I suspect most with a philosophical bent are pretty familiar with David Chalmer's zombie argument regarding consciousness. If not then this is a nice summary. Basically the argument is that if physicalism is true then an exact duplicate of this world would be the same as this world. Yet we can imagine a world where everything is the same except for consciousness. i.e. all people are zombies. The problem is in assuming this really is a physical duplicate. I thought I'd give my personal experience as to why I think Chalmers is onto something with zombies but why I reject it.
Many years ago I was at a party when someone slipped something into my diet coke - presumably as a joke. To this day I'm not sure what, although someone told me they thought it was morphine. I don't know (and doubt it was morphine for various reasons). However the experience was very scary but for an odd reason. Basically I was for part of the evening a Chalmers styled zombie.
According to everyone I asked about the evening I acted completely normal and they didn't notice anything odd. However I wasn't conscious. That sounds weird but I wasn't. Later in the evening, around midnight consciousness switched back on for a while. After about five minutes I realized that I hadn't been conscious and then it switched off again before this realization could really affect my behavior. In the period of consciousness I was perfectly fine. I wasn't acting "drunk" or anything like that. This "switching on" happened several more times except now each time it switched on the realization that I was conscious and hadn't been was enough for me to comment on it. Finally I was permanently conscious.
Now please, I don't really want to discuss the other aspects of that evening (which for obvious reasons were rather distressful) Rather I want to focus on the cognitive and philosophical aspects. First off I think that it entailed for me empirical evidence that consciousness is more than a tad more complex than most philosophical discussions allow. Second I think it entails that much of my thinking and behavior isn't really intrinsically a function of consciousness, like much philosophy assumes. After all when I was unconscious I was thinking and behaving quite normally. Indeed no one, including myself, could detect that I was actually unconscious. I was for all practical (if not ontological) purposes a Chalmers styled zombie.
Where I think this leads me to reject Chalmers though is that clearly this was caused by some drug of some kind. Thus it was a physical difference. (Which Chalmers is, of course, arguing against) Now this doesn't invalidate Chalmers since it's simply not an example of what he's arguing. However it does lead me to strongly suspect that the zombie state Chalmers discusses is in fact a physical difference.
Clark, have you read this? It's a short version of what is probably Chalmers' most sophisticated defense of the zombie argument. It'd be interesting to discuss it in connection with the experience you describe.
Ah, nevermind, it looks like a summary of that defense is in the chapter you linked. Still, it's an interesting launching point for discussion.
Just out of curiosity since you actually are a cognitive scientist. Have you heard of the phenomena I encountered? It was pretty unnerving.
To add, on a logical level the main form of Chalmer's argument (that if dualism is metaphysically conceivable that physicalism is false) strikes me as wrong mainly because it just sounds too much like Anselm's argument. (Yeah, it's different in certain ways, but has a similar core) The main difference is that instead of a claim of existence we have a claim of non-existence (of pure physicalism).
BTW - which part of Chalmer's revised argument do you find relevant? I think for the metaphysical argument my experience isn't terribly useful one way or the other since the issue is physically identical but phenomenologically different situations. In my case I don't think the situations are physically identical. Indeed I think the difference in physicality with a difference in consciousness (but not behavior) suggests consciousness is physical. (Although I tend to be very sympathetic to property dualism)
This is pure speculation, but having experienced something similar but for different reasons, I wonder if what is switched off in these cases is extremely short term memory. No experiences are being stored so one can't remember what happened in the immediate past. If all other faculties are functioning normally, a person could appear to a cursory inspection to be unchanged, but if they might not be able to follow the train of a conversation. Perhaps this isn't what you experienced, Clark.
I've also experienced being fully aware of my surroundings but lacking any higher brain functions. While I was taking in sensory data, exactly zero thoughts were happening, something that I only became aware of after full brain function returned when I was regained the faculty of self-awareness. I realized that I had been in this state of no-thought for a period of at least ten minutes.
I don't follow all the jargon in Chalmers' argument, but it seems to rely on our own intuitive, unreliable understanding of the phenomenon of consciousness. I have trouble conceiving of a zombie without having a firm understanding of at least the rudiments of what gives rise to consciousness and the nature of consciousness itself. I lack enough information to accurately frame the mental picture.
I actually had considered that - which makes me wonder if consciousness is in fact tied to short term memory. Of course many have tried to tie consciousness and reflection which may entail that consciousness is in fact this short term memory functioning.
On the other hand the periods I'm calling non-consciousness there was nothing. Worse than merely being asleep. So I wonder if there is more than merely suppression of short term memory.
Further I'd expect that if short term memory was not working that this would disrupt conversations and the like. After all the content of the prior sentence and even the "theme" of conversation is all held in some kind of short term memory. But one has to be careful and acknowledge that different parts of the brain may be functioning, each with a different short term memory system. Perhaps only one was disrupted while others were not.
As I said though everyone thought I was acting completely normally. And I wasn't even aware of losing consciousness until consciousness returned.
That's a very interesting phenomenon, though how can you be so sure that there really "was nothing", rather than simply nothing that you could afterwards remember?
But on the broader issue, I don't think it would bother Chalmers too much, since he doesn't claim that zombies are nomologically possible anyway. Granting that consciousness emerges from the physical *given our laws of nature*, we can still ask whether the psycho-physical laws could be absent from a possible world that is a physical duplicate of our own, such that no such emergence would take place in such a world.
Clark, it just sounds like a blackout. I've seen it happen to people before with alcohol. They were there, but they weren't really there, though no one could tell until the next day when the alcohol wore off and it was clear they had no memory of the experience. The one time something similar happened to me, I was a freshman in college. I left a party at which I'd had quite a bit to drink, and walked back to my dorm, which was 5 minutes away. My roomate, who'd been at the party, left at about the same time. I arrived almost 45 minutes after him, but didn't remember either leaving the party or going anywhere else (45 extra minutes is a lot for a 5 minute walk!). The next day, he said that when I got there, he asked me where I'd been, and I told him I'd gone to a friend's room in a neighboring dorm. I talked to that friend, and she said I'd dropped by, but that she had no idea I'd even been drinking. So apparently, I was acting completely normal, but retained no information about the experience.
In the first comment, I was referring to the 2-dimensional semantics argument that's on p. 26-27 of the chapter you linked.
Clark: I actually believe that Chalmer's zombie argument has more traction than you do. It seems to me that what you experienced wasn't zombie-like at all, but you just don't recall what you were aware of at the time. A concussion could do the same thing. What is tied with consciousness is globally activated throughout many areas in the brain, including the pre-frontal lobe and amygdala primarily. However, it is easy to show that similar brain state don't always seem to equate to similar states of consciousness or phenomenal awareness. Reflective awareness that one is aware is a very complex physiogical process, but I don't believe that it can be reduced ot brain states. That is what the argument from multiple realizability suggests. It is just very difficult to see how cellular or neural activity can be equated with awareness without losing the "what it is like" aspect of consciousness. That may have more to do with Nagel's "what's it like to be a bat" argument than the zombie argument, but they're getting at the same thing. Awareness, thoughts, consciousness have a subjectivity and intentionality and aboutness about them that cannot be reduced to mere neural activity.
What is more important as I see it is imagination. How the brain dissociates from all that is present or ever has been and creates novel scenarios seems to be very difficult to explain given reductive physicalism. Are you suggesting that your experience somehow requires reductive physicalism?
Yup. Blackout. I've had phone conversations with drunk friends--fairly in-depth ones. They don't even remember making the call, let alone the discussion.
Dude, you were hammered.
Chris, this sounds somewhat different from merely not having memory though since I was coming in and out of consciousness at the time. So this wasn't something the next day about memories not being recorded properly. It might be as Blake says I don't recall what I was aware of at the time. But that seems just the short term memory bit, as I mentioned. (Well a variation on the same theme anyway)
Regarding reductive physicalism. I don't think my experience entails much one way or the other. I think it entails something like physicalism but only on prima facie terms. But as I said the kind of physicalism that tends to be embraced in these discussions (roughly 3rd person accounts) I'm very, very skeptical of. I tend to be most sympathetic to property dualism of a sort. i.e. that there's something like 1st person awareness inherent in matter.
Jack, as I mentioned, this isn't just me not having memory the next day. It's me not being conscious at the time and then coming into and out of consciousness. So at best if it is a memory effect its for very short term memory that affects ones ability to reflect.
The other issue is that I wasn't acting "drunk" - at least no one told me I was. I'd have expected that if whatever substance was put in the pop (say GHB or something like that) that was similar to alcohol and had significant effect to affect my memories it would have also affected my behaviors.
Oh, regarding the argument on page 26. I'm partial to denying premise 4, which suggests a deeper reality than revealed by physics. Although, as I've often noted, this is the problem with these debates about physicalism or materialism. What is revealed by physics? Who's to say but what there isn't something like property dualism and this becomes part of physics in the future? Physicalism can't be defined by current physics for obvious reasons (it's incomplete). So it tends to be defined more by what it denies. So I tend to see a lot of these arguments as sophisticated circular arguments.
This is an interesting discussion. What makes this difficult is that human consciousness (the only one we know first hand) is so very complex. Obviously the structure and contents of our consciousness depends on the neuro-physical detail. The metaphysical argument against physicalism is cleanest when we try to strip everything down to the barest form of subjective experience, not including thinking or memory. This is not easy to conceive of, but I think we can try. (Can you really distinguish between an episode where we were "unconscious" vs. one which leaves no trace of memory?) Anyway, whatever you think of the conceivability argument, the relevent question about physiclism is: What in physics provides for minimal raw first person experience?
Best regards,
- Steve Esser
Like what comment 11 has posted, this is an interesting discussion... A close person to me has expeirenced something very similar to what you have gone through. But the things I heard was horrific. I was informed that the situation she was in was that though she was fully awake, she saw people around her with their skins pealing off & just looking totally different. After hearing that and reading your discussion, I don't think there ARE such things as zombies... I think that it's something that people create in their mind when they're not in the state of sobriety.
Talking about zombies, if my luck runs out and I end up seeing things that wasn't really there... I would want to most definately see a celebrity... only 'cause the pictures on www.hollywooszombies.com are hilarious & makes me wonder if that is something would look normal.
Blake, can I get your email address?
About the physicalism issue - because I have a prior commitment to libertarian free will, I can conceive of two worlds, particle-wise identical, which diverge.
Jared: You can e-mail me at bostler@mpwlaw.com
Jared, just to note, libertarian free will need not entail that. If I understand Blake's position correctly he feels libertarian free will and consciousness emerge radically due to chaotic systems and a robustly open future. Is that right Blake?
Clark: I think that "reductive" physicalism entails neuro-psychological determinism and the denial of libertarian free will. On such a view, there are physical properties and no psychological or mental properties of any kind. Our mental life is reduced to the activity of mindless matter on such a view. Thus, everything is reducible to a single, determinstic system of causation and properties of mind are eliminated.
I don't believe that "nonreductive physicalism" necesarily entails determinsm. I suppose that panpsychism is a form of non-reductive materialism. However, I believe that nonreductive materialism succumbs to Kim's reductive two-level argument where the physical level of explanation does all of explaining and the mental becomes superfluous or epiphenomenal.
It could be that material systems are chaotic in principal, or that quantum effects persist all the way up, or that several different outcomes are possible given identical material configurations of a certain sort. However, it is difficult to see how mere indeterminism or chaos is any more consistent with LFW than determinsim. If there is mental csuation - if our conscious thoughts and plans are involved in causing anything -- and if the underlying states are not determinsistic, then they are all a type of emergence since the underlying material states alone are not sufficient to explain what the system or configuration causes.
I'm still working on whether panpsychism reduces to emergence. I presently believe that it either reduces to emergence or reductive physicalism notwithstanding efforts to avoid that reduction.
I'm not sure what you mean by "radical," but if you mean that new properties of mind arise from underlying neural complexity such as conscious awareness that one is aware, knowing what it is like to see blue, imagining a possibility for the future that has never been experiences before, then I believe that these new properties are neither deterministically necessitated nor reducible to the properties of the base constituents, and then yes I agree. I also believe that such a view is not only consistent with LFW but requires it.
Radical emergence is Searle's term for what I believe you call ontological or non-reductive emergence.
It sounds like someone slipped you a mickie.
Rich
I think this is a little misleading as Chalmers doesn't believe a zombie is actually possible, just logically possible. He also believes consciousness is entirely constrained by the physical though not explanable in terms of it. So I don't think he'd bat an eye at your experience.
He says, as an example, a mile high unicycle might not be physically possible but it is logically possible, it can be imagined without contradiction.
Now, someone might ask why anyone would give a damn about logical possibility and care about just what's possible in the real world. For that, thank David Lewis.
Yeah, I do know that. That's why I said I found Chalmer's argument a touch too similar to Anselm.
I didn't read the Chalmers article, since that's a long read and a lot of effort for something that doesn't interest me much at all. But, a long time ago, Stanley Cavell dealt with these instances and images of robots, zombies, mechanical dumbies, puppets and such like haunting our thinking and self-conception in the last half of "The Claim to Reason". His diagnosis was roughly that such skeptical fantasy images arise from our failures of acknowledgement. Since we regularly misunderstand and miscommunicate with one another, become out of sorts with each other, lose contact and become out of touch, and consequently we tend to adopt a coldly objectifying stance toward others, subliminally sensing that we are susceptible to being reciprocated in the same way and deservedly so, such abstractive images of depersonalized, self-mechanized beings arise as skeptical fantasies displacing and defending against the anxieties of relations between self and other and their mis-alignments. It's a bit disconcerting that nowadays such skeptical fantasy images are being recycled to underwrite theories or speculations about "mind" of which we should rightly be skeptical.
But perhaps the moral here concerns the limits of pure formal logic, since what conclusions we would validly infer to depend upon differing premises, categorical assumptions, and intuitions of sense and plausubility. Just because we possess a well-developed logical calculus, doesn't mean that it tells us how to use it. If Chalmers does indeed hold that a mile-high unicycle is logically possible, then, since a unicycle is an implement, the being of which emerges from the Zuhanden, wouldn't that entail the existence of a mile-and-a-half tall man, because without a rider, why would it be a unicycle?
But on what basis does Chalmers claim that a zombie is logically possible, i.e. not self-contradictory? I think a ready argument could be framed that the idea is contradictory. If consciousness exists, is a real, that means that it has some effect that makes a difference, that at least some part of the organic behavioral decisions of the organism are passed through consciousness in such a way as to make an effective difference in behavioral outcomes. And if consciousness emerged and evolved from biological evolution, then it must somehow be an evolutionary real and operate to some effect, conferring selection advantages that enhance the adaptive fit and survival probabilities of the organism, else it would be a useless appendage selected against. So no matter how subtlely and blended in with other effects, if conscious is a real, it will be manifested in behavioral differences in the organism, and an identical, but utterly nonconscious being would either manifest behavioral differences and not be identical or would not be utterly nonconscious.
There that old "problem" about one person's retina receptors differing from another's, such that one sees blue, while the other sees red on the same object, but since they share a language they both identify the property of the object by the same word. The first answer to that is that so long as they share the same language and all the alignments involved in doing so, the difference might never come out, but it also would not make any difference anyway, so there's no skeptical point implied. The second answer is that color actually has three basic properties, hue, value, and saturation, so that if carefully scrutinized and tested the discrepancy could be detected and the miscorrelations recorrelated. But isn't that the way science often works: small, at first overlooked, discrepancies and differences can lead on to large and important inferences?
Chalmers does not appear to believe it is necessary that consciousness affect behavioral outcomes, he believes the physical universe is causally closed and that epiphenomenalism is most likely true.
Er, let's be a bit more clear here. When Chalmers talks about "consciousness" he's speaking of phenomenal consciousness not what he calls "psychological consciousness" which he does indeed belive affects outcomes of behavior and physically/functionally grounded.
AG:
Ya. I've heard tell that Chalmers distinguishes between psychological/causal consciousness and phenomenal/mental consciousness. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. But aren't we back at Kant's phenomenal/noumenal distinction? And we no longer have a ghost in the machine, but now a machine in the ghost.
One should distinguish between A) the traditional philosophical problematics of consciousness as a philosopher's stone, a super-concept by which all other concepts could be derived and conjured, thus by implication the being of the world itself caught up in the spell and conjured, and the criticism thereof, which has been long since worked through and accomplished, as should be well-known; and B) the much different and reduced problem of the physical/causal explanation of consciousness as a real phenomenon (or set of phenomena). The latter problem neither requires, nor underwrites large philosophical, let alone metaphysical claims, and questions about agency/"freedom", knowledge and its justifications, or the being of the universe as a whole can be readily detached from the matter, and neither turn on, nor are vitiated by the attainment of an adequate causal account. (Hint: one of the criteria for the adequacy of such a causal explanation is that it would converge with its phenomenological explanandum, that the explanation would conserve the identity of the phenomenon or phenomena explained, else it would be explaining away the phenomenon and reducing it to a mere epiphenomenon.)
I think that one of the reasons that the example of pain sensation was chosen is that it cuts against any Cartesian temptation to sort out mental from physical phenomena, since a pain sensation is inextricably both. (Even phantom limb pain has a physical cause). To say that sensations are private is fine as a grammatical remark, the old explicative, analytic judgment, just in case someone were to be confused and mistaken about a matter, such that, say, they didn't realize that when I fall flat on my face and break my nose, it's not you who experiences the pain of a broken nose. (Toddlers are prone to such confusions). But if taken as a referential statement, the old amplicative, synthetic judgment, as if sensations were objects out there to which the mysterious metaphysical property of privacy attaches, such that we don't quite know what they are, how they come about or how to deal with them, then only confusion and obfuscation result. So aren't both pain and redness qualia? What significant difference would distinguish the two cases, such that the latter case is irreducibly mysterious, and would require that we disembody and double our selves? (If Chalmers holds that the physical universe is causally closed, does that mean that he is unaware that animal organisms can be significantly characterized as teleonomic, that is, goal-seeking, "open", systems? One of the irritants in the way the philosophers often or sometimes talk of causality is that they don't inquire into specific sorts of causes or patterns of causes and sort through which specific sorts and patterns might do, instead relying on the bare universal concept of causality and the logical rule that from a cause an effect necessarily follows to form a notion of strict causal determinism, even though the converse, that an effect always results from known determinate causes, or, in other words, that effects are determined solely through the nature of their causes and not through the nature of what is effected, is not necessarily true. That causal events are subject to statistical distributions with recursive regularities, such that they interact variably, seems often to be foreclosed as a possibility by a hasty identification of physical with logical "closure").
If it's legitimate and reasonable to inquire after solutions to problems, isn't it just as reasonable and legitimate to inquire after whether a problem is well-formulated, just how perspicuous the formulation of a problem is and what does it serve to bring into "the open", what the stakes involved in a problem might be and whether they are significant or trivial, whether the problem is formulated in such a way as to exclude its possible solutions, whether the formulation of the problem might not itself be founded on mistakes, such that the "problem" is not really a problem and is to be dissolved rather than solved through the correction of mistakes, and just for whom is a problem a problem?
Of course, the other matter involved metaphorically in that old discussion of pain sensations and their attribution was the question of the soul and just who or what should it be attributed to. Having a soul involves not just the capacity to experience pain, but also the capacity to respond to it. And having a soul involves the significant possibility that one might lose one's soul, not least, though certainly not most signally, through the utter triviality of one's philosophical speculations.
Personally I think that an excellent distinction though. Yeah Kant had some issues but the basic approach, whatever its problems, has merit.
BTW - wasn't pain a popular choice long before phantom limbs were known as physical rather than purely psychic? It seems to me they were popular matters of discussion in the 19th century when Cartesianism was still popular in various forms. I think it's a popular choice since it seems so indubitable.
I do think it an interesting question about the distinction though. Since it seems reasonable to assume that being conscious of something phenomenally would make a causal difference. (Indeed that was ultimately my point in my little example above, even if it didn't really address Chalmers proper)
This gets back to that discussion about nonsense in philosophy with Peter. I tend to think that for something to be different it must make a difference. Which I'm not sure Chalmer's does fully. (It does to an extent of course since there is a phenomenal difference between a human and a zombie)
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