Materialists......

[I less than three logic]

Not bad, considering that it took real philosophers 225 years, give or take.

~~ Paul

Well, it may have taken about 225 years, but they did it in only 59 pages. This only shows we're faster, not more productive.

 

[Bubo]

he only yoga I like is the one practiced by Dhalsim. The rest is just woo.

While "Street Fighter" is an undeniably great video game series, I think it's more than a little narrow of you to dismiss a millenia-old practice(s) with a two-sentence quip.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Well, it may have taken about 225 years, but they did it in only 59 pages. This only shows we're faster, not more productive.

We didn't have time to produce the less verbose version of the proof.

I'm telling you, this paper was a real eye-opener for me:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/

Twelve pages and I still don't have any idea what conceivable means. But I do like this bit:

Consider a zombie world that is an exact physical duplicate of our world, so that in it all philosophers have zombie twins. In particular there are zombie twins of those who appeal to the conceivability argument. Katalin Balog (1999) argues that the utterances of these zombie-twin philosophers would be meaningful, although their sentences would not always mean what they do in our mouths. She further argues — to oversimplify — that if the conceivability argument were sound in actual philosophers’ mouths, then it would be sound in the mouths of zombie philosophers too. But since by hypothesis physicalism is true in their world, their argument is not sound. Therefore the conceivability argument used by actual philosophers is not sound either.

Hang on! Notice how this argument for conceivability depends on metaphysical assumptions. I thought Geoff said it didn't. Now I'm even more confused.

~~ Paul

 

[Bubo]

"Neti, Neti, Neti"

Do you think the relationship between the word "neti" and "nothing" is accidental, Darren?

Enough. See you all tomorrow.

The use of "neti neti" in this sense is an oversimplification. As mentioned in the wiki article, the most correct translation is "neither neither." In the later Buddhist schools, and particularly, the Madhyamika school of Nagarjuna, the term "neti neti" is used to denote the "middle way," the middle being the avoidance of the "two extremes;" absolute being and absolute nothingness. To see only the connection with "nothing" tends to nihilism...

 

[Apathia]

But only barely. Introspection is what gave us religion. And that alone is enough to discredit it.

A friendly piece of advice to Bubo. If you have read through the most of the thread from the OP (A task that takes many days of dedication), and now read Belz's response above, you will understand the futility of talking Introspection as a source of knowledge in the JREF Forum.

I sympathise with your approach due to some Buddhist background, and see it's value in a different context.
However, here you will find a number of obstacles to asserting anything of Subjective knowlwedge.

1. Things that you can assert based on your subjective knowledege are in the Skeptical context less than anecdotal. What one person and one person only can witness, has no Scientific value.

2. Metaphysics is either informed by or it's assertions proven by an emperical method or its statements have no meaning whatsoever.

3. The majority position here is that "Mind," "Self-Consciusness," and any other words you use in reporting your introspection are functional to language only and refer to no reality outside of discourse except to physiological events in the brain. Brain and mind are just two words for the same thing and it's made of matter. The OP is incorrect in saying a distinction can be made between them. (The consitant misreading of what the OP said by the majority of the posters in this thread still has me shaking my head in disbelief.)

4. If you insist you have a self-consciouness and that its significant enough to claim as real and worthy of Philosophical discourse, someone here will insist to you that Self-Consciouness is not only an illusion but is delusional and that you are just a piece of meat. Not that anyone here who says that relates to their loved ones and themselves that way. Belz doesn't switch off his prefrontal lobe stop thinking about himself and his life least he tread on the dangerous ground of religion and its wicked sister, Philosophy. He's not a P Zombie or whatever that thing is. This is just what he must say to drive home his point.

5. The point is that the majoriity worldview of the major posters in this thread, excepting JustGeoff & Hammy, (I'm not one of the majors and my preferences are not being argued here.) is Materialism and that Materialism is, if not proven by Science, so integral to Science that it cannot be questioned. Metaphysical arguments can't dislodge it. If you try to use arguments based on Introspection, that's worse than going Metaphysical.

This post is just a disclaimer. Welcome to the JREF Forum and proceed at your own risk. Prepare to be fired upon! LOL

 

[Apathia]

The use of "neti neti" in this sense is an oversimplification. As mentioned in the wiki article, the most correct translation is "neither neither." In the later Buddhist schools, and particularly, the Madhyamika school of Nagarjuna, the term "neti neti" is used to denote the "middle way," the middle being the avoidance of the "two extremes;" absolute being and absolute nothingness. To see only the connection with "nothing" tends to nihilism...

Yes! and Mu!

 

[UndercoverElephant]

The use of "neti neti" in this sense is an oversimplification. As mentioned in the wiki article, the most correct translation is "neither neither." .

Thanks for that, Bubo, and welcome to the thread. I was just persuing the latest entries before I disappear to the pub - I think I can safely answer this one though.

Yes, you are completely correct. It was an oversimplification, but that was only because it was direct at lifegazer....

In the later Buddhist schools, and particularly, the Madhyamika school of Nagarjuna, the term "neti neti" is used to denote the "middle way," the middle being the avoidance of the "two extremes;" absolute being and absolute nothingness.

If there's a central theme to my posts on this board in recent months, this is it. My major bugbear is extremists on both sides of the religion/science, materialism/idealism and naturalism/supernaturalism debates. My position is designed to be the middle way between the two in all three cases. And yes, absolute being and absolute nothingness are themselves two components of a dual concept.

Namaste.

 

[Belz...]

While "Street Fighter" is an undeniably great video game series, I think it's more than a little narrow of you to dismiss a millenia-old practice(s) with a two-sentence quip.

Oh, I can also dismis Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Egyptian mythology, astrology, the Greek pantheon, Quetzalcoatl, homeopathy, dowsing, spirit guides, sasquatches and imposition of hands.

And some of these beliefs have been around for even longer than yoga.

 

[LW]

WOW! Two pickled herrings later and common sense has broken out in this thread! I basically agree with everything you say here, you simply don't take account of the wider context in which this logical argument arose. When Robin originally tried to formalise it, he only took account of one portion of a larger argument. However, the portion you have very nicely turned into predicate calculus is just fine.

Nice that you agree. I want to empasize that this means that your earlier argument that sentences P₀ - P₂ entail that consciousness is not physical was premature and you need add something more before you get the result.

In effect, this logic proves that IF p-zombies can exist, consciousness can't be physical.

Now we move into dangerous waters. The argument above was that if they do exist, then consciousness isn't physical. Here we have can exist and we have to consider this more clearly. What do we mean here with "can exist"? This is not a standard concept of predicate logic so we have to pin down its exact semantics before we know if the quoted sentence follows logically from P₀ - P₂.

I can immediately think of three possible interpretations for it:

• That there exists a model for P₀ - P₂ where the interpretation of the predicate symbol Z is not empty. That is, that if we augment the set of premises with the sentence "exists p . Z(p)" we do not get an inconsistency.
  
• That we move from predicate calculus to some modal logic where "possible" is a modality and we express "can exist" as "possible exists p . Z(p)".
  
• That we do otherwise as in the second option but use only predicate calculus syntax to define a new predicate symbol to denote the "can exist" concept.

I would immediately rule out the third one since that approach is suitable only for really simple problems with small domains and it will quickly break down when complexity of the model increases. [Side note: I have used this approach successfully for solving simple planning puzzles where you can define the moves that can be made at any state with a couple of simple rules.]

Of the other two, the first one is the one that is to me the more natural interpretation of "can exist". This is because my background is in computational logic where we are interested in solving real world problems with mathematical logic and it is more useful in practice to say that "possibly A" means that "there is a model where A is true". Those who are more into philosophical logic may disagree and they have the right to do so.

However, I'm not particularly keen on trying to model the system using some modal logic. This is mainly because it has been a long time since I've worked with them and even then I have mostly used LTL and CTL (linear time logic and computation tree logic) that are not suitable for this case, so I would have to brush up my memory before doing the modeling. But I'm willing to examine the formalization if someone else provides it.

This leaves us with the first, and to me the natural, interpretation. However, here we can easily construct a structure that is a model for P₀ -- P₂ and where exists p . Z(p) is true:

[latex]$U = \{ c, p \}$ \\
$A = \{ c \}$ \\
$P = \emptyset$ \\
$Z = \{ p \}$ \\
$H = \emptyset$ [/latex]

Note that in this structure consciousness is not physical.

This means that the "logically consistent" interpretation for "can exist" is not strong enough to conclude the non-physicality of consciousness. Under this formalization, p-zombies "can exist" but neg P(c) was not entailed. The same holds also for the other direction, from this we can't conclude that consciousness is physical, either.

So, to salvage the proof you have to model it using some modal logic. I have to warn you that if you choose to undertake that project, you will have hard time in justifying your choice of the logic as well as your formalization. Predicate logic is nice and clean (for some values of 'nice' and 'clean', at least) and, most importantly, there is only one predicate logic (well, only one logic that is the predicate logic). But as soon you open the doors for modal logic, you face a choice of several dozens of candidate logics, each with its own axioms.

Our current conceptual scheme makes them very easy to imagine.

There are many things that that are very easy to imagine but that don't exists. For example, right now I'm imagining a walrus that is as big as the block of flats opposite my window. But unfortunately such walruses don't exist. And can't exist, if our current theories of biology and physics are even reasonably close to being correct.

That I'm able to conceive something doesn't say anything about the existence or even the possibility of existence of that thing.

We have an apparently neccesary connection which we are conceptually incapable of explaining. Nagel's position is that this suggests there is something wrong with our concepts. He suggests we look for a new conceptual scheme, under which the neccessary connection between minds and brains becomes obvious and transparent. At this point, p-zombies will become conceptually impossible as well as actually impossible. Do you follow?

I think that I get the basic idea. I haven't had time to read that Nagel's paper so I'm not certain if I get the details of his argument.

How I see the matter is this: Suppose that we somehow could construct a formal structure S that modeled our universe and its history perfectly (this is of course impossible to do in reality, the simplest argument against it is that we would have to construct another much larger universe to store it). Suppose further that in addition of containing information of what really is and was, it contains all information of what might have happened: every time there is some random event, the structure branches and both choices are included. And this structure covers the whole history of universe, from the beginning to the end. So, essentially S is an accurate model of our noumenal reality. And as it contains also all possibilities, saying that something is possible means that there some branch in S where the thing is true.

Now, with respect to p-zombie and consciousness question, there are four possibilities:

• Consciousness is non-physical and there are no p-zombies in S.
• Consciousness is physical and there are no p-zombies in S.
• Consciousness is non-physical and there is at least one p-zombie in S.
• Consciousness is physical and there is at least one p-zombie in S.

Our noumenal reality corresponds to one of these choices. Note that if it happens to be the last, it means that the laws of logic don't hold in the universe and all attempts to use reason to deduce anything about it are in the end futile.

Supposing that the universe is not contradictory, we live in one of the three first choices. Nagel's problem occurs only in the first one. In the second one a p-zombie is as impossible as a non-prime number 7, and if we are in the third one, Nagel is barking the wrong tree when he tries to eliminate the zombies. So, you need the new conceptualization only if you think that we are in the first situation.

My personal opinion is that we will never be able to distinguish which of the above choices is really true. I believe that the second one is the most probable one but if I ever claim that I can prove it, you can (and should) take away my licence to practice logic.

 

[Belz...]

1. Things that you can assert based on your subjective knowledege are in the Skeptical context less than anecdotal. What one person and one person only can witness, has no Scientific value.

And with very good reason. Imagine a science based on gut feelings.

3. The majority position here is that "Mind," "Self-Consciusness," and any other words you use in reporting your introspection are functional to language only and refer to no reality outside of discourse except to physiological events in the brain. Brain and mind are just two words for the same thing and it's made of matter. The OP is incorrect in saying a distinction can be made between them. (The consitant misreading of what the OP said by the majority of the posters in this thread still has me shaking my head in disbelief.)

No, Geoff is quite correct in saying that a distinction can be made between brain and mind : a dead brain is still a brain, but without the mind to go with it. That is not the point in dispute, as far as I'm concerned.

4. If you insist you have a self-consciouness and that its significant enough to claim as real and worthy of Philosophical discourse, someone here will insist to you that Self-Consciouness is not only an illusion but is delusional and that you are just a piece of meat.

Beign not a vegan myself, I _like_ meat, so it's no insult!

Belz doesn't switch off his prefrontal lobe stop thinking about himself and his life least he tread on the dangerous ground of religion and its wicked sister, Philosophy. He's not a P Zombie or whatever that thing is. This is just what he must say to drive home his point.

Well, it's simple how things work up there. I've never been able to accept much without some form of proof. Of course, this tendency has been greatly "worsened" since I discovered CSICOP, which eventually led me here.

5. The point is that the majoriity worldview of the major posters in this thread, excepting JustGeoff & Hammy, (I'm not one of the majors and my preferences are not being argued here.) is Materialism and that Materialism is, if not proven by Science, so integral to Science that it cannot be questioned. Metaphysical arguments can't dislodge it. If you try to use arguments based on Introspection, that's worse than going Metaphysical.

The problem with metaphysical statements is, of course, that they are rarely useful for anything, and are mostly unfalsifiable (perhaps even always so.) Since feel-good thoughts don't drive me forward, I see little use in even considering them.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

It looks like you are comparing this argument to the ontological argument for the existence of God. If so, it is a completely false comparison. That argument is about claiming that a perfect God is conceivable, and that perfection includes existence, so God must exist. This argument has nothing to do with that argument. It bears no resemblance to it.

Nope, I was specifically talking about the claim that such a being is concievable. Not the other argument, that "if he is perfect he must exist" thing. Anyone can concieve of god but that doesn't mean he merits any sort of attention or that he is even logically consistant due to that.

I cannot relate any of that to this argument.

Really? All that work to come up with a perfect analogy and you just dismiss it out of hand? Well, perhaps it is flawed. Care to explain why? It seems to be exactly the same thing you are saying after all.

Let me just ask this. Is it or is it not the case that you are stating that because we can concieve of the mental attributes and our mental processes as two things that they therefore are forever seperate entities, which can never be called the same thing because we can always think of them as seperate? That is the very crux of my analogy, so if you are not claiming that then it does in fact fall apart. If that IS what you are stating, my analogy seems to apply just fine. What is the difference between the claim "since we can concieve of our mental states as seperate from our brain processes, they must be two seperate things in reality and can never be called the same thing" and "since we can concieve of "the killer" in a crime investigation as seperate, conceptually, from the eventual suspect that is actually convicted of the crime they must be two seperate things in reality and can never be called the same thing"?

Anyway, I'll put it right in this post again so you can look at it. If it's flawed, please try to actually explain the flaw this time.

The main issue with convicting someone of the crime of murder is that it doesn't FULLY explain the murder! Now I'm not saying the guy they arrested wasn't needed for the crime to take place, I'm just saying they need to go further than that to find the real culprit. I will show that investigation alone isn't enough to explain the phenomenon of the killer and that we need to use philosophy to attain a new method. You see when the investigation starts, all they have is "the killer". This conceptual killer could be anyone, by defition. That's the only logical way they can refer to so many different suspects as "the potential killer". The actual killer they find is different from this concept. They may say "this person is the killer" but it is NOT the concept they originally used. How can it be? They had no idea who that person even was and weren't referiing to him specifically when they started the investigation. I can concieve of the guy who killed seperate from "the killer" of the investigation. This is important! It MUST mean, for some reason, that "the killer" aspect is beyond the person! We must search beyond that person to find the true "killer of the investigation"! Since I can conceive of "the killer" as seperate from "the convicted suspect", then I can easily concieve of a p-murderer, a person who kills that is not "the killer". That person is devoid of that aspect. How can you all not see how amazingly true and perfect this logic is? If we can concieve of "the killer" in the sense of searching for the person who committed the act as seperate from the actual person eventually found and convicted, then there is in fact the possibility, at least conceptually, of nonkiller killers, and so there has to be some other part of the average murderer. The actual person is not the only one responsible for the act, but there's something deeper. I suspect quantum mechanics and the nature of how the observer seems to play a role in that should be involved in a truer understanding of criminal investigations. Why are you all looking at me like that? You're the ones who are crazy!

 

[Belz...]

My position is designed to be the middle way between the two in all three cases.

While I can appreciate and admire such a position, sometimes the only real choice is between two extremes. With the scientific truth, often so.

And yes, absolute being and absolute nothingness are themselves two components of a dual concept.

Well, since there seems to be no such thing as nothingness, I'm going to dismiss this for now.

 

[Robin]

At least we've finally arrived where the argument actually is now, rather than where it was in 1780. It only took 61 pages.

You are the one that wants to start from the Cartesian dichotomy, so strictly speaking you haven't reached 1780 yet.

 

[lifegazer]

Yes, you are completely correct. It was an oversimplification, but that was only because it was direct at lifegazer....

Public forum Geoff... for all to hear. You're always talking to everyone.

My position is designed to be the middle way between the two in all three cases. And yes, absolute being and absolute nothingness are themselves two components of a dual concept.

Namaste.

If absolute nothingness is one of two components, it cannot be the absolute essence of everything, can it?
Bring it on Geoff. Forget the middle ground now. I want to meet you at ground zero. I'm tired of the crap inbetween. The others will never ever meet you there. I can. It's upto you.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

LW:

So, to salvage the proof you have to model it using some modal logic. I have to warn you that if you choose to undertake that project, you will have hard time in justifying your choice....

I take my hat off to you. I have already stated on this board, twice, that this argument, when it is finally understood properly from a logical point of view, ends up in an argument about which type of modal logic you wish to employ (edit: I'm guessing it needs S5?). I do not pretend I understand how to choose which scheme of modal logic is legitimately appliable to this (or any other) argument.

You appear to have arrived at the same conclusion on your own. Good for you and have a nice day.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

We cannot sensibly define such a thing even if we wanted to. Numbers cannot have parents. It's conceptual nonsense.

Yes, agreed, if you use the biological definition of parent.

~~ Paul

 

[UndercoverElephant]

My personal opinion is that we will never be able to distinguish which of the above choices is really true.

Not by maths. Not by physics. Not by pure logic.

I believe that the second one is the most probable one but if I ever claim that I can prove it, you can (and should) take away my licence to practice logic.

No sir, you have my approval.

 

[lifegazer]

No sir, you have my approval.

You gain nothing by approving the logic of one who embraces the reality of a dud concept to support your philosophy... except, perhaps, a smile from him for stroking his ego. But only he cares about that.

 

[Robin]

Since you are obviously incapable of reading six pages of text,

Look, if you must resort to infantile insults at least try to make them plausible. I have already pointed out that I read the article the first time you posted it in another thread. I already pointed out that the first part of the article that you quoted did not relate to the zombie argument and I already posted parts of the article that did.

So when you say that I am incapable of reading the paper, either you didn’t read the posts you were responding to, or you are lying. Neither alternative does you or your argument credit.

Are you utterly incapable of distinguishing between conceptual conceivability and empirical possibility, because it's looking very much like that is the case?

“Conceptual conceivability”??????

I have never given any empirical evidence against the possibilities of p-zombies, since to do so would require a greater knowledge of neuroscience than any human being currently has. So clearly I am not talking about empirical possibility.

No, I am clearly talking about “conceivability” as “to apprehend by reason or imagination”.

Let’s take a look at the way Nagel suggests we go about conceiving of zombies:

All we have to do is imagine the physical system from the outside, and then imagine it from the inside -- as not having any inside in the experiential sense.

But it is clearly impossible by definition to imagine a p-zombie from the inside, so Nagel has not made his case here. He has not really thought about that sentence.

If I am to imagine a p-zombie, I must do it from the outside and infer something from it’s behaviour. So I have to do as I suggested earlier and imagine it from the outside – so for example I have to imagine a p-zombie going down to Bondi Beach, grabbing a felafel roll and coffee and sitting on the beach to watch the sun go down.

So I have to ask, why would it do that if it had no experiences? Mere hunger and thirst would not lead it to such a specific action. Is there something special about the nerve impulses gained from a Bondi sunset that would generate attractive powers.

That is the thing about imagination – it must have at least internal consistency, once that goes imagination fails. We can imagine the physically impossible acts of Wile E Coyote because they have internal consistency.

I cannot imagine a p-zombie as having behaviour like I have, so I cannot conceive of a p-zombie even if I cannot verify this intuition empirically.

Again - "your" concepts. Don't speak for me. I don't have a dualistic concept of mind and brain in the first place.

Then you do not have a coherent concept of what a mind is, at all.

And yet your concept of the mind leads to p-zombies being a conceptual possibility and the are absolutely unimaginable in mine.

And I don’t have a coherent concept of the mind? Maybe you just have to rethink that.

 

[Apathia]

The problem with metaphysical statements is, of course, that they are rarely useful for anything, and are mostly unfalsifiable (perhaps even always so.) Since feel-good thoughts don't drive me forward, I see little use in even considering them.

If the metaphysics your talking about are all those inpirational, affirmation thingies, they do nothing for me either.

As for Metaphysics in the sense of the answers we seek to find about our realtionship to reality, we all carry around a worldviews that involve assumptions. Some of them can be decided emperically, some of them are outside an emperical determination, some of them are a priori, some of them are arbitrary, some of them are accepted for functionality. It behooves us to know what we believe, because we all believe to some extent. It doesn't help us to deny that we have beliefs. Instead we want to examine our beliefs and not take beliefs so seriously that they blind us and back us into corners that make living difficult if not impossible.

We should simply know what our metaphysical assumptions are and not get carried away with them. The kind of thinking that dmands a absolute and a dogma in any area of life, be it worldview, religion, or Science, always puts the squeeze on us. It's fine to have Materialism, Idealism, or Netural Monism as your working Metaphysic. Just beware when it makes demands that diminish the quality of your living or claims a certain aspect of your being is wrong.
Platonic Idealism and Christain Idealim based upon it dengrates human sexuality. Some shools of Oriental Mysticism make their satan discriminating intelligence. A Materialist who has to treat himself and others as objective material instead of persons because there's no such thing as a person, has painted himself into a sad corner. If your worldview damands you pluck out an eye, emasculate yourself, starve yourself, give your self a mental or spiritual lobotomy. Just don't go there with it. watch out for a fear based position. Someone might believe in the parental God because that gives them a feeling of security. My college Physics professor was a Theist, but he confessed to me that though believing in God gave him some comfort in some ways, he feared belief in supernatural beings because they could interfere with the course of the physical world and leave him without confidence in the laws of nature. A strickly materialistc-reductionistic-deterministic worldview can utterly rule out freak events that inspire woo-woo. It clears the table of all spiritual considerations so one is safe from religion. But be careful of the cost.
be prgmatic, not dogmatic. (I'm not a Theist, I'm not assigning any value to being one. Theists need to grow up.) (Again: in a nutshell, being spiritual is being a compassionate person.)
Be introspective to catch your unawares beliefs. Examine them and use them creatively. Beware anything that cannot be questioned.