Introduction: Taking Consciousness Seriously. 1. Two Concepts of Mind I. FOUNDATIONS

Size: px
Start display at page:

Download "Introduction: Taking Consciousness Seriously. 1. Two Concepts of Mind I. FOUNDATIONS"

Transcription

1 Notes on David Chalmers The Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996) by Andrew Bailey, Philosophy Department, University of Guelph Introduction: Taking Consciousness Seriously... 2 I. Foundations Two Concepts of Mind Supervenience and Explanation... 3 a) Supervenience... 3 b) Reductive Explanation... 4 c) Logical Possibility and Necessity: Chalmers Two-Dimensionalism... 5 d) The Logical Supervenience of Almost Everything on the Physical... 7 II. The Irreducibility of Consciousness Can Consciousness be Reductively Explained?... 9 Argument 1: The logical possibility of zombies... 9 Argument 2: The inverted spectrum... 9 Argument 3: From epistemic asymmetry... 9 Argument 4: The knowledge argument... 9 Argument 5: From the absence of analysis Naturalistic Dualism...11 a) An Argument Against Physicalism...11 b) Objections to the Argument...11 c) Other Arguments for Dualism...14 d) Is This Epiphenomenalism?...16 e) The Logical Geography of the Issues...18 IV. Applications Strong Artificial Intelligence...20

2 2 Introduction: Taking Consciousness Seriously Three constraints: i) Take consciousness seriously (i.e. don t redefine the hard problem away). ii) Take science seriously (i.e. keep theories compatible with contemporary science). iii) Take consciousness to be a natural phenomenon, falling under the sway of natural laws (xiii) (i.e. assume there is some correct scientific theory of consciousness to be found). [T]he problem of consciousness may be a scientific problem that requires philosophical methods of understanding before we can get off the ground. Everything I say here is compatible with the results of contemporary science; our picture of the natural world is broadened, not overturned (xiv). I. FOUNDATIONS 1. Two Concepts of Mind Consciousness is the subjective quality of experience qualitative feels, or qualia. E.g. sensory experiences, pain and other bodily sensations, mental imagery, conscious thought, emotions, the sense of self. Ultimately one would like a theory of consciousness to do at least the following: it should give the conditions under which physical processes give rise to consciousness, and for those processes that give rise to consciousness, it should specify just what sort of experience is associated. And we would like the theory to explain how it arises, so that the emergence of consciousness seems intelligible rather than magical. In the end, we would like the theory to enable us to see consciousness as an integral part of the natural world (5). Chalmers begins by making a fundamental conceptual distinction between the phenomenal and the psychological concepts of mind : a) [T]he phenomenal concept of mind is the concept of mind as conscious experience, and of a mental state as a consciously experienced mental state (11). b) [T]he psychological concept of mind is the concept of mind as the causal or explanatory basis for behavior. A state is mental in this sense if it plays the right sort of causal role in the production of behavior, or at least plays an appropriate role in the explanation of behavior (11). Chalmers claims that both these notions of mind are correct (within its own domain), that they are complementary, and that they are (close to) exhaustive: neither is alone the whole story about mentality, but together they form a complete picture. (There are two sources of evidence which are responsible for generating the problems of consciousness, Chalmers says: third-person observations, which ultimately come down to behavior (21), and first-person observations which come down to experience (21). Once the psychological and phenomenal (and relational) facts about a person are fixed, then all the mental facts are also fixed there seems to be nothing mental that can be independently varied (21).) These two different conceptual frameworks should not be conflated: for example, Descartes (arguably) thought that all mental concepts are phenomenal, while modern functionalists think that all mental concepts are psychological for Chalmers, both views are equally wrong. We might find out that one of these conceptual frameworks can be reduced to, or assimilated into, the other but we cannot stipulate this at the start of the investigation. Most everyday mental concepts e.g. pain, perception, emotion, belief, learning have both phenomenal and psychological components. This (according to Chalmers) is because phenomenal and psychological properties tend to co-occur, and so for everyday purposes it is not important to carefully distinguish between them. However, for scientific purposes we need to make the distinction (which, Chalmers argues, is a perfectly coherent conceptual distinction despite the fact that we usually pick out phenomenal properties by their associated psychological property). In fact, the notion of consciousness itself has both phenomenal and psychological senses: Chalmers urges us to take care to focus on the phenomenal sense rather than the various psychological senses to explain consciousness by merely explaining psychological consciousness (which

3 3 Chalmers calls awareness) is a sleight of hand which fails to address the real problem. The division of mental properties into phenomenal and psychological properties has the effect of dividing the mind-body problem into two: an easy part and a hard part (24). According to Chalmers, the psychological aspects of the mind pose no deep philosophical questions (just technical puzzles ); the phenomenal aspects of the mind remain baffling. We have a good idea of how the physical gives rise to the psychological; [w]hat remains ill understood is the link between the psychological mind and the phenomenal mind (25). It is this psychological-phenomenal link that Chalmers sets out to explore as much a mind-mind problem as a mind-body problem. 2. Supervenience and Explanation a) Supervenience Chalmers arguments in The Conscious Mind are built, to a large degree, around the crucial notion of supervenience. Supervenience is a metaphysical notion which can be used to formulate relations of dependence between two different domains: in particular, it can be used to develop a theory of the precise way in which the phenomenal depends on the physical/psychological. B-properties supervene on A-properties if no two possible situations are identical with respect to their A- properties while differing in their B-properties. The key phrase to be cashed out here is possible situations : Local supervenience takes the situations to be individuals that is, it says that any two possible individuals that instantiate the same A-properties instantiate the same B-properties (33 34). Global supervenience takes situations to be entire universes (or worlds ) that is, it says that there are no two possible worlds identical with respect to their A-properties but differing with respect to their B-properties (34). Logical supervenience takes the possibility in question to be conceptual/logical possibility that is, it says that no two logically possible situations are identical with respect to their A-properties but distinct with respect to their B-properties (35). Something is logically possible, roughly, iff it is conceivable (says Chalmers). Natural supervenience takes the possibility in question to be nomic/natural possibility that is, it says that any two naturally possible situations with the same A-properties have the same B-properties (36). Something is naturally possible, roughly, iff it is consistent with the laws of nature that hold in the actual world. Local supervenience entails global supervenience, but not vice versa. Logical supervenience entails natural supervenience, but not vice versa. If B-properties supervene logically on A-properties, then once God (hypothetically) creates a world with certain A-facts, the B-facts come along for free as an automatic consequence. If B-properties merely supervene naturally on A-properties, however, then after making sure of the A-facts, God has to do more work in order to make sure of the B-facts: he has to make sure there is a law relating the A-facts and the B- facts (38). (There is a technical problem with the notion of logical supervenience that needs to be addressed: we want to say that, for example, biological properties are globally logically supervenient on (micro-)physical properties even though it is logically possible that there could be a world just like ours but containing extra entities such as ectoplasmic wombats with biological properties. Chalmers solution is to index the supervenience relation to our world, and to restrict supervenience claims to positive facts, those that cannot be negated

4 4 simply by enlarging a world (40). E.g. for any logically possible world W that is A-indiscernible from our world, then the [positive] B-facts true of our world are true of W (40).) It is important to notice the ontological significance of the difference between logical and (merely) natural supervenience: logically supervenient B-facts may be different facts [than the A-facts] but they are not further facts (41); by contrast, merely naturally supervenient B-facts are new facts about the world, over and above the A-facts. Hence, materialism/physicalism is true if all the positive facts about the world are globally logically supervenient on the physical facts (41), but false otherwise i.e., physicalism is true if all the positive facts about our world are logically entailed by the physical facts. b) Reductive Explanation A second notion which is very important for Chalmers framework is the notion of reductive explanation: that is, of completely explaining a higher-level phenomenon (such as life or reproduction) entirely in terms of simpler entities or processes. Chalmers argues that such reductive explanations are possible only if we have available a functional analysis of the phenomenon to be explained they operate precisely by showing how the lower-level processes perform the relevant functional tasks. For example, heat can be reductively explained by treating it as a causal-role concept and showing how roughly the motion of molecules plays the relevant causal role. Thus there are two projects in reductive explanation of a phenomenon. There is first a project of explication, where we clarify just what it is that needs to be explained, by means of analysis. Second, there is a project of explanation, where we see how that analysis comes to be satisfied by low-level facts. The first project is conceptual, and the second is empirical (51). The paradigm of reductive explanation via functional analysis works beautifully in most areas of cognitive science, at least in principle (48). E.g., we can give a cognitive model that shows how a certain system might support the right kind of causal processes for, for example, learning. However, [w]hatever functional account of human cognition we give, there is a further question: Why is this kind of functioning accompanied by consciousness? (47). Once we give an adequate reductive explanation of a functional property, it is logically impossible that something could instantiate the lower-level property but not the functional one; however, for any reductive explanation of a functional property, it is (apparently) always logically possible to ask whether it is accompanied by consciousness. That is, there is an explanatory gap. Hence, something is reductively explainable in terms of lower-level properties if and only if it is logically supervenient on those properties. Reductive explanation entails logical supervenience, because otherwise there would always be further unanswered questions. Logical supervenience entails reductive explanation, because, although this supervenience relation may not be an illuminating explanation, it will at least be a mystery-removing explanation: [i]t does this by reducing the bruteness and arbitrariness of the phenomenon in question to the bruteness and arbitrariness of lower-level processes. [I]t at least eliminates any sense that there is something extra going on (49). (In fact, Chalmers argues, mystery-removing explanations are often also as it happens illuminating, because micro-physical explanations generally have the virtues of autonomy and simplicity.) (A few things to note about reductive explanation: a) Reductive explanation need not involve the reduction of a higher-level entity or theory with a lowerlevel: for example, it is compatible with multiple realizability, as long as each instance of the higherlevel phenomenon has a lower-level explanation. b) Reductive explanation is not the only kind of explanation for example, there are also historical, high-level or teleological explanations. c) Practical reductive explanations need not go all the way to the microphysical level and in principle there might be higher-level reductions (e.g. from the C-level to the B-level) without a further reduction to the bottom level even being available. d) Reductive explanations will often be global rather than local.)

5 5 c) Logical Possibility and Necessity: Chalmers Two-Dimensionalism Logical necessity is a third key notion for Chalmers, and it is essential that we accept his version of this notion for his subsequent arguments to work. The two basic (non-formal) ways to cash out logical necessity are: i) True in all possible worlds. ii) True in virtue of meaning conceptually true. The general notion of non-formal conceptual truth has been under attack since the second half of the last century, and Chalmers sets out to defend (his usage of) it. Attack 1: Most concepts do not have definitions giving necessary and sufficient conditions (52). But this is not a problem, Chalmers argues: one set of facts can entail another set without there being a clean definition of the latter notions in terms of the former. Given that A-facts can entail B-facts without a definition of B-facts in terms of A-facts, the notion of logical supervenience is unaffected by the absence of definitions (54). Attack 2: [P]urported conceptual truths are always subject to revision in the face of sufficient empirical evidence (55). But, Chalmers claims, this is not true of (global) supervenience relations: The facts specified in the antecedent of this conditional effectively include all relevant empirical factors. Empirical evidence could show us that the antecedent of the conditional is false, but not that the conditional is false (55). Attack 3: [T]here is a large class of necessarily true statements whose truth is not knowable a priori. At various points in this book, I use a priori methods to gain insight into necessity; this is the sort of thing that [this claim] is often taken to challenge (56). Chalmers attempts to meet this challenge by describing his theory of two-dimensionalism. A concept determines a function from possible worlds to referents: this is called the intension of this concept (and Chalmers equates this with the concept s meaning, though this is not essential to his account). When a particular possible world is specified (e.g. the actual world), this function determines an extension for the concept: that is, simply, it determines what things the concept is true of in that particular world. Chalmers argues that concepts in fact have, not just one, but two intensions: Primary intension: a function from worlds to extensions reflecting the way that actual-world reference is fixed (57). That is, for a given possible world, the primary intension of a concept picks out what the reference of the concept would be if the world turned out to be actual: if we had lived in a world where water was XYZ, water would refer to XYZ; but since in our world water is H 2 O, water refers to H 2 O. Chalmers puts this by saying that the primary intension of water picks out the watery stuff in the actual world, whatever that stuff turns out to be. Secondary intension: a function from counterfactual worlds to extensions, given that the actual world of the thinker is already fixed. That is, given that water has turned out to be H 2 O in the actual world, the secondary intension of water picks out H 2 O in every counterfactual world. [T]he secondary intension is determined by first evaluating the primary intension at the actual world, and then rigidifying this evaluation so that the same sort of thing is picked out in all possible worlds (59). A good way to understand this is to say that primary intensions pick out the reference of a concept in a world when it is considered as actual that is, when it is considered as a candidate for the actual world of the thinker whereas the secondary intension picks out the referent of a concept in a world when it is considered as counterfactual, given that the actual world of the thinker is already fixed (60). The key idea in all this for Chalmers is that: a) The primary intension of a concept, unlike the secondary intension, is independent of empirical [a posteriori] factors (57). We can characterise the primary intension of a concept a priori, by considering

6 6 our semantic intuitions under various counterfactual circumstances. b) It is the primary intension of a concept that is most central for my purposes: for a concept of a natural phenomenon, it is the primary intension that captures what needs explaining (57). (Chalmers also suggests that it is the primary content of my thoughts which governs their cognitive and rational relations (65).) This is the essence of his answer to Kripke. Chalmers semantic two-dimensionalism gives rise to a pair of notions of conceptual necessity: 1-necessity: truth evaluated in a possible world according to the primary intension of a concept. Chalmers also borrows the term deep necessity for this, since it is unaffected by a posteriori considerations. 2-necessity: truth evaluated in a possible world according to the secondary intension of a concept. Chalmers also borrows the term superficial necessity for this. A key idea for him here is that [t]hese two varieties of possibility and necessity apply always to statements. There is only one relevant kind of possibility of worlds; the two approaches differ on how the truth of a statement is evaluated in a world (63). For Chalmers, the notion of a logically possible world is something of a primitive (66) roughly, a world that (a) God might have created. Two-dimensionalism also entails that sentences have two associated propositions: a primary proposition determined by the truth conditions associated with the primary intension; and a secondary proposition determined by the truth conditions associated with the secondary intension. From this it follows that [a] statement is necessarily true in the first (a priori) sense if the associated primary proposition holds in all centered possible worlds (that is, if the statement would turn out to express a truth in any context of utterance). A statement is necessarily true in the a posteriori sense if the associated secondary proposition holds in all possible worlds (that is, if the statement as uttered in the actual world is true in all counterfactual worlds) (64). What is the relation between conceivability and possibility? In effect, there are two varieties of conceivability, which we might call 1-conceivability and 2-conceivability, depending on whether we evaluate a statement in a conceivable world according to the primary or the secondary intentions of the terms involved (67). For Chalmers, 1-conceivability implies 1-possibility and 2-conceivability implies 2-possibility (67). (1- conceivability, of course, does not entail 2-possibility.) Chalmers is careful to specify that a statement is conceivable (or conceivably true) if it is true in some conceivable world (67) that is, it requires two things, the conceivability of a relevant world and the truth of the statement in that world. One must take care to properly describe the world that one is conceiving, or things may seem conceivable which aren t. It follows from all this that the oft-cited distinction between logical and metaphysical possibility stemming from the Kripkean cases on which it is held to be logically possible but not metaphysically possible that water is XYZ is not a distinction at the level of worlds, but at most a distinction at the level of statements. A statement is logically possible in this sense if it is true in some world when evaluated according to primary intensions; a statement is metaphysically possible if it is true in some world when evaluated according to secondary intensions. The relevant space of worlds is the same in both cases. Most importantly, none of the cases we have seen give reason to believe that any conceivable worlds are impossible. So there seems no reason to deny that conceivability of a world implies possibility (67 68). Hence conceivability implies logical possibility, according to Chalmers. Does logical possibility imply conceivability? Chalmers says yes, as long as we understand conceivability as conceivability-in-principle perhaps conceivability by a superbeing (68). Modality is not epistemically inaccessible: the [logical] possibility of a statement is a function of the intensions involved and the space of possible worlds, both of which are epistemically accessible in principle, and neither of which is dependent on a posteriori facts. The class of 1-necessary truths corresponds directly

7 7 to the class of a priori truths (68 69). As one might expect, the two-dimensional framework produces two versions of logical supervenience: supervenience according to primary intensions (i.e. by 1-necessity), supervenience according to primary intensions (i.e. by 2-necessity). The latter is often called metaphysical supervenience, but Chalmers has argued that it is really a species of logical supervenience. Chalmers argues that the primary version of supervenience is the more central kind, especially when considering questions of explanation: it is the primary intension of a concept that determines whether or not an explanation is satisfactory (69). From all of this, it follows that B-properties are logically supervenient on A-properties if for any actual situation X, the A-facts about X entail the B-facts about X, and furthermore this implication from A-facts to B-facts will be a priori (70) since it will depend only on the intensions of the concepts involved (plus knowledge of the A-facts) i.e., one might say (though Chalmers does not), it will be an analytic truth. There are therefore at least three avenues to establishing claims of logical supervenience: these involve conceivability, epistemology, and analysis. To establish that B-properties logically supervene on A-properties, we can (1) argue that instantiation of A-properties without instantiation of the B-properties is inconceivable; (2) argue that someone in possession of the A-facts could come to know the B-facts ; or (3) analyze the intensions of the B-properties in sufficient detail that it becomes clear that B-facts follow from A-facts in virtue of these intensions alone (70). d) The Logical Supervenience of Almost Everything on the Physical All high-level facts about natural phenomena are logically supervenient on the totality of physical facts, Chalmers argues, except those about consciousness. That is, physicalism is true in all (natural) domains except for the mental. Chalmers argues for this in three ways: It is in principle inconceivable that a world could be identical to ours in every microphysical detail but different biologically / architecturally / astronomically / behaviourally / chemically / economically / sociologically etc. etc. When high-level facts fail to logically supervene on the physical facts, there are deep epistemological problems: it would mean that the externally observable facts which, Chalmers apparently takes it, are fixed by the physical could be just as they are, but the high-level facts different, and hence that no data could suffice to tell us which of the various possible, say, biologies is the actual one. Since there is no deep epistemic problem of biology (etc.), biological facts must logically supervene on the physical. (Chalmers notes that there are some deep epistemic problems to do with physical regularities e.g. causation but he sidesteps these by including a specification of these regularities in the supervenience base.) Furthermore, Chalmers says it is plausible to think that a sufficiently intelligent super-being should be able to simply read off high level facts from the microphysical facts. A proper analysis of the intensions concepts of high level properties will show them to be satisfied by fixing the microphysical facts in a particular way. This is because most high-level intensions can be characterized either structurally or functionally (or both). For example, Chalmers claims that life or economic prosperity are functional properties. Chalmers then goes on to consider some problem cases: Consciousness-dependent properties Intentionality Moral and aesthetic properties Names Indexicals Negative facts

8 8 Physical laws and causation None of these, he argues, presents any reason to think that any natural phenomenon but consciousness fails to supervene on the physical. The position we are left with is that facts about the world are exhausted by (1) particular physical facts, (2) facts about conscious experience, (3) laws of nature, (4) a second-order That s all fact, and perhaps (5) an indexical fact about my location. Modulo conscious experience and indexicality, it seems that all positive facts are logically supervenient on the physical. It is plausible that every supervenience relation of a highlevel property upon the physical is ultimately either (1) a logical supervenience relation of either the primary or the secondary variety, or (2) a contingent natural supervenience relation. If neither of these holds for some apparent supervenience relation, then we have good reason to think that there are no objective high-level facts of the kind in question (87 88).

9 9 II. THE IRREDUCIBILITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS 3. Can Consciousness be Reductively Explained? Chalmers argues in this chapter that consciousness cannot be explained in physical terms since it does not logically supervene on the physical. Chalmers gives five arguments for this conclusion: two arguments from conceivability, two arguments from epistemology, and an argument from analysis. Argument 1: The logical possibility of zombies A zombie can be defined as a creature that is molecule for molecule identical to me, and identical in all the low-level properties postulated by a completed physics, but [that] lacks conscious experience entirely (94). Chalmers argues that zombies are conceivable, and from this it follows (given what he has laid out in the previous chapter) that zombies are logically possible and hence that consciousness does not logically supervene on the physical. Chalmers suggests that something is conceivable if it is conceptually coherent, by which he apparently means that the intensions of the concepts involved do not lead to any contradiction (96). Since, he claims, there is nothing conceptually contradictory about zombies, they are conceivable. He also argues indirectly that zombies are conceivable by suggesting that it is highly plausible that non-standard realizations of his functional organization might lack consciousness, and arguing that from this it follows that his zombie twin is an equally coherent possibility. In making moves of this sort, Chalmers assumes that a) biochemistry and b) physical complexity are conceptually irrelevant to consciousness: that is, adding in these sorts of details about the implementations of a functional architecture cannot introduce the logical, a priori entailment of consciousness. So the only route available to an opponent here is to claim that in describing the zombie world as a zombie world, we are misapplying the concepts, and that in fact there is a conceptual contradiction lurking in the description. Perhaps if we thought about it clearly enough we would realize that by imagining a physically identical world we are thereby automatically imagining a world in which there is conscious experience. But then the burden is on the opponent to give us some idea of where the contradiction might lie in the apparently quite coherent description. If no internal incoherence can be revealed, then there is a very strong case that the zombie world is logically possible (99). Argument 2: The inverted spectrum If it is conceivable that there could be a being physically identical to me but with inverted conscious experiences (e.g. where two of the axes of the three-dimensional colour space are switched) then it is possible for facts about consciousness to vary independently of the physical facts, and so consciousness does not logically supervene on the physical. Even if the human colour space is asymmetrical in such a way that it could not be inverted, we could imagine mapping them onto colours in a more extended colour space (e.g. red might be mapped onto a warm version of blue), or we could simply imagine creatures with a symmetrical colour space and then conceive of their colour experiences being inverted. Argument 3: From epistemic asymmetry Eliminativism about conscious experience is an unreasonable position only because of our own acquaintance with it. [T]here is an epistemic asymmetry in our knowledge of consciousness that is not present in our knowledge of other phenomena (102). Since, if consciousness were logically supervenient on the physical there would be no epistemic asymmetry, it follows (according to Chalmers) that consciousness is not logically supervenient. Argument 4: The knowledge argument Mary has been brought up in a black-and-white room and has never seen any colors except for black, white,

10 10 and shades of gray. She is nevertheless one of the world s leading neuroscientists, specializing in the neurophysiology of color vision. She knows everything there is to know about the neural processes involved in visual information processing, about the physics of optical processes, and about the physical makeup of objects in the environment. But she does not know what it is like to see red. No amount of reasoning from the physical facts alone will give her this knowledge (103). If this is a correct description of a possible situation, Chalmers argues, it follows that the facts about consciousness are not entailed by the physical facts, and so consciousness cannot logically supervene on the physical. That is, knowledge of what red is like is factual knowledge that is not entailed a priori by knowledge of the physical facts (104) that is enough, according to Chalmers, to show that consciousness cannot be reductively explained. Another way of making the same point is to note that knowing all the physical facts about another organism or system such as a bat or a complex computer will not tell us what the consciousness of that creature is like (if anything). Argument 5: From the absence of analysis For consciousness to be entailed by a set of physical facts, one would need some kind of analysis of the notion of consciousness the kind of analysis whose satisfaction physical facts could imply and there is no such analysis to be had (104). In particular, functional analyses of the concept of consciousness must all fail (according to Chalmers) since [a]lthough conscious states may play various causal roles, they are not defined by their causal roles. Rather, what makes them conscious is that they have a certain phenomenal feel, and this feel is not something that can be functionally defined away (105). Chalmers gives two further arguments against functional analysis of the concept of consciousness: 1) [A]ny functionally analyzed concept will have a degree of semantic indeterminacy (105), says Chalmers. But facts about the presence of conscious are determinate, and not subject to semantic stipulation. Hence consciousness cannot the functionally analyzed. 2) Any functionalist analysis will collapse the legitimate (according to Chalmers) conceptual distinction between consciousness and awareness. The prospects for a structural analysis of the concept of consciousness look even worse. Hence, according to Chalmers, [i]t seems that the concept of consciousness is irreducible, being characterizable only in terms of concepts that themselves irreducibly involve consciousness (106). The failure of consciousness to logically supervene on the physical tells us that no reductive explanation of consciousness can succeed (106). There is an unbridgeable explanatory gap between the physical and conscious experience the fact that consciousness accompanies a given physical process is a further fact, not explainable simply by telling the story about the physical facts (107). The best kind of explanation we can hope for in principle is a non-reductive one, e.g. one appealing to additional bridge principles. Chalmers then responds to five objections: Are we setting the standards too high? Couldn t a vitalist have said the same thing about life? Is conceivability a guide to possibility? Isn t this a collection of circular intuitions? Doesn t all explanation have to stop somewhere? Finally, Chalmers sets out to illustrate the failure of reductive explanation by giving a critique of a number of accounts of consciousness that have been proposed by researchers in various disciplines (111). a) Cognitive modelling (Baars, Dennett). The best that these models can do, according to Chalmers, is give a theory of awareness and show how it is correlated with consciousness. b) Neurobiological explanation (Crick and Koch, Edelman). Again, these theories at best establish

11 11 correlations with consciousness. c) The appeal to new physics (Penrose and Hameroff). Even new physics comes down to structure and dynamics (function). d) Evolutionary explanation. The process of natural selection cannot distinguish between me and my zombie twin (120). A key point, for Chalmers, is that it s not just that we don t have a reductive explanation of consciousness yet; he takes his arguments to prove that we could never have a reductive explanation. Any account given in purely physical terms will suffer from the same problem. It will ultimately be given in terms of the structure and dynamical properties of physical processes, and no matter how sophisticated such an account is, it will yield only more structure and dynamics. While this is enough to handle most natural phenomena, the problem of consciousness goes beyond any problem about the explanation of structure and function, so a new sort of explanation is needed (121). 4. Naturalistic Dualism a) An Argument Against Physicalism Chapter 3 argued that consciousness cannot be explained by physical theories (an epistemological claim); this chapter argues that consciousness is not itself physical (an ontological claim). The basic argument for this goes as follows: 1. In our world, there are conscious experiences. 2. There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not hold. 3. Therefore, facts about consciousness are further facts about our world, over and above the physical facts. 4. So materialism is false (123) That is, the failure of the logical supervenience of consciousness on the physical is enough to establish the falsity of physicalism, and hence establishes a version of dualism. Which version of dualism? Chalmers calls it naturalistic dualism, and its key tenet is that, though consciousness fails to supervene logically on the physical, it supervenes naturally on the physical: consciousness arises from a physical basis, even though it is not entailed by that basis (125). Naturalistic dualism is a version of property (rather than substance) dualism: there are properties of individuals in this world the phenomenal properties that are ontologically independent of physical properties (125). All physical events, including human behaviour, can be explained entirely in physical terms. Chalmers denies that naturalistic dualism is antiscientific or supernatural. Physical theories derive higher-level phenomena from fundamental physical features and laws. Similarly, a theory of consciousness will either treat consciousness as a basic feature of the world (like space-time, spin, charge, etc.) or will postulate a class of non-physical, more fundamental properties protophenomenal properties from which consciousness can be derived. There will also have to be a new class of fundamental laws, but these laws will not compete with the closed system of physical laws instead they will be psychophysical supervenience laws. Once we have a fundamental theory of consciousness to accompany a fundamental theory in physics, we may truly have a theory of everything. On this view, the world still consists in a network of fundamental properties related by basic laws, and everything is to be ultimately explained in these terms. Further, nothing about this theory contradicts anything in physical theory; rather it supplements that theory. [T]o embrace dualism is not necessarily to embrace mystery ( ). b) Objections to the Argument Objections can be made to either premise 2 or premise 3 of Chalmers argument for dualism. Chalmers claims to have dealt with objections to the second premise in Chapter 3. In this chapter he deals with

12 12 objections to the third premise, which moves from the failure of logical supervenience to the falsity of materialism (129). Objection 1: Though consciousness may be emergent, this is still compatible with the truth of physicalism. Chalmers distinguishes between two kinds of emergence, weak and strong: properties may be emergent in the weak sense in that they are not obvious consequences of low-level laws (129), and this does not conflict with physicalism. But Chalmers has argued that consciousness is emergent in the much stronger sense that it is not logically supervenient on the low-level (physical) facts. Objection 2: [C]onsciousness and the physical might be two aspects of the same thing [and hence] consciousness might in a sense be physical (130). Chalmers responds that, as long as the conscious aspect is not entailed by the physical aspect, then this duality of aspects gives us a kind of property dualism (130) even if the two aspects of reality can be subsumed under a grander monism, it will not be a monism of the physical alone. Objection 3: To hold that property A is merely naturally supervenient on (caused by) property B is not to adopt a dualism of properties for example, suggests Searle, being liquid is merely naturally supervenient on (caused by) being H 2 O, but no one is a dualist about liquidity. Chalmers responds that this is simply a false analogy: the microphysical features of water do not cause liquidity, they constitute it. Liquidity does logically and not merely naturally supervene on the low-level, physical facts about water. The notion of a nonliquid replica of a batch of liquid H 2 O is simply incoherent. Consciousness is ontologically novel in a much more significant way than liquidity (130). Objection 4: Chalmers argument resembles that of Descartes, and Descartes argument was flawed: just because one can imagine that A and B are not identical, it does not follow that A and B are not identical (130). Chalmers responds that [i]t is crucial that the argument as I have put it does not turn on questions of identity but of supervenience (131) he claims that the argument rephrased in terms of the supervenience of facts about consciousness on the totality of physical facts can escape Descartes s fallacy. The following objections take this objection further. Objection 5: Chalmers argument only establishes that zombie worlds are logically possible; however, to refute physicalism he needs to prove that zombie worlds are metaphysically possible, and [w]hereas conceptual coherence suffices for logical possibility, metaphysical possibility is more constrained. The point is also often made by suggesting that there is a difference between conceivability and true possibility (131). For example, Kripke s Naming and Necessity demonstrates the existence of necessary truths whose necessity is only knowable a posteriori; similarly, perhaps the facts about consciousness follow necessarily from the physical facts but this can only be established a posteriori hence there can be a conceptual gap without a metaphysical gap (131). Chalmers begins his response to this objection by appealing to the notion of logical possibility he defined in Chapter 2: Logical possibility comes down to the possible truth of a statement when evaluated according to the primary intensions involved. The primary intensions of water and H 2 O differ, so it is logically possible in this sense that water is not H 2 O. Metaphysical possibility comes down to the possible truth of a statement when evaluated according to the secondary intensions involved. The secondary intensions of water and H 2 O are the same, so it is metaphysically necessary that water is H 2 O (132). If Chalmers is right about this, then the objection turns into the following: even though the primary intensions of phenomenal concepts differ from those of any physical concepts, their secondary intensions may be the same (for all Chalmers has shown). If so, then phenomenal and physical/functional concepts may pick out the same properties a posteriori despite the a priori distinction (132). Chalmers answers this reformulated objection in the following way: whether or not the primary and secondary intensions coincide, the primary intension determines a perfectly good [center-relative] property of objects in possible worlds. The property of being watery stuff is a perfectly reasonable property, even though it is not the same as the property of being H 2 O. If we can show that there are possible worlds that are

13 13 physically identical to ours but in which the property introduced by the primary intension is lacking, then dualism will follow. This is just what has been done for consciousness. By analogy, if we could show that there were worlds physically identical to ours in which there was no watery stuff, we would have established dualism about water just as well as if we had established that there were worlds physically identical to ours in which there was no H 2 O. And importantly, the difference with respect to the primary intension can be established independently of a posteriori factors, so that considerations about a posteriori necessity are irrelevant ( ). The most general way to make the point is to note that nothing about Kripke s a posteriori necessity renders any logically possible worlds impossible. It simply tells us that some of them are misdescribed, because we are applying terms according to their primary intensions rather than the more appropriate secondary intensions. So although there may be two kinds of possibility of statements there is only one relevant kind of possibility of worlds. It follows that if there is a conceivable world that is physically identical to ours but which lacks certain positive features of our world, then no considerations about the designation of terms such as consciousness can do anything to rule out the metaphysical possibility of the world (134). (Furthermore, Chalmers notes, for consciousness the primary and secondary intensions coincide: what it is to have consciousness in either sense is to have a phenomenal feel. Unlike water, there is no gap between the appearance of consciousness and the underlying reality. But this point is controversial, and he does not depend on it.) Objection 6: [T]o claim that the zombie world is physically identical to ours is to misdescribe it. Just as the XYZ world seems to contain water but does not, the zombie world seems physically identical while being physically different ( ). This might be so if there were properties essential to the physical constitution of the world that are not accessible to physical investigation. In conceiving of a physically identical world, we are really only conceiving of a world that is identical from the standpoint of physical investigation, while differing in the inaccessible essential properties, which are also the properties that guarantee consciousness (135). E.g. something might not be an electron unless it not only played the extrinsic role of an electron but also had its intrinsic nature, and the intrinsic nature of matter might be phenomenal or protophenomenal. This objection turns in part on a purely conceptual question: do phenomenal predicates work in the way suggested above? Chalmers suggests that this is highly implausible. Furthermore, even if this objection holds the difference between this view and the property dualism that I have advocated is small. It remains the case that the world has phenomenal properties that are not fixed by the properties that physics reveals (136). Objection 7: It could be held that there is a modality of metaphysical possibility that is distinct from and more constrained than logical possibility, and that arises for reasons independent of the Kripkean considerations. We can call this hypothesized modality strong metaphysical necessity, as opposed to the weak metaphysical necessity introduced by the Kripkean framework. On this view, there are worlds that are entirely conceivable, even according to the strongest strictures on conceivability, but which are not possible at all ( ). Chalmers short answer to this objection is that there is no reason to believe that such a modality exists,, and the constraints it imposes on the space of possible worlds would be brute and inexplicable (137). Indeed, if some worlds are logically possible but metaphysically impossible, it seems that we could never know it. By assumption, the information is not available a priori, and a posteriori information only tells us about our world. This can serve to locate our world in the space of possible worlds, but it is hard to see how it could give information about the extent of that space (137). Furthermore, strong metaphysical necessity saves materialism only at he cost of making it entirely mysterious how consciousness could be physical (138). On this view, it would still be the case that the existence of consciousness cannot be derived from physical knowledge, so that consciousness cannot be reductively explained. And it would remain the case that we would need certain primitive connecting principles to explain the supervenience of the phenomenal on the physical. The only difference between the views is that the relevant psychophysical principles are deemed to be brute laws of necessity rather than laws of nature (138). Objection 8: The apparent conceivability of zombie worlds arises from some sort of impaired rationality, so

14 14 that if we were only more intelligent we would see that the description of the world is not coherent at all (139). Perhaps some mathematical truths are necessarily true even though they are not knowable a priori by us, so by analogy this might be true of some truths about consciousness. Chalmers responds that this analogy fails because [i]n the mathematical case, our modal reasoning leaves the matter open; our conceivability intuitions do not tell us anything one way or the other. There may be some weak sense in which it is conceivable that the statements are false for example, they are false for all we know but this is not a sense that delivers a conceivable world where they fail. In the zombie case, by contrast, the matter is not left open: there seems to be a clearly conceivable world in which the implication is false (139). Nothing in the mathematical analogy shows us how to rule out apparently conceivable worlds. While it must be conceded that any philosophical argument could go wrong because of cognitive impairment, in the absence of any substantial reason to believe this, this sort of objection seems quite ad hoc ( ). c) Other Arguments for Dualism Jackson s Knowledge Argument: As a direct argument against materialism Jackson s argument is often seen as vulnerable due to its use of the intensional notion of knowledge (140). Chalmers argues these attacks fail. i) Many opponents to the knowledge argument (Churchland, Horgan, Lycan, McMullen, Papineau, Teller, Tye) have argued that, although Mary does gain new knowledge, this knowledge does not correspond to a new fact she simply comes to know an old fact in a new way (under a new mode of presentation). Chalmers responds that [t]hese gaps arise precisely because of the difference between primary and secondary intensions. This objection therefore comes to precisely the same thing as the objection from the distinction between logical necessity and (Kripkean) metaphysical necessity discussed earlier, and the discussion there of primary and secondary intensions is sufficient to refute it (141). Suppose that a is G and b is G are the same fact, but that this cannot be seen a priori: this must be because a=b and the secondary intensions are the same but the primary intensions differ. But when Mary learns that a=b then there must be some truly novel fact that she gains knowledge of. In particular, she must come to know a new fact involving that mode of presentation (142). That is, Mary learns a new fact that connects the two modes of presentation. For example, suppose that a is dthat(p) and b is dthat(q); if Mary knows that a is G but doesn t know that b is G, then Mary cannot know that something is both P and Q. It is this latter, conjunctive fact which is the genuinely novel one. (After all, Chalmers suggests, [e]ven when interpreted according to secondary intensions, there will be a possible world in which a is [G] but in which nothing is both P and Q (142) presumably this is because, though a=b by (metaphysical) necessity, their modes of presentation are contingent.) For example, [i]f one knows that Hesperus is visible but not that Phosphorus is visible (because one does not know that Hesperus is Phosphorus), then one does not know that one object is both the brightest star in the morning sky and the brightest star in the evening sky. This is a separate fact that one lacks knowledge of entirely (141). ii) Brian Loar tries to advance beyond objection i). Loar recognizes that analogies with the usual examples cannot do the job for the materialist, as such analogies allow that physical and phenomenal notions have distinct primary intensions, and the antimaterialist can simply apply the argument to the property corresponding to the primary intension (142). He therefore argues that two predicates can share the same primary intension even when this sameness is not knowable a priori. But, Chalmers argues, this could be so [o]nly if the space of possible worlds is smaller than we would have thought a priori we must think that the intensions differ because there is a possible world in which the two predicates have different reference, but in fact there must be no such possible world. But this requires a notion of brute strong metaphysical necessity, and Chalmers has already argued against this (and Loar does not defend it explicitly). iii) One could argue that Mary knows all the physical facts but lacks knowledge about the hidden (proto)phenomenal essences of physical entities. But this more or less concedes the argument to Jackson.

THE TWO-DIMENSIONAL ARGUMENT AGAINST MATERIALISM AND ITS SEMANTIC PREMISE

THE TWO-DIMENSIONAL ARGUMENT AGAINST MATERIALISM AND ITS SEMANTIC PREMISE Diametros nr 29 (wrzesień 2011): 80-92 THE TWO-DIMENSIONAL ARGUMENT AGAINST MATERIALISM AND ITS SEMANTIC PREMISE Karol Polcyn 1. PRELIMINARIES Chalmers articulates his argument in terms of two-dimensional

More information

The UCD community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters!

The UCD community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters! Provided by the author(s) and University College Dublin Library in accordance with publisher policies., Please cite the published version when available. Title Zombies and their possibilities Authors(s)

More information

IN THIS PAPER I will examine and criticize the arguments David

IN THIS PAPER I will examine and criticize the arguments David A MATERIALIST RESPONSE TO DAVID CHALMERS THE CONSCIOUS MIND PAUL RAYMORE Stanford University IN THIS PAPER I will examine and criticize the arguments David Chalmers gives for rejecting a materialistic

More information

Chalmers, "Consciousness and Its Place in Nature"

Chalmers, Consciousness and Its Place in Nature http://www.protevi.com/john/philmind Classroom use only. Chalmers, "Consciousness and Its Place in Nature" 1. Intro 2. The easy problem and the hard problem 3. The typology a. Reductive Materialism i.

More information

Chapter 11 CHALMERS' THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. and yet non-reductive approach to consciousness. First, we will present the hard problem

Chapter 11 CHALMERS' THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. and yet non-reductive approach to consciousness. First, we will present the hard problem Chapter 11 CHALMERS' THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS 1. Introduction: In this chapter we will discuss David Chalmers' attempts to formulate a scientific and yet non-reductive approach to consciousness. First,

More information

Grounding and Analyticity. David Chalmers

Grounding and Analyticity. David Chalmers Grounding and Analyticity David Chalmers Interlevel Metaphysics Interlevel metaphysics: how the macro relates to the micro how nonfundamental levels relate to fundamental levels Grounding Triumphalism

More information

Please remember to sign-in by scanning your badge Department of Psychiatry Grand Rounds

Please remember to sign-in by scanning your badge Department of Psychiatry Grand Rounds AS A COURTESY TO OUR SPEAKER AND AUDIENCE MEMBERS, PLEASE SILENCE ALL PAGERS AND CELL PHONES Please remember to sign-in by scanning your badge Department of Psychiatry Grand Rounds James M. Stedman, PhD.

More information

The Possibility of Materialism

The Possibility of Materialism The Possibility of Materialism Mike Holliday Final version: 3 June 2016 1: Introduction Is a materialist account of conscious experience even possible? David Chalmers famously answered No, setting out

More information

Primitive Concepts. David J. Chalmers

Primitive Concepts. David J. Chalmers Primitive Concepts David J. Chalmers Conceptual Analysis: A Traditional View A traditional view: Most ordinary concepts (or expressions) can be defined in terms of other more basic concepts (or expressions)

More information

BOOK REVIEWS. The Philosophical Review, Vol. 111, No. 4 (October 2002)

BOOK REVIEWS. The Philosophical Review, Vol. 111, No. 4 (October 2002) The Philosophical Review, Vol. 111, No. 4 (October 2002) John Perry, Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. Pp. xvi, 221. In this lucid, deep, and entertaining book (based

More information

All philosophical debates not due to ignorance of base truths or our imperfect rationality are indeterminate.

All philosophical debates not due to ignorance of base truths or our imperfect rationality are indeterminate. PHIL 5983: Naturalness and Fundamentality Seminar Prof. Funkhouser Spring 2017 Week 11: Chalmers, Constructing the World Notes (Chapters 6-7, Twelfth Excursus) Chapter 6 6.1 * This chapter is about the

More information

The knowledge argument

The knowledge argument Michael Lacewing The knowledge argument PROPERTY DUALISM Property dualism is the view that, although there is just one kind of substance, physical substance, there are two fundamentally different kinds

More information

Physicalism and Conceptual Analysis * Esa Díaz-León.

Physicalism and Conceptual Analysis * Esa Díaz-León. Physicalism and Conceptual Analysis * Esa Díaz-León pip01ed@sheffield.ac.uk Physicalism is a widely held claim about the nature of the world. But, as it happens, it also has its detractors. The first step

More information

the aim is to specify the structure of the world in the form of certain basic truths from which all truths can be derived. (xviii)

the aim is to specify the structure of the world in the form of certain basic truths from which all truths can be derived. (xviii) PHIL 5983: Naturalness and Fundamentality Seminar Prof. Funkhouser Spring 2017 Week 8: Chalmers, Constructing the World Notes (Introduction, Chapters 1-2) Introduction * We are introduced to the ideas

More information

On David Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

On David Chalmers's The Conscious Mind Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LIX, No.2, June 1999 On David Chalmers's The Conscious Mind SYDNEY SHOEMAKER Cornell University One does not have to agree with the main conclusions of David

More information

David Chalmers on Mind and Consciousness Richard Brown Forthcoming in Andrew Bailey (ed) Philosophy of Mind: The Key Thinkers.

David Chalmers on Mind and Consciousness Richard Brown Forthcoming in Andrew Bailey (ed) Philosophy of Mind: The Key Thinkers. David Chalmers on Mind and Consciousness Richard Brown Forthcoming in Andrew Bailey (ed) Philosophy of Mind: The Key Thinkers. Continuum Press David Chalmers is perhaps best known for his argument against

More information

Hitoshi NAGAI (Nihon University) Why Isn t Consciousness Real? (2) Day 2: Why Are We Zombies?

Hitoshi NAGAI (Nihon University) Why Isn t Consciousness Real? (2) Day 2: Why Are We Zombies? Philosophia OSAKA No.7, 2012 47 Hitoshi NAGAI (Nihon University) Why Isn t Consciousness Real? (2) Day 2: Why Are We Zombies? The contrast between the phenomenal and the psychological is progressive. This

More information

Revelation, Humility, and the Structure of the World. David J. Chalmers

Revelation, Humility, and the Structure of the World. David J. Chalmers Revelation, Humility, and the Structure of the World David J. Chalmers Revelation and Humility Revelation holds for a property P iff Possessing the concept of P enables us to know what property P is Humility

More information

Minds and Machines spring The explanatory gap and Kripke s argument revisited spring 03

Minds and Machines spring The explanatory gap and Kripke s argument revisited spring 03 Minds and Machines spring 2003 The explanatory gap and Kripke s argument revisited 1 preliminaries handouts on the knowledge argument and qualia on the website 2 Materialism and qualia: the explanatory

More information

A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge

A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge Leuenberger, S. (2012) Review of David Chalmers, The Character of Consciousness. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 90 (4). pp. 803-806. ISSN 0004-8402 Copyright 2013 Taylor & Francis A copy can be downloaded

More information

Putnam: Meaning and Reference

Putnam: Meaning and Reference Putnam: Meaning and Reference The Traditional Conception of Meaning combines two assumptions: Meaning and psychology Knowing the meaning (of a word, sentence) is being in a psychological state. Even Frege,

More information

Experiences Don t Sum

Experiences Don t Sum Philip Goff Experiences Don t Sum According to Galen Strawson, there could be no such thing as brute emergence. If weallow thatcertain x s can emergefromcertain y s in a way that is unintelligible, even

More information

Varieties of Apriority

Varieties of Apriority S E V E N T H E X C U R S U S Varieties of Apriority T he notions of a priori knowledge and justification play a central role in this work. There are many ways in which one can understand the a priori,

More information

Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity

Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity 24.09x Minds and Machines Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity Excerpt from Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Harvard, 1980). Identity theorists have been concerned with several distinct types of identifications:

More information

Objections to the two-dimensionalism of The Conscious Mind

Objections to the two-dimensionalism of The Conscious Mind Objections to the two-dimensionalism of The Conscious Mind phil 93515 Jeff Speaks February 7, 2007 1 Problems with the rigidification of names..................... 2 1.1 Names as actually -rigidified descriptions..................

More information

BEYOND CONCEPTUAL DUALISM Ontology of Consciousness, Mental Causation, and Holism in John R. Searle s Philosophy of Mind

BEYOND CONCEPTUAL DUALISM Ontology of Consciousness, Mental Causation, and Holism in John R. Searle s Philosophy of Mind BEYOND CONCEPTUAL DUALISM Ontology of Consciousness, Mental Causation, and Holism in John R. Searle s Philosophy of Mind Giuseppe Vicari Guest Foreword by John R. Searle Editorial Foreword by Francesc

More information

Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness

Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Citation As Published Publisher Levine, Joseph.

More information

Constructing the World

Constructing the World Constructing the World Lecture 6: Whither the Aufbau? David Chalmers Plan *1. Introduction 2. Definitional, Analytic, Primitive Scrutability 3. Narrow Scrutability 4. Acquaintance Scrutability 5. Fundamental

More information

BonJour Against Materialism. Just an intellectual bandwagon?

BonJour Against Materialism. Just an intellectual bandwagon? BonJour Against Materialism Just an intellectual bandwagon? What is physicalism/materialism? materialist (or physicalist) views: views that hold that mental states are entirely material or physical in

More information

Conceptual Analysis and Reductive Explanation

Conceptual Analysis and Reductive Explanation Conceptual Analysis and Reductive Explanation David J. Chalmers and Frank Jackson Philosophy Program Research School of Social Sciences Australian National University 1 Introduction Is conceptual analysis

More information

Materialism and the Metaphysics of Modality

Materialism and the Metaphysics of Modality Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LIX, No.2, June 1999 Materialism and the Metaphysics of Modality DAVID J. CHALMERS University ofarizona Contents 1 Introduction 2 A priori entailment (Shoemaker)

More information

Wright on response-dependence and self-knowledge

Wright on response-dependence and self-knowledge Wright on response-dependence and self-knowledge March 23, 2004 1 Response-dependent and response-independent concepts........... 1 1.1 The intuitive distinction......................... 1 1.2 Basic equations

More information

A Posteriori Necessities

A Posteriori Necessities A Posteriori Necessities 1. Introduction: Recall that we distinguished between a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge: A Priori Knowledge: Knowledge acquirable prior to experience; for instance,

More information

Property Dualism and the Knowledge Argument: Are Qualia Really a Problem for Physicalism? Ronald Planer Rutgers Univerity

Property Dualism and the Knowledge Argument: Are Qualia Really a Problem for Physicalism? Ronald Planer Rutgers Univerity Property Dualism and the Knowledge Argument: Are Qualia Really a Problem for Physicalism? Ronald Planer Rutgers Univerity Abstract: Where does the mind fit into the physical world? Not surprisingly, philosophers

More information

1 What is conceptual analysis and what is the problem?

1 What is conceptual analysis and what is the problem? 1 What is conceptual analysis and what is the problem? 1.1 What is conceptual analysis? In this book, I am going to defend the viability of conceptual analysis as a philosophical method. It therefore seems

More information

Constructing the World

Constructing the World Constructing the World Lecture 1: A Scrutable World David Chalmers Plan *1. Laplace s demon 2. Primitive concepts and the Aufbau 3. Problems for the Aufbau 4. The scrutability base 5. Applications Laplace

More information

Review of David J. Chalmers Constructing the World (OUP 2012) David Chalmers burst onto the philosophical scene in the mid-1990s with his work on

Review of David J. Chalmers Constructing the World (OUP 2012) David Chalmers burst onto the philosophical scene in the mid-1990s with his work on Review of David J. Chalmers Constructing the World (OUP 2012) Thomas W. Polger, University of Cincinnati 1. Introduction David Chalmers burst onto the philosophical scene in the mid-1990s with his work

More information

Philosophy of Mind. Introduction to the Mind-Body Problem

Philosophy of Mind. Introduction to the Mind-Body Problem Philosophy of Mind Introduction to the Mind-Body Problem Two Motivations for Dualism External Theism Internal The nature of mind is such that it has no home in the natural world. Mind and its Place in

More information

Kantian Humility and Ontological Categories Sam Cowling University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Kantian Humility and Ontological Categories Sam Cowling University of Massachusetts, Amherst Kantian Humility and Ontological Categories Sam Cowling University of Massachusetts, Amherst [Forthcoming in Analysis. Penultimate Draft. Cite published version.] Kantian Humility holds that agents like

More information

Contextual two-dimensionalism

Contextual two-dimensionalism Contextual two-dimensionalism phil 93507 Jeff Speaks November 30, 2009 1 Two two-dimensionalist system of The Conscious Mind.............. 1 1.1 Primary and secondary intensions...................... 2

More information

Analyticity and reference determiners

Analyticity and reference determiners Analyticity and reference determiners Jeff Speaks November 9, 2011 1. The language myth... 1 2. The definition of analyticity... 3 3. Defining containment... 4 4. Some remaining questions... 6 4.1. Reference

More information

The Hard Problem of Consciousness & The Progressivism of Scientific Explanation

The Hard Problem of Consciousness & The Progressivism of Scientific Explanation The Hard Problem of Consciousness & The Progressivism of Scientific Explanation Several philosophers believe that with phenomenal consciousness and neural-biological properties, there will always be some

More information

Ayer on the criterion of verifiability

Ayer on the criterion of verifiability Ayer on the criterion of verifiability November 19, 2004 1 The critique of metaphysics............................. 1 2 Observation statements............................... 2 3 In principle verifiability...............................

More information

The Inscrutability of Reference and the Scrutability of Truth

The Inscrutability of Reference and the Scrutability of Truth SECOND EXCURSUS The Inscrutability of Reference and the Scrutability of Truth I n his 1960 book Word and Object, W. V. Quine put forward the thesis of the Inscrutability of Reference. This thesis says

More information

Constructing the World

Constructing the World Constructing the World Lecture 5: Hard Cases: Mathematics, Normativity, Intentionality, Ontology David Chalmers Plan *1. Hard cases 2. Mathematical truths 3. Normative truths 4. Intentional truths 5. Philosophical

More information

Realism and instrumentalism

Realism and instrumentalism Published in H. Pashler (Ed.) The Encyclopedia of the Mind (2013), Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, pp. 633 636 doi:10.4135/9781452257044 mark.sprevak@ed.ac.uk Realism and instrumentalism Mark Sprevak

More information

Week Eleven: Objections to Jackson 1. The Objection From Linguistic Ignorance

Week Eleven: Objections to Jackson 1. The Objection From Linguistic Ignorance Week Eleven: Objections to Jackson 1. The Objection From Linguistic Ignorance One of the benefits of the 2D framework we looked at last week was that it explained how we could understand a sentence without

More information

Philip D. Miller Denison University I

Philip D. Miller Denison University I Against the Necessity of Identity Statements Philip D. Miller Denison University I n Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke argues that names are rigid designators. For Kripke, a term "rigidly designates" an

More information

DUALISM VS. MATERIALISM I

DUALISM VS. MATERIALISM I DUALISM VS. MATERIALISM I The Ontology of E. J. Lowe's Substance Dualism Alex Carruth, Philosophy, Durham Emergence Project, Durham, UNITED KINGDOM Sophie Gibb, Durham University, Durham, UNITED KINGDOM

More information

The Irreducibility of Consciousness

The Irreducibility of Consciousness Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont CMC Faculty Publications and Research CMC Faculty Scholarship 1-1-2005 The Irreducibility of Consciousness Claremont McKenna College Recommended Citation Kind,

More information

Nagel, Naturalism and Theism. Todd Moody. (Saint Joseph s University, Philadelphia)

Nagel, Naturalism and Theism. Todd Moody. (Saint Joseph s University, Philadelphia) Nagel, Naturalism and Theism Todd Moody (Saint Joseph s University, Philadelphia) In his recent controversial book, Mind and Cosmos, Thomas Nagel writes: Many materialist naturalists would not describe

More information

Tony Chadwick Essay Prize 2006 Winner Can we Save Qualia? (Thomas Nagel and the Psychophysical Nexus ) By Eileen Walker

Tony Chadwick Essay Prize 2006 Winner Can we Save Qualia? (Thomas Nagel and the Psychophysical Nexus ) By Eileen Walker Tony Chadwick Essay Prize 2006 Winner Can we Save Qualia? (Thomas Nagel and the Psychophysical Nexus ) By Eileen Walker 1. Introduction: The problem of causal exclusion If our minds are part of the physical

More information

A Posteriori Necessities by Saul Kripke (excerpted from Naming and Necessity, 1980)

A Posteriori Necessities by Saul Kripke (excerpted from Naming and Necessity, 1980) A Posteriori Necessities by Saul Kripke (excerpted from Naming and Necessity, 1980) Let's suppose we refer to the same heavenly body twice, as 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus'. We say: Hesperus is that star

More information

Session One: Identity Theory And Why It Won t Work Marianne Talbot University of Oxford 26/27th November 2011

Session One: Identity Theory And Why It Won t Work Marianne Talbot University of Oxford 26/27th November 2011 A Romp Through the Philosophy of Mind Session One: Identity Theory And Why It Won t Work Marianne Talbot University of Oxford 26/27th November 2011 1 Session One: Identity Theory And Why It Won t Work

More information

Glossary (for Constructing the World)

Glossary (for Constructing the World) Glossary (for Constructing the World) David J. Chalmers A priori: S is apriori iff S can be known with justification independent of experience (or: if there is an a priori warrant for believing S ). A

More information

The knowledge argument purports to show that there are non-physical facts facts that cannot be expressed in

The knowledge argument purports to show that there are non-physical facts facts that cannot be expressed in The Knowledge Argument Adam Vinueza Department of Philosophy, University of Colorado vinueza@colorado.edu Keywords: acquaintance, fact, physicalism, proposition, qualia. The Knowledge Argument and Its

More information

Informalizing Formal Logic

Informalizing Formal Logic Informalizing Formal Logic Antonis Kakas Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus, Cyprus antonis@ucy.ac.cy Abstract. This paper discusses how the basic notions of formal logic can be expressed

More information

The Unsoundness of Arguments From Conceivability

The Unsoundness of Arguments From Conceivability The Unsoundness of Arguments From Conceivability Andrew Bailey Department of Philosophy The University of Guelph Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1 Canada (519) 824-4120 x3227 abailey@uoguelph.ca 14 June 2007 ABSTRACT

More information

The Qualiafications (or Lack Thereof) of Epiphenomenal Qualia

The Qualiafications (or Lack Thereof) of Epiphenomenal Qualia Francesca Hovagimian Philosophy of Psychology Professor Dinishak 5 March 2016 The Qualiafications (or Lack Thereof) of Epiphenomenal Qualia In his essay Epiphenomenal Qualia, Frank Jackson makes the case

More information

Thinking About Consciousness

Thinking About Consciousness 774 Book Reviews rates most efficiently from each other the complexity of what there is in Jean- Jacques Rousseau s text, and the process by which the reader has encountered it. In a most original and

More information

The Phenomenal Concept Strategy

The Phenomenal Concept Strategy Peter Carruthers and Bénédicte Veillet 1 The Phenomenal Concept Strategy A powerful reply to a range of familiar anti-physicalist arguments has recently been developed. According to this reply, our possession

More information

Debate on the mind and scientific method (continued again) on

Debate on the mind and scientific method (continued again) on Debate on the mind and scientific method (continued again) on http://forums.philosophyforums.com. Quotations are in red and the responses by Death Monkey (Kevin Dolan) are in black. Note that sometimes

More information

Kripke on the distinctness of the mind from the body

Kripke on the distinctness of the mind from the body Kripke on the distinctness of the mind from the body Jeff Speaks April 13, 2005 At pp. 144 ff., Kripke turns his attention to the mind-body problem. The discussion here brings to bear many of the results

More information

Verificationism. PHIL September 27, 2011

Verificationism. PHIL September 27, 2011 Verificationism PHIL 83104 September 27, 2011 1. The critique of metaphysics... 1 2. Observation statements... 2 3. In principle verifiability... 3 4. Strong verifiability... 3 4.1. Conclusive verifiability

More information

24.09 Minds and Machines Fall 11 HASS-D CI

24.09 Minds and Machines Fall 11 HASS-D CI 24.09 Minds and Machines Fall 11 HASS-D CI free will again summary final exam info Image by MIT OpenCourseWare. 24.09 F11 1 the first part of the incompatibilist argument Image removed due to copyright

More information

DECONSTRUCTING NEW WAVE MATERIALISM

DECONSTRUCTING NEW WAVE MATERIALISM In C. Gillett & B. Loewer, eds., Physicalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge University Press, 2001) DECONSTRUCTING NEW WAVE MATERIALISM Terence Horgan and John Tienson University of Memphis. In the first

More information

Searle vs. Chalmers Debate, 8/2005 with Death Monkey (Kevin Dolan)

Searle vs. Chalmers Debate, 8/2005 with Death Monkey (Kevin Dolan) Searle vs. Chalmers Debate, 8/2005 with Death Monkey (Kevin Dolan) : Searle says of Chalmers book, The Conscious Mind, "it is one thing to bite the occasional bullet here and there, but this book consumes

More information

24.09 Minds and Machines spring an inconsistent tetrad. argument for (1) argument for (2) argument for (3) argument for (4)

24.09 Minds and Machines spring an inconsistent tetrad. argument for (1) argument for (2) argument for (3) argument for (4) 24.09 Minds and Machines spring 2006 more handouts shortly on website Stoljar, contd. evaluations, final exam questions an inconsistent tetrad 1) if physicalism is, a priori physicalism is 2) a priori

More information

There are two explanatory gaps. Dr Tom McClelland University of Glasgow

There are two explanatory gaps. Dr Tom McClelland University of Glasgow There are two explanatory gaps Dr Tom McClelland University of Glasgow 1 THERE ARE TWO EXPLANATORY GAPS ABSTRACT The explanatory gap between the physical and the phenomenal is at the heart of the Problem

More information

Van Fraassen: Arguments Concerning Scientific Realism

Van Fraassen: Arguments Concerning Scientific Realism Aaron Leung Philosophy 290-5 Week 11 Handout Van Fraassen: Arguments Concerning Scientific Realism 1. Scientific Realism and Constructive Empiricism What is scientific realism? According to van Fraassen,

More information

General Philosophy. Dr Peter Millican,, Hertford College. Lecture 4: Two Cartesian Topics

General Philosophy. Dr Peter Millican,, Hertford College. Lecture 4: Two Cartesian Topics General Philosophy Dr Peter Millican,, Hertford College Lecture 4: Two Cartesian Topics Scepticism, and the Mind 2 Last Time we looked at scepticism about INDUCTION. This Lecture will move on to SCEPTICISM

More information

THE ANTI-ZOMBIE ARGUMENT

THE ANTI-ZOMBIE ARGUMENT The Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 57, No. 229 October 2007 ISSN 0031 8094 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.510.x THE ANTI-ZOMBIE ARGUMENT BY KEITH FRANKISH The zombie argument has come to occupy a central

More information

Introduction. I. Proof of the Minor Premise ( All reality is completely intelligible )

Introduction. I. Proof of the Minor Premise ( All reality is completely intelligible ) Philosophical Proof of God: Derived from Principles in Bernard Lonergan s Insight May 2014 Robert J. Spitzer, S.J., Ph.D. Magis Center of Reason and Faith Lonergan s proof may be stated as follows: Introduction

More information

Hard, Harder, Hardest

Hard, Harder, Hardest Hard, Harder, Hardest Katalin Balog In this paper, I will discuss three problems concerning consciousness 1. The first two problems have been dubbed The Hard Problem 2 and The Harder Problem 3. The third

More information

Merricks on the existence of human organisms

Merricks on the existence of human organisms Merricks on the existence of human organisms Cian Dorr August 24, 2002 Merricks s Overdetermination Argument against the existence of baseballs depends essentially on the following premise: BB Whenever

More information

Chalmers on Epistemic Content. Alex Byrne, MIT

Chalmers on Epistemic Content. Alex Byrne, MIT Veracruz SOFIA conference, 12/01 Chalmers on Epistemic Content Alex Byrne, MIT 1. Let us say that a thought is about an object o just in case the truth value of the thought at any possible world W depends

More information

PHILOSOPHY 4360/5360 METAPHYSICS. Methods that Metaphysicians Use

PHILOSOPHY 4360/5360 METAPHYSICS. Methods that Metaphysicians Use PHILOSOPHY 4360/5360 METAPHYSICS Methods that Metaphysicians Use Method 1: The appeal to what one can imagine where imagining some state of affairs involves forming a vivid image of that state of affairs.

More information

FOREWORD: ADDRESSING THE HARD PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

FOREWORD: ADDRESSING THE HARD PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Biophysics of Consciousness: A Foundational Approach R. R. Poznanski, J. A. Tuszynski and T. E. Feinberg Copyright 2017 World Scientific, Singapore. FOREWORD: ADDRESSING THE HARD PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

More information

World without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Natural- ism , by Michael C. Rea.

World without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Natural- ism , by Michael C. Rea. Book reviews World without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism, by Michael C. Rea. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004, viii + 245 pp., $24.95. This is a splendid book. Its ideas are bold and

More information

Elements of Mind (EM) has two themes, one major and one minor. The major theme is

Elements of Mind (EM) has two themes, one major and one minor. The major theme is Summary of Elements of Mind Tim Crane Elements of Mind (EM) has two themes, one major and one minor. The major theme is intentionality, the mind s direction upon its objects; the other is the mind-body

More information

Supervenience & Emergentism: A Critical Study in Philosophy of Mind. Rajakishore Nath, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India

Supervenience & Emergentism: A Critical Study in Philosophy of Mind. Rajakishore Nath, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India Supervenience & Emergentism: A Critical Study in Philosophy of Mind Rajakishore Nath, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India Abstract: The paper intends to clarify whether the supervenience theory

More information

Annotated Bibliography. seeking to keep the possibility of dualism alive in academic study. In this book,

Annotated Bibliography. seeking to keep the possibility of dualism alive in academic study. In this book, Warren 1 Koby Warren PHIL 400 Dr. Alfino 10/30/2010 Annotated Bibliography Chalmers, David John. The conscious mind: in search of a fundamental theory.! New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Print.!

More information

Machine Consciousness, Mind & Consciousness

Machine Consciousness, Mind & Consciousness Machine Consciousness, Mind & Consciousness Rajakishore Nath 1 Abstract. The problem of consciousness is one of the most important problems in science as well as in philosophy. There are different philosophers

More information

Reply to Robert Koons

Reply to Robert Koons 632 Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic Volume 35, Number 4, Fall 1994 Reply to Robert Koons ANIL GUPTA and NUEL BELNAP We are grateful to Professor Robert Koons for his excellent, and generous, review

More information

Why I Am Not a Property Dualist By John R. Searle

Why I Am Not a Property Dualist By John R. Searle 1 Why I Am Not a Property Dualist By John R. Searle I have argued in a number of writings 1 that the philosophical part (though not the neurobiological part) of the traditional mind-body problem has a

More information

Resemblance Nominalism and counterparts

Resemblance Nominalism and counterparts ANAL63-3 4/15/2003 2:40 PM Page 221 Resemblance Nominalism and counterparts Alexander Bird 1. Introduction In his (2002) Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra provides a powerful articulation of the claim that Resemblance

More information

Understanding Truth Scott Soames Précis Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Volume LXV, No. 2, 2002

Understanding Truth Scott Soames Précis Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Volume LXV, No. 2, 2002 1 Symposium on Understanding Truth By Scott Soames Précis Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Volume LXV, No. 2, 2002 2 Precis of Understanding Truth Scott Soames Understanding Truth aims to illuminate

More information

Ayer and Quine on the a priori

Ayer and Quine on the a priori Ayer and Quine on the a priori November 23, 2004 1 The problem of a priori knowledge Ayer s book is a defense of a thoroughgoing empiricism, not only about what is required for a belief to be justified

More information

Metaphysics & Consciousness. A talk by Larry Muhlstein

Metaphysics & Consciousness. A talk by Larry Muhlstein Metaphysics & Consciousness A talk by Larry Muhlstein A brief note on philosophy It is about thinking So think about what I am saying and ask me questions And go home and think some more For self improvement

More information

Intro. The need for a philosophical vocabulary

Intro. The need for a philosophical vocabulary Critical Realism & Philosophy Webinar Ruth Groff August 5, 2015 Intro. The need for a philosophical vocabulary You don t have to become a philosopher, but just as philosophers should know their way around

More information

Rejecting Jackson s Knowledge Argument with an Account of a priori Physicalism

Rejecting Jackson s Knowledge Argument with an Account of a priori Physicalism NOĒSIS XVII Spring 2016 Rejecting Jackson s Knowledge Argument with an Account of a priori Physicalism Reggie Mills I. Introduction In 1982 Frank Jackson presented the Knowledge Argument against physicalism:

More information

KANT, MORAL DUTY AND THE DEMANDS OF PURE PRACTICAL REASON. The law is reason unaffected by desire.

KANT, MORAL DUTY AND THE DEMANDS OF PURE PRACTICAL REASON. The law is reason unaffected by desire. KANT, MORAL DUTY AND THE DEMANDS OF PURE PRACTICAL REASON The law is reason unaffected by desire. Aristotle, Politics Book III (1287a32) THE BIG IDEAS TO MASTER Kantian formalism Kantian constructivism

More information

Review Tutorial (A Whirlwind Tour of Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of Religion)

Review Tutorial (A Whirlwind Tour of Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of Religion) Review Tutorial (A Whirlwind Tour of Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of Religion) Arguably, the main task of philosophy is to seek the truth. We seek genuine knowledge. This is why epistemology

More information

Panpsychism and the Combination Problem. Hyungrae Noh. A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts

Panpsychism and the Combination Problem. Hyungrae Noh. A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts Panpsychism and the Combination Problem by Hyungrae Noh A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts Approved April 2013 by the Graduate Supervisory Committee:

More information

A Review of Neil Feit s Belief about the Self

A Review of Neil Feit s Belief about the Self A Review of Neil Feit s Belief about the Self Stephan Torre 1 Neil Feit. Belief about the Self. Oxford GB: Oxford University Press 2008. 216 pages. Belief about the Self is a clearly written, engaging

More information

Philosophy 5340 Epistemology Topic 4: Skepticism. Part 1: The Scope of Skepticism and Two Main Types of Skeptical Argument

Philosophy 5340 Epistemology Topic 4: Skepticism. Part 1: The Scope of Skepticism and Two Main Types of Skeptical Argument 1. The Scope of Skepticism Philosophy 5340 Epistemology Topic 4: Skepticism Part 1: The Scope of Skepticism and Two Main Types of Skeptical Argument The scope of skeptical challenges can vary in a number

More information

To appear in The Journal of Philosophy.

To appear in The Journal of Philosophy. To appear in The Journal of Philosophy. Lucy Allais: Manifest Reality: Kant s Idealism and his Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. xi + 329. 40.00 (hb). ISBN: 9780198747130. Kant s doctrine

More information

Reply to Kirk and Melnyk

Reply to Kirk and Melnyk SWIF Philosophy of Mind, 09 May 2003 http://www.swif.uniba.it/lei/mind/forums/papineau.htm Forums Forum 4 Reply to Kirk and Melnyk David Papineau Department of Philosophy King's College London I am lucky

More information

Epistemic two-dimensionalism

Epistemic two-dimensionalism Epistemic two-dimensionalism phil 93507 Jeff Speaks December 1, 2009 1 Four puzzles.......................................... 1 2 Epistemic two-dimensionalism................................ 3 2.1 Two-dimensional

More information

Dualism: What s at stake?

Dualism: What s at stake? Dualism: What s at stake? Dualists posit that reality is comprised of two fundamental, irreducible types of stuff : Material and non-material Material Stuff: Includes all the familiar elements of the physical

More information