Brain Hammer

Jonathan Coulton – Re Your Brains

Here’s a roundup of recent blogospheric zombie roundups: Siris’s, my mind on books’s, and my own.

My $.02 on zombiology: either we know that we’re not zombies or we don’t know that we’re not zombies. If we know that we’re not zombies, then physicalism is true (see “Transcending Zombies“). If we don’t know that we’re not zombies, then physicalism is true (see “Type-Q Materialism“).

Numbers of people (more than one) have asked for the following, perhaps because they are students in a class soon to be examined on the topics contained within. Others may be interested as well. Below are PowerPoint slides for talks closely associated with Chapter 5 & 6 of The Subjective Brain.

Transcending Zombies [link to download]

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Phenomenal Consciousness and the Allocentric-Egocentric Interface [link to download]

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Recycle

Originally uploaded by Pete Mandik

Eric Schwitzgebel and I have been having an interesting (to us, at least) exchange in the comments on his recent post “Three Reasons to Mistrust Reports about Ongoing Conscious Experience“. At issue in our exchange are questions concerning introspective reliability concerning phenomenological facts or “phacts” as I called them. Eric is somewhat famous now for his many interesting arguments against introspective reliability. I tend to side with people who think that there are important senses in which introspective judgments can’t be wrong.

An interesting case, and one that Eric raises, concerns people’s judgments about the nature of their visual field. More specifically, people tend to vary over times and across subjects in their judgments concerning how much of the visual field is clear. The determinate colors and shapes of peripherally presented objects cannot be seen clearly. But people vary in their opinions about whether this is so.

Key question: do people vary in their accuracy of judgments of the phacts of the matter? That is, do some but not all of them get the phacts right?

The answer to the key question depends, of course, on what the phacts are. And one possibility that needs to be dealt with is that the variation in judgments is matched by a corresponding variation in phacts. On an extreme version of this possibility, everyone is right, they’re just right about different phacts.

One way to characterize resistance to this possibility is as interposing a third realm between a first realm constituted by objective facts concerning stimuli and sensory receptors and a second realm constituted by various conceptualized reactions to stimuli. Supplying a third realm gives something for items in the second realm to be mistaken about yet, unlike items in the first realm, look like candidates for genuine phenomenology. A lot of what Eric claims people to be mistaken about look to me to not be mistakes about phenomenology, but instead mistakes about what’s going on in the first realm (or mistakes about relations between the first and second realms).

Worries about a third realm can be put by saying that we really have no idea what sorts of denizens would populate it. In the case of the visual field, third-realm denizens would include peripheral objects that are colored and shaped but have no determinate color and no determinate shape. Do we really understand the suggestion that there can be such objects? And aside from questions about what objects would be, there are the various questions that arise about where they would be. No one’s ever found anything like that in anyone’s brains, and the items that populate our external environments certainly don’t fit the description.

It’s not enough to motivate the postulation of the third realm to say that we already know what it is, that it’s whatever makes it the case that there’s something it’s like to be conscious. Nor is it enough to counter skeptical resistance by characterizing that resistance as requiring reductive definitions. Reductive definitions are beside the point at this stage in the game, we just want something informative to “what are you talking about?” kinds of questions. No one has a reductive definition of a duvet, but could probably say something more informative about duvets beyond “if ya gotta ask, ya ain’t ever gonna know” kinds of responses.

The most pressing challenge for friends of the third realm is to say something informative about it such that it would be something separate from the second realm. This is because the second realm seems to be best suited for handling the sorts of weird indeterminacies that arise for phacts – indeterminacies like being indeterminately colored or having an indeterminate number of speckles.

See also:
[How do you know that you know what you are talking about when you talk about qualia?]
[Transcending Zombies]

Phenomenally Vacant

Originally uploaded by Pete Mandik

Keith Frankish, posting on the Splintered Mind, summarizes very interesting Anti-Zombie Argument as follows:

Consider anti-zombies. These are beings that are physical duplicates of humans, and that have no non-physical properties, but which are nonetheless conscious. They inhabit an anti-zombie world, which is a physical duplicate of ours, but where no non-physical properties are instantiated. (Physicalists think that we are anti-zombies, of course.) Then we can run an anti-zombie argument for physicalism, as follows. Anti-zombies are conceivable and therefore, by the CP principle, metaphysically possible. And if anti-zombies are metaphysically possible, then physicalism is true. The last step may seem a big one, but it should be uncontroversial. In the anti-zombie world consciousness is physical, so the microphysical features of that world are metaphysically sufficient for consciousness, and any world with the same microphysical features will have the same distribution of phenomenal properties. But, by definition, our world has the same microphysical features as the anti-zombie world. Hence the microphysical features of our world are metaphysically sufficient for the existence of consciousness, which is to say that physicalism is true.

Here’s an excerpt of a response I left:

Consider a version of zombism that doesn’t seem touched by your argument. I don’t believe it, and I don’t know anyone who does, but it is worth considering.

On this version of zombism, consciousness is massively multiply realized. In some worlds—Berkeleyan ghost worlds—there are no physical properties, only consciousnesses. In those worlds, my mental doppleganger is realized by networks of non-physical ectoplasmic psychons, or spook-juice, or something. In other worlds—Cartesian fractured worlds—there exist both minds and bodies, and like the ghost worlds, conscious stuff is realized by non-physical spook-juice. In other worlds—anti-zombic worlds—consciousness is realized by solely physical stuff. In other worlds—zombic worlds–there’s all the same physical stuff as in the anti-zombic worlds, but absolutely no consciousness, perhaps because of different laws that operate there, or something.

So, I guess this imagined zombist would deny your statement that “any world with the same microphysical features will have the same distribution of phenomenal properties.”

I suppose you’ll need some reason why such a move wouldn’t be available to the zombist. What is it?

If you know that you are not a zombie, then phenomenal character is conceptual and inverted spectra (color qualia being inverted relative to your conceptualizations) are impossible.

Regarding the supposition that you know that you are not a zombie, I interpret this as meaning that you know that you now have states with phenomenal character or qualia. It is useful to compare this kind of knowledge to more ordinary cases of knowing that something is the case. Take for example, my knowing that there is a dog in the room. In order for me to know this, there must be some set of properties that the dog has and that I am able to conceptualize. I can be relatively neutral on exactly which conceptualizations will get the job done. Maybe my conceptualization is that there’s a four-legged furry barker in the room. Maybe my conceptualization is that there’s a domesticated wolf-descendant in the room. Maybe my conceptualization is simply that there’s a dog in the room. But however it goes, there must be some set of properties of the dog (e.g. being domesticated, being wolfish) and I must have some set of concepts adequate for the accurate representation of those properties (e.g. the concept of domestication, the concept of wolves).

Now, my knowledge that I now have states with phenomenal character is seldom if ever analogous to the case in which I simply conceive of the dog as a dog. I am not now simply conceiving of myself as having phenomenal states. There are specific phenomenal states that I conceive myself as having. As I type this note and take breaks to sip coffee there’s a whole slew of qualia that I conceive my states as having. In particular, I conceive myself as seeing my coffee mug as being blue. I have a blue quale and am able to conceptualize it as such. I reject, then, the statement that there is no absolute correct orientation of the color spectrum. I think there is. It involves conceptualizing a blue quale as blue and a yellow quale as yellow and so forth.

Now, if qualia are distinct from my conceptualizations, as they would need to be if inverted spectra are possible, then it would be theoretically possible for my qualia to become inverted without my noticing. My quale that I currently conceptualize as blue would actually be yellow and vice versa. My current conceptualization as having a blue quale would be false, then. And it would be false without my noticing. Further, if qualia are distinct from my conceptualizations, I could have all the same conceptualizations without having any qualia at all, and my belief that I’m not a zombie would be false. If it’s possible for my belief that I’m not a zombie to be false, then I can’t know that I’m not a zombie. Thus does self-knowledge of non-zombie-hood lead to the impossibility of inverted spectra.

Below are the slides for the talk based on the chapter available here: link.

Zombie Pete

Originally uploaded by Pete Mandik

“Transcending Zombies,” available here, is the fifth chapter of The Subjective Brain as well as the basis for my talk on July 5 at the CUNY Grad Center.
Excerpt:
The argument that I will be developing in the remainder of this chapter, and referring to as the Transcending Zombies argument or simply TZ, goes as follows.

P1. If it is possible for me to know that I am not a zombie, then phenomenal character is (a certain kind of) conceptualized egocentric content.
P2. I know that I am not a zombie.
P3. Phenomenal character is (a certain kind of) conceptualized egocentric content.
P4. Fixing my physical properties fixes my conceptualized egocentric contents.
C. Fixing my physical properties fixes my phenomenal properties.

I turn now to the sections wherein I defend P1 of TZ. In §3 I defend the claim that my knowing that I’m not a zombie requires that if I have (states with) phenomenal character right now then my current conceptual repertoire is adequate for representing that phenomenal character. In §4, I defend the claim that my knowing that I’m not a zombie requires that if I have (states with) phenomenal character right now, then I have states with egocentric content. In §5 I defend the claim that if I know that I am not a zombie, then not only does my having (states with) phenomenal character require that I have states with conceptual and egocentric contents, but certain states with conceptual and egocentric contents must suffice for my having (states with) phenomenal character. Further, in §5, I begin a case (to be completed in §§7-8) that (if I know that I’m not a zombie then) certain conceptualized egocentric contents are identical to (not just necessary and sufficient for) phenomenal character.

Danny Ocean (George Clooney) circles up the boys one more time to steal the world’s largest diamond…from zombies.

All is Dark Inside

Originally uploaded by Pete Mandik.

Dig your grave or dig my Zombie Apocalypse photo set at Flickr