An Intellectual's Christian Narrative: A Non-Magical Alternative (Buddhist, hell, atheist)

[Gaylenwoof]

Originally Posted by Arach Angle

How do you feel about people that deny everything because they are afraid of religion?

I'm agnostic about God, but I'm even more skeptical about peoples' ability to read the minds of other people. I assume Trans is an example of what you mean? I don't know that he denies anything just because he is "afraid of religion."

How do I feel about Trans, and other like him?
Answer: Curious.

I understand his skepticism about God, and I share that skepticism. I suspect that our reasons for feeling this skepticism are mostly similar. My curiosity about Trans is mostly about his views on qualitative awareness. We seem to have directly opposite instincts about this. I don't see this as him being an idiot, or being blind to something out of sheer stubbornness or fear. On the contrary; I suspect that his point of view could be of great value to me, if I could just understand his perspective. I think he is wrong about the nature of subjectivity and the prospects for reductive materialism and it seems to me that he doesn't really understand one of the core ideas that I keep trying to explain, but I also know for a fact that I don't have all the answer either because, if I did, I would be rich and famous for proposing a viable theory of consciousness.

I have this feeling that somewhere in his perspective - somewhere in his resistance to my perspective - is an important piece of the puzzle that I am trying to assemble. I feel, of course, that I am right about the non-reducibility of qualia, but I think he might a little bit right a well. Maybe there is some sense in which a certain type of reduction might be possible, if we could just get a handle on it. It seems almost impossible for us both to be right, but puzzles that seem impossible upfront are generally the most fun to solve.

And, BTW, if Trans were a lone voice in the wilderness of cyberspace, I might not be quite so curious - I could, perhaps, just write him off as a quirky guy with a weird brain disorder. But he is not alone. He is out there camping with some reputable philosophers who have essentially the same general perspective. Even if my view is, in some important sense, ultimately correct, it is not complete. To complete the puzzle I need to comprehend those people in that other camp. So, yeah, Trans is a pain in the patootie, but he is also a gift. I suspect that, in general, this is true of people with whom we philosophically disagree.

[TRANSPONDER]

Thank you! That was a fascinating look in the mirror. And I am painfully aware of how much more you know about perception than I do and that my feeling that reduction to natural/physicalist causes of it cannot be ruled out and even seem more probable could be dead wrong. But -yes - i have seen a few dissenting voices from Dualism, even in the philosophical savants, though they were doing it through the processes of philosophy rather than the way i do - with one eye on physics and biochemistry.

I don't mind being a pain in your patootie, because I find that the pains in mine - Eusebius, Pneuma, Nateswift, Mike555 and old Khalif make me think about things that otherwise i might not, and in fact i have learned more from them than I have by some who don't in fact pose much of a challenge.

P.s
I can say of course that this business of perception, qualia and consciousness is academic because, even if dualism and "Something more" and a independent consciousness (that you seemed to have toyed with) and even Mystic's cosmic mind that is putting us through a spiritual education course, turned out to be right, It wouldn't make much difference to me as regards man -made religions of all kinds, which is really what I am Activist -atheist about.

[TRANSPONDER]

Let me try to get over to you the way I'm thinking, because if you can Grasp it then if anyone can see what's wrong with it, you can.

Let's start with "Stuff". Basic cosmic matter. The potential that was always there because it is as near nothing as makes no difference. But it has the potential to act in patterns of power so to speak. The potential is the ability of bits of nothing to take up a space -position with other bits. This is proto matter. And Energy, as I gather that energy and matter are the same thing, but energy is what the matter is doing.

So we get patches, areas or balls of this 'nothing' acting as though something was there, and that is the same as something really being there. As I say matter is an illusion, but a reliable one. These balls of matter 'particles' react with each other and sometimes they mutually destruct, sometimes combine and sometimes relate one to another, and this is the start of chemical evolution. What works becomes physical laws. There are of course many of them.

Now we get to where it is not just pure hypothesis by me. there is the field - effectively infinite as there is no 'end' to Nothing. And this field (perhaps the Hiiggs boson field, or that may have evolved like algae out of a pond of 'stuff') but a cosmos of matter which as part of the physical laws, tends to coalesce (one part of chemical evolution -theory is that thermo 2 drives particle to form more complex units). Probably a rotation effect was part of this, as we see it all the time(from froth on stirred coffee to galaxies) . This means that (as is postulated) a universe of this stuff came together into an event which was probably pretty small (made of nothing you see) but all the power of the universe reduced into something the size of your patootie before the power caused it to fly apart, or 'unfold' as some prefer to all it.

This is the conclusion of physicists postulating the Big bang and is not My idea, though the idea that there are dying universes becoming dead through entropy (as they will) and form part of the soup of stuff and new 'big bang' events happen all the time. Lots of universes.

Multiverses, other dimensions and quantum is beside the point and irrelevant. I'm talking about the one we know about and in the world of matter, whatever happens at quantum level, doesn't alter the fact that matter behaves as we expect and physical laws are reliable.

As I have said before now, reality is reliability, not solidity. So I don't need to go through the explanations of star and planet formation or even the hypotheses about the origins of life. We need only keep in mind that biochemicals (derived from exploding stars - which will give us idea of how old this bloody cosmos has to be) and water are very ubiquitous in the universe, and how the biochemicals bubbling away in hot water, heated by a recently molten planet, with chemical reactions going on like a busy day on the stockmarket floor, eventually and not at all statistically improbably, produced replication of a particular combination, and that was the start of Life. It reproduces.

So all this is chemical reaction. It isn't any awareness as we might see it. But the tendency that we saw from the start - what survives, becomes the norm; what doesn't work, vanishes - becomes evolutionary - survival.

This 'evolution' isn't Darwinism or Biological evolution, but that begins the first time one cell ingested another, and probalby ate a lot before some mutating in their DNA developed a genetic signal to move away. Or some other form of survival mechanism, Some say a tough membrane which amoebas didn't have.

This was the start of plants taking nutrients from the sea and others going after it, though of course in the pre -cambrian, some animals looked like plants and only swam in the larval stage. similar to plant -pollen dispersal. It wasn't so diversified as it later became.

But you see how animal instinct to predate and plant instinct to absorb nutrient is merely developed chemical reaction. It isn't awareness, by by God, it is damn near instinct, which just DNA - coded survival mechanisms.

I might pass quickly through the Cambrian 2 billion year proliferation of really just molluscs and lobsters. Hardly 'all the kinds' as Creationists are fond of saying.

And the first cartilage -backbone proto- fish. The start of the vertebrates, The Silurian -Devonian eras, when lobe -fin fishes walked, as some still do, and began to make their way on land, where plants and insects had already got a foothold. Tiktaalik is of course the 'missing link' fossil of fish to reptile, but not the only one.

So through the age of amphibians, reptiles and the first dinosaurs at the end of the Triassic, which extinction allowed dinosaurs to dominate, and already the first mammalian reptiles were around.

Now, you can see how the survival instinct has developed from mere chemical reaction to a physical law of perpetuation and to survival -instincts, because if they worked, the species survived and if not, or if they weren't good enough, they died out.

This is the law of survival and extinction that drives evolution and is conditioned by the environmental conditions (natural selection). But the point is that this has become animal consciousness. Not awareness perhaps, but consciousness. the instinctive reaction has become a complex mix of muscles tightening up, chemicals pumping into the blood, and the DNA trigger saying 'get away!' This is fear. And it is a chemical reaction.

I can quickly trip over the mental development of animals to where complex tribe communities and the need for pack co -operations leads to a sense of identity (back in my theory again). We have something like the combination of survival instinct, social relationships and a feeling of identity, plus problem - solving that really only takes some extra cranial folds to produce human thought.

What is hard to explain is the experience of sensation. But I am thinking that the thing is is a chemical effect, or rather an particle energy interreaction effect that comes together in a complex way of receiving information, processing information and sending out instinctive signals, and that the 'mental pixel screen' is in the brain. It doesn't need to be anywhere else, and when you take away the evolved survival instincts that cause pleasure, pain and fear, which as you will recall zombies and robots don't have because they have not evolved, but if you engrammed those instincts into a computer it would feel just as we do, except it isn't organic (the analogy is always going to be a bit of a cheat). and the perception (aside from biological sensation) is no more than a mental pixel -screen of particles presenting information.

Complex, but essentially just chemical (or particle -stuff) reaction, just as with the silver particles clogging together in chemical evolution. And bear in mind the perception of Red or Blue. I gather that human evolutionary biology says that most animals have a sense of colour but at one time humans didn't, but saw things in black and white(1). We evolved (re -evolved) the ability to see colour because it was a survival advantage to tell ripe fruit from unripe.

But when we just had mono pixel screens, we had qualia just as much as any other animal. I'd ask whether this gets my thinking over but you will probably protest that there is so much more to sensation -experience than that. But I am not so sure. Look again and ask: is that perception or an evolved instinctive reaction? Could not the actual perception be no more more than a mental presentation of codified information for the brain to send signals about - pleasure, fear or pain? And is anything "more" than that just a mystification coming from the admittedly awesome complexity and sophistication of it?

(1) you'll probably say that black white and grey are colours like red and blue, but the point is that, without a sense of colour (and even now some humans are colour -blind - to some colours) you can't tell one from the other other that as a gradation of hue. Red and Blue are meaningless without the retinal mechanism and mental ability to process that information.

[Gaylenwoof]

Originally Posted by TRANSPONDER

This is fear. And it is a chemical reaction.

From a behavioral point of view, yes, it is fear and it is a chemical reaction. But is fear nothing but behavior? And keep in mind I'm using the term 'behavior' in a very loose way - not just animal behavior but, say, the behavior of an electron when it comes close to a hydrogen atom, etc. Chemicals exhibit complex behavior, but why does any system adopt a qualitative subjective perspective - a feeling of what it is like to behave in this way rather than that way, etc.? Adding extra complexity does not, in itself, get you from quantitative to qualitative unless the potential for the emergence of qualitative is always already built in to the essence of reality. (BTW: If the potential for qualitative is not built in, then the emergence of qualitative feelings is purely miraculous and thus inexplicable, in principle. But, even if the emergence of qualitative experience is a pure miracle, the potential-for-miracles of this sort would have to be built in to the nature of reality. No matter how you slice it, the potential for the emergence of qualia is ultimately grounded on an inexplicable brute fact of reality. But, personally, I don't think that the emergence of qualia is purely miraculous. I think that qualitative experience emerges via complexity (thus electrons don't have any subjective qualitative feelings of attraction for protons, but complex systems like animals do feel attractions, pains, etc.). So, to have a true theory of everything, we need to be able to model the emergence of qualia from chemicals, but to do this we need to build the potential-for-qualia into our ontology - i.e., our list of the fundamental stuff of reality (where 'fundamental' = the brute-fact stuff of a theory upon which we derive explanations for everything else - aka, the logical "givens" that are not derivable from anything "more fundamental"). Thus I favor what I've been calling a dual aspect ontology.

What is hard to explain is the experience of sensation.

Yes, although I would add a note of caution: The word 'sensation' makes people think of just "sensory data" - e.g., visual, auditory, tactile, etc., but really any qualitative experience falls under the umbrella of the "Hard Problem" - e.g., what-it's-like to think about the number 2 is a qualitatively different experience than what it is like to think about the number 3. (BTW: In an earlier post I mentioned my recent efforts to understand the philosophical discipline/method called "phenomenology" and this is part of the reason for my thinking that this realm of philosophy is probably important to my quest.)

...which as you will recall zombies and robots don't have because they have not evolved...

I think that you have never really comprehended the meaning of the "philosophical zombie" argument. The zombie argument aims at a purely conceptual/logical point. From a perspective of natural possibility (i.e., what is possible, given the laws of nature as we currently understand them) we can all say with virtual certainty that philosophical zombies do not actually exist.

My zombie-twin would be atom-for-atom identical to me in every way. If there is an oxygen atom at some particular point in my brain right now and it is doing X, then in the brain of my zombie-twin there is a different oxygen atom in the equivalent part of my twin's brain performing the exact same physical function. Given the laws of nature, it is naturally impossible for my zombie-twin to not feel anything at this moment, but the point of the zombie argument is this: It is not LOGICALLY impossible for my zombie twin to feel nothing.

My zombie twin would be, at this very moment, typing these exact words, but he would have no qualitative experience at all - there would be no "inner" sense of being alive, etc. Physically he would, of course, behave exactly as I do (since he is atom-for-atom identical) but there would be, so to speak, "nobody really in there." The conclusion of the zombie argument is that, in terms of logical possibility, qualia are not just behavior. You need extra "laws" of reality to link chemical behaviors (3rd-person accessible) with qualitative (subjective) feelings of this or that sort. These naturalistic "links" between physical behavior and subjective feelings are what a lot of cognitive scientists are trying to track down. (You can google "neural correlates of consciousness" to find a bunch of stuff about that.) But whatever the links turn out to be, we know that they are either fundamental (contingent brute facts such as "patterns of type A are experienced as feeling B when a subject is composed of pattern A") or they are derivable from fundamentally qualitative deeper laws. Personally, I'm putting my money on the "qualitative deeper" concept of a "qualitative chaos."

And is anything "more" than that just a mystification coming from the admittedly awesome complexity and sophistication of it?

I think you keep confusing yourself with the concept of "more." Yes, in a way there is "something more" but it is a conceptual "something more" NOT a substantive "something more." Is there "something" more to a triangle than just 3 sides? In a substantive sense, the answer is no. But conceptually, yes: There are 3 angles, and one of these angles might or might not be a right angle, and there are 3 vertices, etc. Do the angles, etc. "add" anything to the triangle? No. Given a proper conception of "triangle" there are a host of aspects that are logically implied. All of these aspects of the triangle "come along for free" - so to speak - when properly comprehending the nature of a triangle.

I'm arguing that when we properly comprehend the concept of 'physical' we will see that, logically, the possibilities for qualitative experience are just aspects of what it means to be physical - just as "having 3 vertices" is just an aspect of being a triangle. They key concept is the notion of being "properly comprehended." My claim is that we are not properly comprehending the nature of what it means to be "physical." It is as if we think we have a concept of "triangle" but are deeply confused by people who claim that triangles have a surface area. In our confusion we might say:

"Huh? Triangles can't be composed of "square inches" - whatever those are supposed to be. What is this extra stuff you want to add to triangles? I can't measure it with my ruler, so it can't be real. Lines and angles should be enough. We don't need something more - like surface area; that just adds confusion."

Obviously this is a trite example, but my point is that, from the point of view of a sufficiently advanced intelligence who really has a proper conception of what it means to be "physical", our confusion over the "mind/body problem" might look just as silly as the confusion of someone trying to figure out how to use a ruler to measure the surface area of a triangle. An extra layer of calculation is needed to get from 1D to 2D, but until the calculation is comprehended, the concept of a triangle's surface area could seem like a mysterious "something more" that someone wants to add to the concept to triangle for no good reason.

Bottom line: We need to comprehend "physical" in some way such that the potential for "qualitative experience" is logically always already "built in" to the concept - just as the concept of surface area is always already logically built in to the concept of a triangle. I'm predicting that this will be a key component of a future paradigm shift in physics. I'd love to be able to contribute to that paradigm shift. Realistically, I will probably just die trying but, in any case, I am obsessed with trying. These days I'm hopeful that adding a proper blend of Husserlian phenomenology to my current concoction will do the trick (or, at least, be a step in the right direction).

[TRANSPONDER]

Ok Three points, rather in reverse.

The 'what it is like to experience'?

Zombies cannot feel

Something more.

So I'll take them the other way around because more in My order and in order of simplicity.

Something more as you describe it, is irrelevant. You get a cube in nature (salt, for example) Something More is inherent in the geometry, but that is in the human mind, and is nothing to do with the shape of a triangle or square which is as natural as an irregular shape and of no more than natural significance.

But I gathered that Your 'more' was (and I may have got you wrong, or you may have changed your view) an assertion that physicality could not explain qualia (what it is like to perceive) and never could. This was to assert (if it wasn't merely a form or creationist claim) that a new Something (physics, particle or just knowledge of physics) was needed before qualia could be explained. As I suggested I am not sure that new physics (let alone particles) are needed, but in terms of the ones we are familiar with, it might do it and what is needed is a different way of looking at it.

As I say I am a bit suspicious of the zombie analogy, though I get the idea is to explain what qualia is, but if the analogy is not really a watertight one, is should not be used to produce evidence of anything (or that's rather a dictum of mine) but rather used to indicate in a simpler form what is known. So far, the zombie seems to make false assumptions based on false analogy, as I already said, it hasn't evolved or it has had it's instincts taken away. It still has nerves I suppose and feels pain. How is that not qualia? Ah we'll take the nervous system away and run the mind experiment again. As I recall it went on to manipulate the zombie to be whatever it needed to be to make your argument (or rather Chalmer's), work.

Finally the point about what is it like to perceive. take away the fear instincts and your point that an electron avoids in some way another particle in order to survive is fear, but of course not, but is the reaction that in a more complex form will become 'fear' -because it is more complex. Just as life and thought are inherent in particles, but because they are so simple, we think that life and consciousness is not just a far more complex mechanism that particle reaction, but there is some mysterious quality about it that mere chemicals don't have. You will probably recall the disagreement (and possible misunderstanding because we meant different things) I had with Mystic about "Emergence" of a quality. Well, this is it, and it requires nothing new or mysterious.

I have tried to show that there is no need for it. Replication is a chemical process not some Mysterious force. Consciousness is a complex development of animal reactions and instinct and not something that has to be Given by a magical being.

Qualia is more tricky because the 'what it is like' when you have taken away all the pleasure and fear instincts is just the mechanics of the perception. I'm suggesting that a complex aggregate of the physics and matter we are familiar with can in a very complex and sophisticated form give rise to a feeling of personal perception, as a development of instincts and reactions can give rise to a feeling of individual identity.

As an analogy I used wetness. The effect is caused by the interaction of molecules and it's effect which when you think about it is 'wetness'. It wasn't there before but in combination the effect emerges, and it's all about how the physical interreacts, drops of water on skin, and how it feels and what we think about it. That all confuses and even mystifies what is simply a chemical effect.

Now this may be what Mystic calls 'concrete thinking'. But I have got to say that if you have a situation where a zombie may logically have no feelings (for the purpose of the argument) but logically cannot be without his arms or legs because those are the rules of philosophy I can only, as I did before, say that I glad to stick to what seems to have some practical coherence and stick to concrete thinking.

Ok 2 is dependent on 1. a dimension is dependent of the previous dimension. Isn't that the whole basis of my argument? I don't see the problem if no claim is being made that what perception is like cannot be based in what is already there but needs something unknown with an earlier basis we don't know about, which Mystic is (you can bet) ready and waiting to label "God".

I don't see the practical or logical need for it, and without wishing to be impolite and of course risking Mystic's scorn, it feels like being forced into some situation because of a secret society with rules and secret handshakes and doctrines that have nothing that I can see to do with the world as it works but which I am expected to accept, even though it makes no kind of sense.

[Gaylenwoof]

Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof

I think he is wrong about the nature of subjectivity and the prospects for reductive materialism ...

It's been a while since I've tried to nail down the problem of subjectivity for materialists. Hopefully my previous post addressed some key points. I’d also like to add a bit of historical context concerning how we got to the current controversy over qualia. Also, I'd like to clarify the relationship between "God" and subjectivity.

Science was basically born when we got the idea of trying to factor out the whims of subjective perception. One person says "It's hot in here," and the other says "No, it's actually a bit cool." An objective definition of temperature along with an instrument to measure this objectively-defined temperature gives us access to a quantity that all observers can agree upon. We can all look at the thermometer and agree that it is approximately 70F. The idea of objective/measureable values is built into the fabric of science, and this allowed for great progress in understanding the natural world.

Brains are part of the natural world, so science can be of great help in understanding brains. But notice that the fantastic progress of science was accomplished by, in effect, "weeding out" or ignoring subjective feelings for the purposes of theory-building and testing. We basically "set aside" all those messy subjective aspects of experience so that we could focus, for the sake of technological progress, on the quantifiable material aspects of reality. But just because we set some stuff of type X aside so that we can focus on some other tangible phenomena for the sake of a certain type of intellectual progress, it does not follow that the stuff of type X disappears from reality. The initial plan was to set X aside, not to claim that X does not exist, nor to claim that X has no role whatsoever to play in the natural world. If X supposedly plays no role in the natural world, then why did we have to bother "setting it aside" in the first place? For the most part, everyone understood this, but in the middle of the last century, some philosophers ("logical positivists"/"behaviorists") got the idea that if the existence of something could not be proven by objective testing/measurement, then it wasn't real. It must just be some sort of "illusion" or cognitive error due to a conceptual "category mistake," etc. But I say, no, the confusion is in the minds of those who have seemingly forgotten that science found a "work-around" option for X that was never really intended to be an ontological claim that X doesn't exist, or that X has no role to play in the natural world.

To say that my subjective experience of cold, as such, cannot be objectively measured does not imply that this experience, as such, is not relevant. We can measure neural activity and say that this activity is correlated with my feeling of being cold, but my subjective experience of being cold is not "just" or "nothing other than" than this neural activity. Science focuses on the neural activity precisely because it can't "get at" the subjective sensations themselves by objective means. So the philosophical questions stands: What are these subjective aspects of experience that we directly experience? My answer: They are the immediate, actual "essence" of Reality.

In my previous post I mentioned that we need to re-think the concept of “physical.” The problem with the current conception boils down to this: The modern concept of “physical” was formulated, in a manner of speaking, after we “set aside” the subjective elements in order to get the “underlying reality”. We’ve come to think that what is “really real” is not the individual peculiarities of subjective experiences, but the abstract patterns – the laws and principles guiding the behaviors of most physical systems.

People seem to forget that the fundamental “particles” are not “things” in the usual sense – they are more like abstract place-holders in a theory that help us to do calculations. Everything we know about an electron is in the form of descriptions of its behavior under various conditions. NO scientist who has even the slightest bit of philosophical savvy claims that we have ever measured the intrinsic essence of an electron. We have no idea if there even is any such thing as an “intrinsic essence” of an electron. When it come to the fundamental elements of physics, we only know behavior – just behavior – that’s all. Period.

Niels Bohr was well aware of this when he said: “In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, as far as possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience.”

And Heisenberg was getting at the same idea when he said: “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

Bohr and Heisenberg hit the nail straight on the head. But now consider this: Does this mean that no human being can ever experience nature in a direct way – in a way that could reveal at least some aspects of nature’s intrinsic essence? Is there absolutely no sense in which – or degree to which – we can ever know “the real essence” of nature itself. My claim is that direct knowledge of nature’s true essence is not only possible, but it is logically unavoidable. Every moment of conscious experience is, in fact, without exception, a moment in which Nature’s rock-bottom true deep essence is revealed to Herself via the qualitative nature of every animal’s sentient experience.

Back to Bohr again: “A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.” He is almost on target, but I would tweak the statement slightly: “A conscious being is just Reality’s way of looking at itself.”

I think that when Reality looks at itself, it sees its own intrinsic essence – its own deep Being. There are plenty of illusions too – but illusions are high-level conceptions based on interpretations and judgments. Below all that high-level stuff there is the raw “given” stuff that just is what it is – the stuff out of which the high-level illusions are built. Our current concept of “physical” was built on what was set aside in order to do science, and what we set aside for the sake of objectivity were the quirky individual intrinsic essences of experiences. This was essential for finding the higher-level patterns (the laws and principles of science), but philosophically we shoot ourselves in the foot if we come to think that these higher-level patterns are the only “really real” things. Yes, the objective nature of these patterns attests to the fact that they are, in some sense, really real, but we are foolish to lose sight of the fact that we would not even know of these patterns if we did not, ourselves, experience the quirky individual subjective qualitative essences out of which the high-level patterns emerge. As Mary, the colorblind neuroscientist discovers, there simply cannot be any adequate conception of “red” without red.

If “God” is anything, It is just the Conscious (or Proto-Conscious) aspect of Nature – the aspect of Nature that is, in the form of Bohr’s physicist, looking at Itself.

[TRANSPONDER]

I'm fine with all that. What is reality looking at itself? just one particle reacting to another, at base, and in a complex form our feelings of awareness and reaction in a mix or emotional response to the effect of input on the mind and transferred to our bod that reacts to instinctive signals. And of course we cannot have reactions, logical or emotional to red if there was no red, as we could not have the same reactions to things we could imagine that (for all we know) don't exist, like unicorns.

[Gaylenwoof]

Originally Posted by TRANSPONDER

As I say I am a bit suspicious of the zombie analogy... [...]It still has nerves I suppose and feels pain. How is that not qualia?

You posted this while I was writing my post. I have no time to read or address this in detail, but one glaring problem jumps out at me: If the zombie feels pain, then it is not a zombie. If it feels pain then, yes, it is experiencing qualia. Pain is qualia. But, by definition, a zombie feels no qualia. It has atom-for-atom identical nerves cells firing neurotransmitters across synapse, etc., but no pain is experienced.

Ah we'll take the nervous system away and run the mind experiment again.

No we don't. That's the whole point of the zombie being atom-for-atom identical. We don't take anything away from anything that can be objectively measured. The only difference is that my zombie twin doesn't feel anything, whereas I do. The zombie behaves just exactly like I do ("Ouch #%$#%$%, that hurt!") but the zombie does not actually feel anything.

If I could somehow "tap into the Zombie's consciousness" to see whether or not he sees red in the same way that I see red, I would find...nothing. Absolutely nothing. It would be like tapping into the "conscious experience" of my office chair. I find nothing because my office chair has no conscious experience. Same with my zombie twin, despite the fact that the zombie is atom-for-atom identical to me and is insisting that he does, in fact, have conscious experiences. The zombie perfectly mimics my behavior and is physically identical to me in every measurable way - even down to the atomic details - but he actually feels nothing at all.

[TRANSPONDER]

Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof

You posted this while I was writing my post. I have no time to read or address this in detail, but one glaring problem jumps out at me: If the zombie feels pain, then it is not a zombie. If it feels pain then, yes, it is experiencing qualia. Pain is qualia. But, by definition, a zombie feels no qualia. It has atom-for-atom identical nerves cells firing neurotransmitters across synapse, etc., but no pain is experienced.

No we don't. That's the whole point of the zombie being atom-for-atom identical. We don't take anything away from anything that can be objectively measured. The only difference is that my zombie twin doesn't feel anything, whereas I do. The zombie behaves just exactly like I do ("Ouch #%$#%$%, that hurt!") but the zombie does not actually feel anything.

That's where the mind experiment doesn't work for me. If it is atom for atom identical it can't not feel pain or for all i can see cannot be a zombie. A zombie must be lacking a whole lot of things like a nervous system or have some kind of cut off so that the brain doesn't get input from sensory organs.

The zombie has to be different in some physical way to be a zombie and thus the qualia (so far as I can see) are there but the body isn't reacting to it because of some physical disability

To have an exact replica that is still a zombie seems a practical impossibility that is postulated just to make the argument work, even if philosophy says it is not logically impossible.

To me it is practically impossible and logic should accept that it is impossible.

I can hear this "Less us assume that there is an exact atom for atom replica of me but has no feelings." I say @No, let's not, because it sounds like an impossible thing done to prove a point. If you have to do that, what is the value of the point being made? So far as I can see to make qualia "something more" that is needed to allow feelings even with all the faculties present that would normally do that. It seems to be adding something that isn't really necessary.

[Gaylenwoof]

Originally Posted by TRANSPONDER

To have an exact replica that is still a zombie seems a practical impossibility...

Yes. Exactly. Given the laws of nature, my zombie twin is what I called naturally impossible. Just like it is naturally impossible for the moon to be made of cheese (given what we know about cosmology and the requirements of cheese-making).

Or, if you prefer: It is naturally impossible for 3 electrons to be in the lowest orbit of an atom (thanks to Pauli's Exclusion Principle, etc.). But we didn't know that 3 electrons couldn't be in the shell until we did the math. Why? Because it is logically possible for the shell to have 3 electrons. Only empirical data and theories built on empirical data reveal that, despite the logical possibility, 3 electrons in the first shell is not a natural possibility.

...even if philosophy says it is not logically impossible.

NO! Philosophy says it is not a natural possibility, but it is a logical possibility.

You might want to google "logical impossibility" but, basically, something is logically impossible only if it is self-contradictory - e.g., a square circle or a married bachelor, etc., given precise definitions of the terms involved.