> I guess the question boils down to how you respond to challenges about > philosophical zombies. These discussions normally begin with someone > asserting "You can imagine things that behave exactly like you and I in all > ways, but not conscious." The presenter then goes on to lay out a series of > riddles these creatures lead to. However, I am not sure I buy the premise.
Thank you for saying this, Eric. I was reluctant to pick up this thread, because I haven't read Chalmers at length and sympathetically. What I normally get is a version of the statements above, followed with some kind of assertion that "it is therefore logically possible that... exist" etc. I find such statements completely incomprehensible, and I am unable to understand why anyone else thinks they have content (not that my finding something incomprehensible is a significant observation). But, since people on this list have proved generous in having their time wasted, let me try to explain why I am unable to distinguish any of this from full nonsense. Let me hereby declare to the list that "I am able to imagine the existence of perpetual motion machines" (First or second kind, your choice.) What is the status of that sentence? It has the virtue that the terms in it actually have definitions, which means I can address the question what its status is, something I cannot do for the foregoing statements about consciousness. It takes a bit of unpacking, which I won't waste everyone's time doing, but in the end, the notation of "perpetual motion machine" can be resolved to mean a sequence of successive states of matter that the laws of physics show do not exist as successive slices within any material history. Said another way, a thing that is identified by not existing. What then does it mean that I am able to make a declarative statement about imagining something for which the word, correctly resolved, has no referent? I would say it means that the above sentence satisfies the basic filters of English syntax. Good for it. Since when were the rules of syntax believed to carry more than a first-line filter against meaninglessness? Sentences in which the tokens -- marked as parts of speech by the morphology we give them -- are consistent with the rules of syntax, and in which the words themselves have not been given any reliable definition, do not seem to me to carry any "logical" status at all. Hence I do not see under what rule of "logic" it is "logically possible" that what I can imagine "could exist", apart from the transformation rules of syntax. I don't mean, here, to refuse discussions that are carried out in approximate terms; often they are the best we can do. My point is only that, when one is as far into the fog as this topic is, and there is a choice between assuming something magical, versus simply assuming that you don't know what you are talking about and the rules of syntax don't provide much help or protection, the latter seems to me more plausible. The discussion of perpetual motion machines just provides an example where the anal-retentive can dot the i's and cross the t's to verify that it is indeed possible to make statements in which one does not know what one is talking about. Eric ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
