Your general point that we can mistakenly think we conceive of something is quite right, and I said so before. That’s why I keep talking about coherent conceivability. So, when you think you’re imagining gold iron, you’re not imagining it coherently, because from iron’s physical properties, it follows that it’s not gold. Thus, what you’re imagining is either contradictory, or simply not iron.
All I want as an answer to the zombie argument is for someone to point out where the flaw in my conception of a zombie is , as I’ve just done with your gold iron. But saying that sometimes we err in our conceptions doesn’t suffice, because it doesn’t imply that I err in conceiving of a zombie. If you want to show a conception incoherent, you have to expose the incoherence; just pointing out that it might be incoherent (which I readily accept, and in fact, suspect myself) simply cuts no ice.
The ‘zoombie’ need not be detectably different on the physical plane, as far as you are concerned; it could have slightly different neuronal wiring, for instance, which you can’t detect without dissecting the brain. You would be unable to detect this difference yourself, so it would make no difference to your experience of the world (although it might show up in an autopsy).
There is no reason to expect that your ‘experience of consciousness’ is exclusively confined to the non-material plane; since I doubt that the non-material plane exists at all, I have no problem expecting it to be inconsequential. If there is an ‘non-physical’ attribute to your mentality, but that ‘non-physical’ aspect is inconsequential and irrelevant to your experience of consciousness, then the quality of consciousness must be located in the physical part of your mentality.
This means that the ‘zoombie’ concept is conceivable; and if true, the p-zombie argument is soundly defeated.
In reality I have no doubt that neither zoombies or p-zombies can exist.
But then your argument is still circular, because if physicalism is true, then you inherently cannot conceive of such a p-zombie. And again, I’m really lost as to how one would go about proving that your conception of a p-zombie actually is a p-zombie. To be perfectly honest, when it comes to rationality I rate this argument just about as high as Anselm’s ontological argument - that is, it’s completely ridiculous on its face, and it has the same problems. Trying to prove something as logically possible through conception fails because we have no way of determining whether our perception actually represents the item itself, or merely a simplified version of the concept. I can imagine “nothing”. But is my conception of nothing really nothing? Probably not, as “nothing” is probably not a coherent concept in and of itself. Similarly, I can imagine a p-zombie. But is my conception of it actually it? Probably not, because a p-zombie is probably not a coherent concept.
Really, really, really simple: if physicalism is true, then the zombie is incoherent. Given that physicalism is our null hypothesis, the only thing for which there is reasonable evidence, it is entirely fair to claim this.
The degree of difference on the physical plane between me and the zombie is beside the point. The point is, or so the argument alleges, that if I can conceive of a being identical to myself along the non-physical dimension, without that being having conscious experience, then the non-physical properties can have no relevance to conscious experience. That’s a perfectly sound argument.
But I don’t think it’s possible to conceive of a zoombie: consider the variety of property dualism in which the non-physical facts are just the facts of my conscious experience. So, the complete layout of the world as it pertains to me would be a description of my physical constituents, plus a description of all my mental experience, neither reducible to the other. To conceive of a twin that’s identical to me regarding my nonphysical properties is then to conceive of a twin that’s identical to me regarding my conscious experience, and the idea of a zoombie is simply incoherent.
Now, one might hold that we’ve got no way of knowing that we live in such a world, and thus, my argument is really no better than that of the physicalists who hold that zombies are inconceivable, since to (fully) conceive of a physical isomorph would necessarily include conceiving of its mental properties, as well; so if the latter is question-begging, then my argument should be, as well. But there’s a catch: while we know that the property-dualist world is possible (it’s just the concatenation of a series of true statements about the world), we don’t know that the physicalist world that has subjective experience is possible. So we know that there are versions of property dualism in which zoombies are inconceivable, but we don’t know that there are versions of physicalism in which zombies are likewise inconceivable. Thus, it is consistent to be a property dualist and deny the conceivability of zoombies, while the physicalist has the onus of showing zombies to be impossible on him.
There’s also the question of whether I can conceive of non-physical properties at all. I have a good conception of the physical mechanisms that underly the actions of physical organisms, and their physical basis. It is on this basis that I can imagine a zombie. But I have no knowledge of the nonphysical properties that underly conscious experience. So I can’t actually conceive of a nonphysical twin, since I can’t even conceive of what the nonphysical properties are with respect to which it is supposed to be identical to me.
Indeed, and to show this, you’d have to point out how my p-zombie conception is wrong; because if you can’t, we might just simply live in a world in which physicalism is not true.
But every time we judge whether something is possible, we do so by attempting to conceive of it. To deny thus that conception does not offer a guide to possibility robs us of the power of ever judging anything possible for which we have no direct empirical evidence; in particular, we never could judge something impossible, because there is no empirical evidince of things never happening. So if somebody asks you, ‘can pigs fly?’, your only honest reply would be ‘I don’t know’, and you could never settle the matter.
In reality, of course, you will take your knowledge of pig anatomy and the mechanics of flying, and deduce that it is impossible to conceive of something with that anatomy implementing these mechanisms, and hence, that it’s impossible to conceive of pigs flying; and you’ll answer accordingly. But note that in doing so, you have merely relied on an argument of conceivability.
Yes. If the argument is false, then the argument is false. Very good.
If your consciousness is limited to your physical facts, (as I am certain it is), your mentality may still have a non-physical component which is irrelevant to your experience of consiousness. The non-physical component may be some sort of ghostly back-up system, that only records the memories your physical mind manufactures; these memories could be reconstituted (as a mindless ghost?) at some future date perhaps, but they need not include any aspect of your own consciousness.
From a logical point of view, why is it possible to have a conscious being which is dependent on its metaphysical facts but not on its physical facts, but not vice versa? There is no reason to favour one over the other, even if both exist (which they probably do not).
It seems to me that you get the problem. What is a non-physical property? If it’s inconceivable, then surely that means it is impossible by your logic? Well, I have yet to hear any coherent explanation of what a “non-physical” anything is. Or how it’s even a coherent thought.
Yes, and this is a horribly flawed epistemology. Can you conceive of something being a particle and a wave? Can you conceive of something traveling faster than light? Can you conceive of nothing? I’m willing to bet that your answers (should a hypothetical you not be extremely educated in science) are, respectively, “No” “Yes” and “Yes”. But what reality allows is exactly the opposite. You cannot travel faster than light; nothing is a physical impossibility; but light absolutely acts as both a wave and a particle. What you’re trying to appeal to is our intuition, and it is a rotten judge of what is and isn’t possible or real. Many things were widely considered completely impossible… Before science showed us that it’s not just possible, it’s how shit works. And at a fundamental level, we can already observe that the universe directly contradicts our intuition and our assumptions about it.
Uh… Yeah. Without empirical experience of pigs, how would you know what a pig is, let alone whether or not it could fly? I have no empirical evidence of pigs flying. So I can reject the notion as baseless. That said, if someone asked me whether or not it was possible, I could check that against my empirical experience and that which I understand about flying and porcine anatomy and try to make a reasonable deduction (which could later prove wrong if my inference was wrong when checked against empirical evidence). You’re right - empiricism is lousy at proving negatives. But thankfully, it has mechanisms in place to ensure that this doesn’t become a problem. Occam’s razor, the burden of proof, and similar artifacts.
This has got to be the most bizarre statement you’ve made so far. I can easily conceive of a flying pig. It’s trivial. Children’s books contain the concept. It is only once I vet that against my understanding of reality and evidence that I realize “hang on, that pig ain’t getting off the ground”.
I didn’t get your point in the first part of your post, could you reformulate?
As for the part I quoted, we have a conception of the physical, but have no analogous conception of the non-physical beyond our conscious experience, i.e. we are in a situation analogous to that before empirical inquiry taught us what stuff we’re made of. So, I can’t conceive of a zoombie, simply because I don’t know what constitutes one.
I actually gave a characterization of some non-physical properties above—they might be subjective, qualitative, nonlocal, in the same sense that physical properties are objective, structural, spatial and so on. Also note that I’m not talking about non-physical stuff, but rather, about stuff that has both physical and non-physical properties.
And when I say that I can’t conceive of the non-physical properties, I merely acknowledge that we’re in the same situation as we were before empirical inquiry told us about our physical nature—I’m not making an in-principle argument. Which wouldn’t work anyway, since even if conceivability implies possibility, arguing that inconceivability implies impossibility is just an argument to ignorance.
I think you haven’t quite gotten the importance of the stipulation of imagining something coherently: it is not coherent to conceive of a flying pig given your knowledge of pig anatomy. Yes, this knowledgeable is empirical, but so is our knowledge of the physical that goes into conceiving of zombies.
I may not need to, if I can get my point across in my answer to your next question.
To be accurate, we have no good working model of consciousness yet, so we can’t tell if it relies on a physical or a non-physical mechanism. So there is no reason to dismiss the zoombie concept as inconceivable at this moment in time, any more than there is to dismiss the p-zombie argument.
Before anybody comes in with a gotcha on this point, I’m not really saying that because you can’t conceive of a flying pig, it’s impossible; I’m saying that because you have a conception of a pig, which is inconsistent with it flying, it’s impossible for pigs to fly. Failing to conceive of anything proves nothing other than our inability to conceive of that thing; that’s why I don’t argue that since I can’t conceive of an explanation of consciousness in physical terms, there is none—that would be fallacious.
No, but the zoombie argument asks me to conceive something that is identical to me in its non-physical properties; I can’t do that without knowing what those properties are, how they behave, etc. And in fact, for a certain kind of non-physical properties, i.e. if they are just my subjective experiences, it’s actually impossible to imagine a zoombie. On the other hand, I do know what the physical properties are and how they behave, and on that knowledge, I can base my conception of a zombie.
You misread it. The thought-experiment would demonstrate that the conscious experiences are not non-physical, but physical.
It’s the antimatter twin to your argument. For you to claim that the zombie argument is valid, but that the zoombie argument is invalid, means that you’re introducing a very specific asymmetry in the properties of the physical and non-physical planes. That’s a form of special pleading that only supports your view.
Yes, I know. But in order to do so, the argument invokes the conceivability of a non-physically identical twin of mine; but I can’t conceive of such a thing without knowing the non-physical properties along which we are supposed to be identical. Moreover, I can give an explicit example of non-physical properties such that the zoombie is not conceivable; nobody’s succeeded in doing this for zombies.
Both arguments are obviously valid; I just don’t believe both are sound. The premise in the zombie argument follows from knowing the physical properties that are responsible for the physical processes underlying our functioning; but in the zoombie argument, I don’t know the non-physical properties, and thus, can’t imagine a being identical to me along those properties. The asymmetry is in our knowledge of the physical, and lack of knowledge of the non-physical (we don’t even know if the latter exists).
One of those artifacts, purely social, is “benign neglect.” This is what science has a history of using when an interesting idea comes up for which there isn’t any test possible.
Isaac Asimov wrote of this in a brief history of Iceland Spar Crystal, the naturally occurring transparent mineral that produces dual images. If you set it down on a page, yyoouu ggeett ddoouubbllee images. Rather fun to play with. For centuries, no one knew how this happened. Science had no explanation. So…science pretty much ignored it. It got shoved away in a back drawer somewhere, and nobody thought much about it. Then, one day, someone looked through a piece of it at sunlight reflected from a distant window…saw only one image…and discovered polarized light.
The James Randi foundation, with their famous million dollar bet, refuses to engage with people who claim that they can disperse atmospheric clouds by their mental powers. The claimants go away smugly saying that the foundation is afraid to test them, but the fact is, no experiment can be devised that would test such a claim.
There’s right, wrong, and just not interesting, thank you.
In other words, when I imagine a zombie, say, recoiling from a pain stimulus, I can tell, at least in broad strokes, a story of physical processes that’s causative of this reaction—the stimulus engages nociceptors, leads to the firing of c-fibers, which transmit signals along the spinal cord to wherever in the brain it is they are processed, the processing produces outgoing signals which lead to certain muscle contractions, and so on. That I can imagine this story without there being any necessity to say anything about conscious experience is what makes the zombie conceivable.
But in the case of a zoombie, I wouldn’t even know where to start the analogous story. I would have to say something about non-physical processes, which occur in some way without there being any necessity to talk about conscious experience. But what processes? What properties? I have no story to tell; thus, I have no conception of a zoombie.
The only such story that I could tell is one in which the non-physical properties are precisely my experiences—in which my experiencing such-and-such leads to my forming this-and-that thought, and so on. But obviously, this story can’t be told without talking about conscious experience.
If you imagine a zoombie, what’s that like? What, exactly, are you imagining when you say, ‘I’m conceiving of a zoombie’? What’s the picture in your mind’s eye?
Since, in a zoombie, the non-physical effects have no bearing on the existence of consciousness, you can imagine any arbitrary non-physical process. The quality of consciousness occurs in the physical body (as it almost certainly does in reality).
e.g., when the zoombie recoils from a physical stimulus – a jarring of the knee, or a source of heat to the fingertips – he could just as well be reacting to the non-physical qualities of the impact or the flame. Flames and physical impacts might have some non-physical quality to which the non-physical mentality of the zoombie is reacting.
The terms “physical” and “non-physical” are symmetric here. We could call them Roofdrak and Nuru-Ah without loss of generality. Anything that can be claimed about one can be claimed about the other. The “zombie” proof works exactly as well for the “zoombie” proof. This mirroring is, itself, a proof that neither proof occupies a privileged position.
One example of such a non-physical stimulus could be Sheldrake’s Morphic Resonance. We respond to the mystical morphology of the flame, not the physical heat; or to the shadow of the flame from the future. The important thing is that all the non-physical facts are irrelevant to the experience of consciousness.
In the zoombie thought experiment, both the physical and non-phyisical facts of consciousness are treated as black boxes; we knon’t know the details of either. The same is true of the p-zombie experiment. The only thing that changes is the location of the effects which allow the experience of consciousness.
The most likely set of non-phyisical facts that could occur are the null case - that is, there are no non-physical facts. The zoombie thought experiment is consistent with that case, and therefore consistent with what I imagine to be reality. But it would also be consistent with non-physical facts that do exist, so long as they are irrelevant to the fact of consciousness.
No, certainly not. I can’t, for example, imagine a zoombie if the non-physical properties are experiential—since this would mean imagining something that is both experiential and non-experiential. So this argument, even if it succeeds, can at best rule out versions of dualism in which the non-physical properties are non-experiential—but of course, that’s not an interesting form of dualism.
It’s the other way around—despite (at least seemingly) being able to conceive of the physical processes, I can’t answer those questions, which is just why I think myself able to imagine a zombie. To claim that, if I were to actually imagine the physical processes, I must be able to imagine the questions about consciousness, is to presuppose physicalism, since only in that case would it be true.
Now, once again, I readily concede that I might be deceived into believing zombies are conceivable (although of course somebody arguing for the conceivability of zoombies would have a hard time consistently arguing for the inconceivability of zombies); but in that case, somebody should be able to point out the incoherence of my conception.
Which of course means that you now should believe neither in physicalism, nor in dualism—the zoombie argument is one against dualism, but not for physicalism, the same way that the zombie argument is against physicalism, but not for dualism. So, if you believe in zoombies (which you are surprisingly ready to do, given your earlier resitance against zombies), then you should also believe in zombies, and reject physicalism, as well.
In fact, for every other strategy of solving the hard problem, if the zoombie argument works as advertised, it’s possible to conceive of a zo[sup]n[/sup]mbie argument—a zooombie argument agains neutral monism, a zoooombie argument against panpsychism—which refutes it, leading to the conclusion that the hard problem is insoluble.
Of course, the solution is that no zo[sup]n[/sup]mbie argument goes through as long as you introduce properties that are at their foundation experiential, since you can’t conceive of a being that is both experiential and non-experiential. Any other way, the arguments simply deadlock one another, blocking any path to a resolution.
No. The conception of a p-zombie includes the physical processes underlying it; without it, there simply is no conception of any particular thing—you’re just making noises when you say ‘I conceive of a zombie’ in this case. I can only imagine pain not being c-fibers firing, because I can think about c-fibers firing without thinking about pain. I can not think about blank and know that I’m not thinking about pain, because in that case I’m not thinking about anything.
Take my earlier point about the necessary identity of H[sub]2[/sub]O and water. I can’t think about one without thinking about the other—this is what their identity consists in. But if I didn’t know the properties of, say, H[sub]2[/sub]O, then I could easily claim to be able to conceive of water without conceiving of H[sub]2[/sub]O; but I would err, since I wasn’t actually conceiving of H[sub]2[/sub]O, due to my ignorance of its properties. Knowing all the relevant facts about both, I can’t conceive of one without conceiving of the other. Thus, in order to make the zombie argument, I must be able to conceive of both sides of the postulated identity, that is, the physical as well as the mental.
The zoombie argument may be, but the zombie argument isn’t. But if you are willing to grant zoombie conceivability, you should also grant zombie conceivability, ruling out this possibility.
