situation as someone who was in pain and yet for that person not to be in pain (and that it is impossible for there to be a person who was in the same epistemic situation as someone who wasn’t in pain and yet to be in pain. There is no appearance/reality distinction when it comes to pains. So then the upshot here is to try to show that there is a difference between the way ‘water is not H2O’ works and the way ‘pain is not C-fiber firing’ works that preserves Kripke’s general idea but is made precise by the 2-D framework. Kripke’s basic idea was that when we think that some identity is contingent what is really going on is that there is some identity statement involving a description that is contingent but this can’t be the way we explain away the seeming contingency of ‘pain is C-fiber firing’ since there  is no alternate contingent identity involving a description in the case of pains.  This translates into the 2-D framework as the claim that Kripkean a posteriori necessities have a contingent primary intension (i.e. ‘water isn’t  H2O’ comes out true at some possible world considered as actual) but ‘pain isn’t C-fiber firing’, according to physicalist, has a necessary primary intension (there are no worlds considered as actual where this comes out true).

 But what are we to make of this claim? Is it really the case that the primary and secondary intensions of ‘the painful stuff is C-fiber firing’ are  identical? Or another way of asking the question; can the painful stuff fail to be c-fiber firing at some possible world considered as actual even though the painful stuff picks out C-fiber firing here? The answer is arguably yes! This is something that may be surprising but it is arguably shown to be true by empirical results. In particular cases of Dental Fear show that we can pick out mental states as painful which are not pains. Pain Asymboilia also, arguably, shows that we can pick out pain states without picking them out as painful. So the primary intension of ‘pain is not C-fiber firing’ is contingent. There is a possible world, say, where the painful stuff is ABC, where ABC is some distinct property from C-fiber firing, and if that world were actual it would be true that pain is not C-fiber firing. But does that world threaten physicalism? Obviously not. It is not physically identical to our world so is no threat. What needs to be shown is that there is a possible world where you have C-fiber firing and no painful stuff. Is there one? Well, obviously there might be one that is physically distinct from ours (that is, a world that was NOT a micro-physical duplicate of ours, say with different laws of physics there, might have C-fiber firing and no painful stuff and if that world were actual then it would be true that ‘c-fiber firing isn’t pain’) but again this world is not threat to physicalism. But of course (P & ~Q) is supposed to describe a world that IS micro physically identical to ours and which lacks qualitative properties. But this clearly isn’t conceivable on the present account. To see this, compare the water=H2O case. Given that the watery stuff is H2O in the actual world we know that in a world micro-physically identical to ours is a world in which H2O is picked out by ‘the watery stuff’. So too, then, if pain=C-fiber firing in the actual world then we know that any world micro-physically identical to ours is a world in which C-fiber firing is picked out by ‘the painful stuff’. So IF physicalism is true of our world then zombies are not conceivable. But this is not to rely on secondary conceivability. This is to rely of the non-identity of the primary and secondary intensions of ‘pain is not C-fiber firing’ in just the same way as we do in the water/H2O case. This is why my view is in the Kripkean-tradition, and so akin to type B physicalism but not wholly so.

Notice that the upshot of this is that when the dualist says that (P & ~Q) is semantically neutral they are either wrong or do not threaten physicalism. When they go to explicitly fill in the place holder ‘~Q’ with statements like ‘RB is consciously having a pain’ they assign a semantics to terms like ‘pain’ where the primary and secondary intensions are identical, whereas a physicalist like me will assign those terms a semantics just like other natural kind terms (where these intensions are not identical). If you really were to remain neutral on this semantic issue the conceivability of (P & ~Q) is no threat to physicalism (since you need the premise (PI=SI) to make the argument go through). So to get the zombie argument off the ground you must assume a certain semantics for the terms in Q, just as to get the zoombie argument off the ground you have to assume a certain semantics for NP (namely one that stipulates that there are no qualitative properties in NP. This nicely mirrors the zombie argument where the dualist has to stipulate that there are no physical properties in Q). It may be the case that this is more obvious in the zoombie case but it still helps to expose the same flaw in teh zombie argument.

Ut vos es Bellator Victus Mortuus Tempus Fugit

Richard Brown 22 Comments

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.