For consciousness, I understand your Casper type-D dualism argument as something like this:
The mainstream physics position is that there is a causally-closed “theory of everything”, and we don’t know it exactly yet but it will look more-or-less like some complicated mathematical formula that reduces to quantum field theory (QFT) in one limit, and reduces to general relativity (GR) in a different limit, etc., like probably some future version of string theory or whatever. Let’s call such a law “Law P”.
But that’s just a guess. We don’t know it for sure. Maybe if we did enough experiments with enough accuracy, especially experiments involving people and animals, then we can find places Law P gives wrong predictions. So maybe it will turn out that these “ultimate laws of the universe” involve not only Law P but also Law C (C for Casper or Consciousness) which is some (perhaps very complicated) formula describing how Casper / Consciousness pushes and pulls on particles in the real world, or whatever.
And next, you’re saying that this hypothetical is compatible with zombie-ism because Law C “really” is there because of consciousness, but it’s conceivable for there to be a zombie universe in which Law C is still applicable but those forces are not related to consciousness. (I’m referring to the part where you say: “So the idea is that even if consciousness causes things, we could still imagine a physically identical world to {the world where consciousness causes the things}. Instead, the things would be caused the same physical way as they are with consciousness, but there would be no consciousness.”)
But isn’t that still epiphenomenalism?? Why can’t we say “the real physical laws of the universe are {Law P and Law C}, and consciousness is epiphenomenal upon those physical laws”?
Hmm. One possible response would be: Law C is supposed to be natural-seeming in the consciousness-universe, and unnatural-seeming / convoluted / weird in the zombie-universe. Is that how you’d respond? Or something else? If that’s the response, I think I don’t buy it. I think it’s exactly equally convoluted. If all the complexity of psychology is bundled up inside Law C, then that’s true whether consciousness is involved or not.
~~~
Well anyway, I’m interested in understanding the above line of argument but it’s ultimately not very cruxy for me. My real reason for disbelieving to dualism is something like this:
There’s a project where we start with the known formulas of fundamental physics (QFT+GR), and we assume that those formulas are causally-closed (at least here on Earth; those laws are well-known to break down in exotic situations like microscopic exploding black holes and the Big Bang, but those don’t come up here on Earth). And then we try to work our way up from those laws to explain chemistry and then biochemistry and then neuroscience and then psychology and behavior, and we try to get all the way up to David Chalmers writing books about qualia. My claim is: This project is going to succeed. In other words, in the fullness of time, we will not find anything about David Chalmers’s book-writing process that can only be explained via QFT+GR issuing false predictions.
OK, this isn’t really an “argument” as stated, because I’m not explaining why I’m so optimistic about this project. Basically, I see each step as well under way, maybe not with every last detail hammered out, but also with no great mysteries left. (See here for one part of the story.) I have the impression (I forget exactly what he wrote that makes me think this) that Eliezer feels the same way, and that might have been an unspoken assumption when he was writing. (If so, I agree that he should have stated it explicitly, and acknowledged that there’s some scope for reasonable people to disagree with that optimism.)
This (framework of an) argument would be an argument against both Chalmers’s “type-D dualism” and his “type-F monism”, I think. (I’m not 100% sure though, because I’m pretty confused by Chalmers’s discussion of type-F monism.)
Which “sane variants” do you have in mind? Can you suggest any (ideally pedagogical) references?
I’m currently skeptical, if we’re working under the assumption that the framework / project I suggested above (i.e., the project where we start with QFT+GR and systematically explain that entire chain of causation of David Chalmers typing up book chapters about consciousness) will be successful and will not involve any earth-shattering surprises.
If that assumption is true, then we have two postulates to work with: (1) microphysics is causally closed, (2) phenomenal consciousness, whatever it is (if it’s anything at all) is the thing that David Chalmers is able to successfully introspect upon when he writes book chapters talking about phenomenal consciousness (per the argument that Eliezer was putting forward).
I acknowledge that type-F monism is compatible with (1), but it seems to me that it fails (2). When future scientists tell the whole story of how QFT+GR leads to David Chalmers writing books about consciousness, I think there will be no room in that story for the “intrinsic phenomenal properties of quarks” (or whatever) to be involved in that story, in a way that would properly connect those intrinsic properties to David’s introspection process.
But again, this is pretty tentative because I remain confused about type-F monism in the first place. :)
The sane variant is cosmopsychism (because real physical objects are not fundamentally separable) with probably only one intrinsic property—existence.
When future scientists tell the whole story of how QFT+GR leads to David Chalmers writing books about consciousness, I think there will be no room in that story for the “intrinsic phenomenal properties of quarks” (or whatever) to be involved in that story, in a way that would properly connect those intrinsic properties to David’s introspection process.
From your linked paper:
If one holds that physical terms refer not to dispositional properties but the underlying intrinsic properties, then the protophenomenal properties can be seen as physical properties, thus preserving a sort of materialism.
The story is about intrinsic properties, because that’s what equations describe—when you describe some physical system, it is implied that described physical system exists and all it’s casual influence is because of it’s existence. And you introspect the existence of universe itself by cogito ergo sum.
The story is about intrinsic properties, because that’s what equations describe—when you describe some physical system, it is implied that described physical system exists and all it’s casual influence is because of it’s existence. And you introspect the existence of universe itself by cogito ergo sum.
Hmm, I don’t think you’re following me (or I’m not following you).
Let’s say Chalmers introspects for a bit, and then writes the sentence “I am currently experiencing the ineffable redness of red.”, or alternatively that Chalmers writes the sentence “I am not currently experiencing the ineffable redness of red.”. Presumably (since you seem not to be an illusionist), you would endorse the claim that Chalmers chooses one sentence over the other based on its truth value, and that he ascertained that truth value by introspection, and that choice is intimately / causally related to properties of phenomenal consciousness. Right? So then we can ask questions like: What exactly (if anything) was he introspecting upon, and how was he doing so, and how did he interpret the results in order to choose one sentence over the other? If phenomenal consciousness is anything at all, it presumably needs to be the thing that Chalmers is somehow able to query during this introspection process, right? So how does this querying process work, and produce specific correct answers to questions about consciousness?
If your version of cosmopsychism is just the idea of saying “the universe exists, and this existence is an intrinsic property of the equations” or whatever, then I’m open-minded to that. (Related.) But I don’t understand how that has anything to do with the question above. Right? You’re calling it “cosmopsychism” but I don’t see any “psych” in it…
What exactly (if anything) was he introspecting upon, and how was he doing so, and how did he interpret the results in order to choose one sentence over the other? If phenomenal consciousness is anything at all, it presumably needs to be the thing that Chalmers is somehow able to query during this introspection process, right? So how did his brain manage to do that?
The thing that Chalmers queries is his brain. The phenomenal nature of his brain is that his brain exists. Chalmers can’t query a brain that doesn’t exist. Therefore phenomenal things cause Chalmers to say “I am currently experiencing the ineffable redness of red.”.
But I don’t understand how that has anything to do with the question above.
Existence have something to do with everything—you can’t introspect or see red if you don’t exist. But yes, the solution to the Hard Problem doesn’t have much to do with human qualia specifically (except maybe in the part where cogito ergo sum is the limit of reflectivity and awareness in humans have something to do with reflectivity) - if you explain the consciousness itself using physical notion of existence, then the redness of red is just the difference of neural processes.
You’re calling it “cosmopsychism” but I don’t see any “psych” in it…
That it doesn’t have any magical “psych” is by design—that’s why it’s not dualism. The relevant phenomenal aspect of existence is that it solves zombies. And I mean, sure, you can avoid using the word “consciousness” and stick only to “existence”. But it connects to your intuitions about consciousness—if you imagined you may lose consciousness if you were to be disassembled to atoms and reassembled back, now you have a direct reason to imagine that it still would be something to be like reassembled you.
Therefore phenomenal things cause Chalmers to say “I am currently experiencing the ineffable redness of red.”.
I feel like you’re dodging the question here. I can make a list of properties X that Chalmers believes consciousness has, and I can make another list of properties Y that Chalmers believes consciousness doesn’t have. There should be an explanation of why the things on list X are not on Y instead, and vice-versa.
You can’t just say “if the universe didn’t exist, then lists X and Y wouldn’t exist either”. Sure, maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t constitute any progress towards explaining why the X&Y list contents are what they are. Right?
I feel like you’re angling for a position kinda like: “cosmopsychism explains why I have a conscious experience, but explains nothing whatsoever about any of the properties of that conscious experience”. Right? That strikes me as kinda an insane thing to believe…
Like, if I say “this rock was formed by past volcanic activity”, then you can dig a bit deeper and relate specific properties of the rock to known properties of volcanoes. Right? That’s the normal state of affairs.
So if you say “I know the explanation of why there’s conscious experience, but that explanation doesn’t offer even one shred of insight about why conscious experience is related to memory and self-awareness and feelings and first-person perspective etc., as opposed to conscious experience being related to this pile of blankets on my couch” … then I reject that the thing you’re saying is actually the explanation of why there’s conscious experience.
I hope this isn’t coming across as mean. You seem pretty reasonable, maybe you’ll have good responses, that’s why I’m still here chatting :)
Not intentional—I’m just not sure whether you see problems with casual closure or with epistemic usefulness.
You can’t just say “if the universe didn’t exist, then lists X and Y wouldn’t exist either”. Sure, maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t constitute any progress towards explaining why the X&Y list contents are what they are. Right?
I wouldn’t say “any progress”—correct propositions about X and Y are correct even if they may seem trivial. And it sure would be a progress for someone who was forced to believe in dualism or worse as an alternative. And, to be clear, consciousness having a content is not a problem for casual closure—if some specific universe didn’t exist and some other universe existed instead, X and Y would be different. But yes, it’s a solution that is not especially useful except for a narrow purpose of solving the Hard Problem.
I feel like you’re angling for a position kinda like: “cosmopsychism explains why I have a conscious experience, but explains nothing whatsoever about any of the properties of that conscious experience”. Right?
Right. Well, if you stretch the definition of an explanation and properties, there are some vague intuition-like mental processes that I believe become streamlined when you accept cosmopsychism. Like, at the stage of “we have no idea how to solve the Hard Problem but I’m sure physicalism will win somehow” people still manage to hope for some kind of moral realism about consciousness, like there is objective fact that someone is in pain. But yeah, you may derive all this stuff from other sources too.
But, why do you think it’s insane? There are no philosophical problems with relation of some mental processes to memory. Science will explain it in the future just fine. “Why there’s conscious experience” always was the only mysterious problem about consciousness. And I’m not even saying that the Hard Problem and it’s solution is interesting, while practical theory of awareness is boring and useless. It’s just as the matter of fact under some reasonable definitions cosmopsychism solves the Hard Problem—that’s the extent of what I’m arguing.
then I reject that the thing you’re saying is actually the explanation of why there’s conscious experience.
The point is that cosmopsychism together with usual science provides the explanation you want. And no one doubts that science will do it’s part.
It’s not epiphenomenalism because the law invokes consciousness. On the interactionalist account, consciousness causes things rather than just the physical stuff causing things. If you just got rid of consciousness, you’d get a physically different world.
I don’t think that induction on the basis of “science has explained a lot of things therefore it will explain consciousness” is convincing. For one, up until this point, science has only explained physical behavior, not subjective experience. This was the whole point (see Goff’s book Galileo’s error). For another, this seems to prove too much—it would seem to suggest that we could discover the corect modal beliefs in a test tube.
I don’t think that induction on the basis of “science has explained a lot of things therefore it will explain consciousness” is convincing.
First of all, I was making the claim “science will eventually be able to explain the observable external behavior wherein David Chalmers moves his fingers around the keyboard to type up books about consciousness”. I didn’t say anything about “explaining consciousness”, just explaining a particular observable human behavior.
Second of all, I don’t believe that above claim because of induction, i.e. “science can probably eventually explain the observable external behavior of Chalmers writing books about consciousness because hey, scientists are smart, I’m sure they’ll figure it out”. I agree that that’s a pretty weak argument. Rather I believe that claim because I think I already know every step of that explanation, at least in broad outline. (Note that I’m stating this opinion without justifying it.)
If you just got rid of consciousness, you’d get a physically different world.
OK, but then the thing you’re talking about is not related to p-zombies, right?
I thought the context was: Eliezer presented an argument against zombies, and then you / Chalmers say it’s actually not an argument against zombies but rather an argument against epiphenomenalism, and then you brought up the Casper thing to illustrate how you can have zombies without epiphenomenalism. And I thought that’s what we were talking about. But now you’re saying that, in the Casper thing, getting rid of consciousness changes the world, so I guess it’s not a zombie world?
Maybe I’m confused. Question: if you got rid of consciousness, in this scenario, does zombie-Chalmers still write books about consciousness, or not? (If not, that’s not zombie-Chalmers, right? Or if so, then isn’t it pretty weird that getting rid of consciousness makes a physically different world but not in that way? Of all things, I would think that would be the most obvious way that the world would be physically different!!)
If you only got rid of consciousness behavior would change.
Oh, I see, the word “only” here or “just” in your previous comment were throwing me off. I was talking about the following thing that you wrote:
So the idea is that even if consciousness causes things, we could still imagine a physically identical world to ‘the world where consciousness causes the things’. Instead, the things would be caused the same physical way as they are with consciousness, but there would be no consciousness.
[single quotes added to fix ambiguous parsing.]
Let’s label these two worlds:
World A (“the world where consciousness causes the things”), and
World B (the world where “the things would be caused the same physical way as they are with consciousness, but there would be no consciousness”).
Your perspective seems to be: “World A is the truth, and World B is a funny thought experiment. This proposal is type-D dualist.”
I am proposing an alternative perspective: “World B is the true causally-closed physical laws of the universe (and by the way, the laws of physics maybe look different from how we normally expect laws of physics to look, but oh well), and World A is an physically equivalent universe but where consciousness exists as an epiphenomenon. This proposal is type-E epiphenomenalist.”
Is there an error in that alternative perspective?
You might be able to explain Chalmers’ behavior, but that doesn’t capture the subjective experience.
Let’s say I write the sentence: “my wristwatch is black”. And let’s say that sentence is true. And let’s further say it wasn’t just a lucky guess. Under those assumptions, then somewhere in the chain of causation that led to my writing that sentence, you will find an actual watch, and it’s actually black, and photons bounced off of that watch and went into my eye (or someone else’s eye or a camera etc.), thus giving me that information. Agree?
By the same token: Let’s say that Chalmers writes the sentence “I have phenomenal consciousness, and it has thus-and-such properties”. And let’s say that sentence is true. And let’s further say it wasn’t just a lucky guess. Under those assumptions, then somewhere in the chain of causation that led Chalmers to write that sentence, you will find phenomenal consciousness, whatever it is (if anything), with an appropriate place in the story to allow Chalmers to successfully introspect upon it—to allow Chalmers to somehow “query” phenomenal consciousness with his brain and wind up with veridical knowledge about it, analogous to how photons bounce off the watch and carry veridical information about its optical properties into the retina and eventually into long-term memory.
I claim that, if the project I proposed here is successful (i.e. the project to get from QFT+GR to the external behavior of Chalmers writing books), and we combine that with the argument of the previous paragraph (which I understand to be Eliezer’s argument), then we get a rock-solid argument that rules out all zombies, whether type-D, type-E, or type-F. Do you see what I mean?
For consciousness, I understand your Casper type-D dualism argument as something like this:
The mainstream physics position is that there is a causally-closed “theory of everything”, and we don’t know it exactly yet but it will look more-or-less like some complicated mathematical formula that reduces to quantum field theory (QFT) in one limit, and reduces to general relativity (GR) in a different limit, etc., like probably some future version of string theory or whatever. Let’s call such a law “Law P”.
But that’s just a guess. We don’t know it for sure. Maybe if we did enough experiments with enough accuracy, especially experiments involving people and animals, then we can find places Law P gives wrong predictions. So maybe it will turn out that these “ultimate laws of the universe” involve not only Law P but also Law C (C for Casper or Consciousness) which is some (perhaps very complicated) formula describing how Casper / Consciousness pushes and pulls on particles in the real world, or whatever.
And next, you’re saying that this hypothetical is compatible with zombie-ism because Law C “really” is there because of consciousness, but it’s conceivable for there to be a zombie universe in which Law C is still applicable but those forces are not related to consciousness. (I’m referring to the part where you say: “So the idea is that even if consciousness causes things, we could still imagine a physically identical world to {the world where consciousness causes the things}. Instead, the things would be caused the same physical way as they are with consciousness, but there would be no consciousness.”)
But isn’t that still epiphenomenalism?? Why can’t we say “the real physical laws of the universe are {Law P and Law C}, and consciousness is epiphenomenal upon those physical laws”?
Hmm. One possible response would be: Law C is supposed to be natural-seeming in the consciousness-universe, and unnatural-seeming / convoluted / weird in the zombie-universe. Is that how you’d respond? Or something else? If that’s the response, I think I don’t buy it. I think it’s exactly equally convoluted. If all the complexity of psychology is bundled up inside Law C, then that’s true whether consciousness is involved or not.
~~~
Well anyway, I’m interested in understanding the above line of argument but it’s ultimately not very cruxy for me. My real reason for disbelieving to dualism is something like this:
OK, this isn’t really an “argument” as stated, because I’m not explaining why I’m so optimistic about this project. Basically, I see each step as well under way, maybe not with every last detail hammered out, but also with no great mysteries left. (See here for one part of the story.) I have the impression (I forget exactly what he wrote that makes me think this) that Eliezer feels the same way, and that might have been an unspoken assumption when he was writing. (If so, I agree that he should have stated it explicitly, and acknowledged that there’s some scope for reasonable people to disagree with that optimism.)
This (framework of an) argument would be an argument against both Chalmers’s “type-D dualism” and his “type-F monism”, I think. (I’m not 100% sure though, because I’m pretty confused by Chalmers’s discussion of type-F monism.)
It doesn’t work against (sane variants of) type-F monism—it predicts same things equations predict.
Which “sane variants” do you have in mind? Can you suggest any (ideally pedagogical) references?
I’m currently skeptical, if we’re working under the assumption that the framework / project I suggested above (i.e., the project where we start with QFT+GR and systematically explain that entire chain of causation of David Chalmers typing up book chapters about consciousness) will be successful and will not involve any earth-shattering surprises.
If that assumption is true, then we have two postulates to work with: (1) microphysics is causally closed, (2) phenomenal consciousness, whatever it is (if it’s anything at all) is the thing that David Chalmers is able to successfully introspect upon when he writes book chapters talking about phenomenal consciousness (per the argument that Eliezer was putting forward).
I acknowledge that type-F monism is compatible with (1), but it seems to me that it fails (2). When future scientists tell the whole story of how QFT+GR leads to David Chalmers writing books about consciousness, I think there will be no room in that story for the “intrinsic phenomenal properties of quarks” (or whatever) to be involved in that story, in a way that would properly connect those intrinsic properties to David’s introspection process.
But again, this is pretty tentative because I remain confused about type-F monism in the first place. :)
Not sure about references, maybe Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism and The Combination Problem for Panpsychism by Chalmers?
The sane variant is cosmopsychism (because real physical objects are not fundamentally separable) with probably only one intrinsic property—existence.
From your linked paper:
The story is about intrinsic properties, because that’s what equations describe—when you describe some physical system, it is implied that described physical system exists and all it’s casual influence is because of it’s existence. And you introspect the existence of universe itself by cogito ergo sum.
Thanks for the references.
Hmm, I don’t think you’re following me (or I’m not following you).
Let’s say Chalmers introspects for a bit, and then writes the sentence “I am currently experiencing the ineffable redness of red.”, or alternatively that Chalmers writes the sentence “I am not currently experiencing the ineffable redness of red.”. Presumably (since you seem not to be an illusionist), you would endorse the claim that Chalmers chooses one sentence over the other based on its truth value, and that he ascertained that truth value by introspection, and that choice is intimately / causally related to properties of phenomenal consciousness. Right? So then we can ask questions like: What exactly (if anything) was he introspecting upon, and how was he doing so, and how did he interpret the results in order to choose one sentence over the other? If phenomenal consciousness is anything at all, it presumably needs to be the thing that Chalmers is somehow able to query during this introspection process, right? So how does this querying process work, and produce specific correct answers to questions about consciousness?
If your version of cosmopsychism is just the idea of saying “the universe exists, and this existence is an intrinsic property of the equations” or whatever, then I’m open-minded to that. (Related.) But I don’t understand how that has anything to do with the question above. Right? You’re calling it “cosmopsychism” but I don’t see any “psych” in it…
The thing that Chalmers queries is his brain. The phenomenal nature of his brain is that his brain exists. Chalmers can’t query a brain that doesn’t exist. Therefore phenomenal things cause Chalmers to say “I am currently experiencing the ineffable redness of red.”.
Existence have something to do with everything—you can’t introspect or see red if you don’t exist. But yes, the solution to the Hard Problem doesn’t have much to do with human qualia specifically (except maybe in the part where cogito ergo sum is the limit of reflectivity and awareness in humans have something to do with reflectivity) - if you explain the consciousness itself using physical notion of existence, then the redness of red is just the difference of neural processes.
That it doesn’t have any magical “psych” is by design—that’s why it’s not dualism. The relevant phenomenal aspect of existence is that it solves zombies. And I mean, sure, you can avoid using the word “consciousness” and stick only to “existence”. But it connects to your intuitions about consciousness—if you imagined you may lose consciousness if you were to be disassembled to atoms and reassembled back, now you have a direct reason to imagine that it still would be something to be like reassembled you.
I feel like you’re dodging the question here. I can make a list of properties X that Chalmers believes consciousness has, and I can make another list of properties Y that Chalmers believes consciousness doesn’t have. There should be an explanation of why the things on list X are not on Y instead, and vice-versa.
You can’t just say “if the universe didn’t exist, then lists X and Y wouldn’t exist either”. Sure, maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t constitute any progress towards explaining why the X&Y list contents are what they are. Right?
I feel like you’re angling for a position kinda like: “cosmopsychism explains why I have a conscious experience, but explains nothing whatsoever about any of the properties of that conscious experience”. Right? That strikes me as kinda an insane thing to believe…
Like, if I say “this rock was formed by past volcanic activity”, then you can dig a bit deeper and relate specific properties of the rock to known properties of volcanoes. Right? That’s the normal state of affairs.
So if you say “I know the explanation of why there’s conscious experience, but that explanation doesn’t offer even one shred of insight about why conscious experience is related to memory and self-awareness and feelings and first-person perspective etc., as opposed to conscious experience being related to this pile of blankets on my couch” … then I reject that the thing you’re saying is actually the explanation of why there’s conscious experience.
I hope this isn’t coming across as mean. You seem pretty reasonable, maybe you’ll have good responses, that’s why I’m still here chatting :)
Not intentional—I’m just not sure whether you see problems with casual closure or with epistemic usefulness.
I wouldn’t say “any progress”—correct propositions about X and Y are correct even if they may seem trivial. And it sure would be a progress for someone who was forced to believe in dualism or worse as an alternative. And, to be clear, consciousness having a content is not a problem for casual closure—if some specific universe didn’t exist and some other universe existed instead, X and Y would be different. But yes, it’s a solution that is not especially useful except for a narrow purpose of solving the Hard Problem.
Right. Well, if you stretch the definition of an explanation and properties, there are some vague intuition-like mental processes that I believe become streamlined when you accept cosmopsychism. Like, at the stage of “we have no idea how to solve the Hard Problem but I’m sure physicalism will win somehow” people still manage to hope for some kind of moral realism about consciousness, like there is objective fact that someone is in pain. But yeah, you may derive all this stuff from other sources too.
But, why do you think it’s insane? There are no philosophical problems with relation of some mental processes to memory. Science will explain it in the future just fine. “Why there’s conscious experience” always was the only mysterious problem about consciousness. And I’m not even saying that the Hard Problem and it’s solution is interesting, while practical theory of awareness is boring and useless. It’s just as the matter of fact under some reasonable definitions cosmopsychism solves the Hard Problem—that’s the extent of what I’m arguing.
The point is that cosmopsychism together with usual science provides the explanation you want. And no one doubts that science will do it’s part.
It’s not epiphenomenalism because the law invokes consciousness. On the interactionalist account, consciousness causes things rather than just the physical stuff causing things. If you just got rid of consciousness, you’d get a physically different world.
I don’t think that induction on the basis of “science has explained a lot of things therefore it will explain consciousness” is convincing. For one, up until this point, science has only explained physical behavior, not subjective experience. This was the whole point (see Goff’s book Galileo’s error). For another, this seems to prove too much—it would seem to suggest that we could discover the corect modal beliefs in a test tube.
First of all, I was making the claim “science will eventually be able to explain the observable external behavior wherein David Chalmers moves his fingers around the keyboard to type up books about consciousness”. I didn’t say anything about “explaining consciousness”, just explaining a particular observable human behavior.
Second of all, I don’t believe that above claim because of induction, i.e. “science can probably eventually explain the observable external behavior of Chalmers writing books about consciousness because hey, scientists are smart, I’m sure they’ll figure it out”. I agree that that’s a pretty weak argument. Rather I believe that claim because I think I already know every step of that explanation, at least in broad outline. (Note that I’m stating this opinion without justifying it.)
OK, but then the thing you’re talking about is not related to p-zombies, right?
I thought the context was: Eliezer presented an argument against zombies, and then you / Chalmers say it’s actually not an argument against zombies but rather an argument against epiphenomenalism, and then you brought up the Casper thing to illustrate how you can have zombies without epiphenomenalism. And I thought that’s what we were talking about. But now you’re saying that, in the Casper thing, getting rid of consciousness changes the world, so I guess it’s not a zombie world?
Maybe I’m confused. Question: if you got rid of consciousness, in this scenario, does zombie-Chalmers still write books about consciousness, or not? (If not, that’s not zombie-Chalmers, right? Or if so, then isn’t it pretty weird that getting rid of consciousness makes a physically different world but not in that way? Of all things, I would think that would be the most obvious way that the world would be physically different!!)
If you only got rid of consciousness behavior would change.
You might be able to explain Chalmers’ behavior, but that doesn’t capture the subjective experience.
Oh, I see, the word “only” here or “just” in your previous comment were throwing me off. I was talking about the following thing that you wrote:
[single quotes added to fix ambiguous parsing.]
Let’s label these two worlds:
World A (“the world where consciousness causes the things”), and
World B (the world where “the things would be caused the same physical way as they are with consciousness, but there would be no consciousness”).
Your perspective seems to be: “World A is the truth, and World B is a funny thought experiment. This proposal is type-D dualist.”
I am proposing an alternative perspective: “World B is the true causally-closed physical laws of the universe (and by the way, the laws of physics maybe look different from how we normally expect laws of physics to look, but oh well), and World A is an physically equivalent universe but where consciousness exists as an epiphenomenon. This proposal is type-E epiphenomenalist.”
Is there an error in that alternative perspective?
Let’s say I write the sentence: “my wristwatch is black”. And let’s say that sentence is true. And let’s further say it wasn’t just a lucky guess. Under those assumptions, then somewhere in the chain of causation that led to my writing that sentence, you will find an actual watch, and it’s actually black, and photons bounced off of that watch and went into my eye (or someone else’s eye or a camera etc.), thus giving me that information. Agree?
By the same token: Let’s say that Chalmers writes the sentence “I have phenomenal consciousness, and it has thus-and-such properties”. And let’s say that sentence is true. And let’s further say it wasn’t just a lucky guess. Under those assumptions, then somewhere in the chain of causation that led Chalmers to write that sentence, you will find phenomenal consciousness, whatever it is (if anything), with an appropriate place in the story to allow Chalmers to successfully introspect upon it—to allow Chalmers to somehow “query” phenomenal consciousness with his brain and wind up with veridical knowledge about it, analogous to how photons bounce off the watch and carry veridical information about its optical properties into the retina and eventually into long-term memory.
I claim that, if the project I proposed here is successful (i.e. the project to get from QFT+GR to the external behavior of Chalmers writing books), and we combine that with the argument of the previous paragraph (which I understand to be Eliezer’s argument), then we get a rock-solid argument that rules out all zombies, whether type-D, type-E, or type-F. Do you see what I mean?
I felt like I was following the entire comment, until you asserted that it rules out zombies.