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Asherlee
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Asherlee
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Shepherd

A philosophical zombie is a hypothetical being that is almost entirely indistinguishable from a "normal" human being on earth. There is one exception, a p-zombie lacks conscious experience (which is what we will call QUALIA). For example, when a p-zombie is slapped across the face with the back of my hand for being insubordinate, it does not actually feel any pain. While it may behave exactly as if it does feel pain (scream out or wince), it does not actually have the experience of pain as a putative "normal" person would. Another example, a p-zombie cannot experience the true redness of an apple (referring to the inverted spectrum theory).

So, a p-zombie is a challenge to physicalism. Physicalism is basically states that all other facts are dependent purely on physical facts. That there is no mind, only a brain. Now then, here is how the argument against physicalism lays out according to p-zombie.

1. If physicalism is true, then it is NOT possible for there to be a world in which all the physical facts are the same as those of the actually world, but in which there are ADDITIONAL facts.

2. But there is a possible world in which all the physical facts are the same as those of our world, but in which there are additional facts. (This means, it is possible that there is a world exactly like ours in every physical respect, but everyone would lack certain mental states, namely qualia. Even though they look and act just like we would).

3. Therefore, physicalism is false (Conclusion follows by modus tollens)


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What I ask of you:

1. Do premise 1 and 2 appear to be true? Please justify your answer.

2. If you answered 'no' to the above question, you are saying that there is no difference between a mental state (metaphysical) and a brain state (physical). If that is the case, how do you combat theories like Inverted Spectrum? Inverted spectrum basically states that one day you possibly could wake up and see all colors inverted. Green would be red, red would be green, etc.

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EnterOrion
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EnterOrion
4,220 posts
Nomad

I always thought the opposite of red was purple . . . .

Anyways, physicalism is BS, judging by what you have given me.

Where else do personalities come from? Identical twins very often have very different personalities.

MageGrayWolf
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MageGrayWolf
9,462 posts
Farmer

I always thought the opposite of red was purple


purple doesn't really exist in the light wave spectrum, it's a composite of two colors.
EnterOrion
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EnterOrion
4,220 posts
Nomad

purple doesn't really exist in the light wave spectrum, it's a composite of two colors.


Okay, violet. At the high end of visible light, just before ultraviolet.

Better?
Moegreche
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Moegreche
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Duke

The first premise is simply the definition of physicalism - that the only facts in the world are physical facts. So if we're going to reject a premise, it'll have to be premise 2.
The physicalist here could argue that premise 2 begs the question against physicalism. We are positing a world that, according to physicalism, can't be posited. The motivation for this world's existence (basically, the existence of p-zombies), is our intuitive notion of mental states having a certain intrinsic quality to them.
I love this debate and I'm so glad you brought it up, Ash. Although this may just turn into a conversation between like 3 people, I would like to offer some motivations for physicalism. While I don't think the theory is right, I think a lot of philosophers would like it to be right.

So physical is contrasted with other theories of mind: dualism, phenomenalism, functionalism, behaviorism, etc. And while physicalism has its problems, all these theories have some devastating problem or other.
Dualism, the claim that there are two distinct substances (mental and physical) has a tough problem with interaction (although Bill Lycan has a new-ish paper out that gives a plausible defense of dualism).
Phenomenalism is just false. It claims that material states are reducible to sense data, or phenomenal, states. But Chisholm has shown, I think definitively, that we need additional physical facts to get a reduction. So, having a red ball in front of you does not analytically imply that you will see red. You also need a statement about your being in normal observation conditions.
Functionalism ignores the intrinsic qualities of experience as well. It's still not well enough defined for an actual discussion in this kind of format. It's just not "ripe" as a theory - even though it's been around for like 40 years.
And behaviorism was shown by Putnam to be untenable. If mental states are just the disposition to exhibit certain behaviors, then there will be very problematic consequences. The view has pretty much been abandoned.
What physicalism offers is an explanation of the causal relation between the physical facts of the world and our mental states. It also provides a way out of skeptical arguments, since our experience is made true by the physical facts of the world. And notice that if we deal purely in phenomenal talk, we don't have the requisite facts needed to know if we're in proper observation conditions.
A consequence, then, of physicalism could be that we don't have a priori access to our internal states or the content of our thoughts. There's a great article by Tyler Burge who uses Hilary Putnam's Twin Earth thought experiment to get a reasonable argument that we don't have internal access.
My point is this: what's the difference between a p-zombie and the consequence of physicalism? Not much, really. Both us and p-zombies believe we have internal access, but it may turn out that we don't. Perhaps we are all p-zombies in this respect. Perhaps the thought experiment just relies on the delusion we all suffer that we do have internal states.

thisisnotanalt
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thisisnotanalt
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Farmer

The physicalist here could argue that premise 2 begs the question against physicalism. We are positing a world that, according to physicalism, can't be posited.


A consequence, then, of physicalism could be that we don't have a priori access to our internal states or the content of our thoughts. There's a great article by Tyler Burge who uses Hilary Putnam's Twin Earth thought experiment to get a reasonable argument that we don't have internal access.


From what I understand(which isn't much; I'm a 7th grader, not a philosophy student) physicalism itself proposes no difference between our mind and our brain, i.e. a part of us. Assuming that this is true for physicalism, and assuming therefore that our thoughts and internal states are by extension part of us, why wouldn't we have internal access? According to physicalism, my thoughts are as much a part of me as my foot. I have access to my foot, and all other parts of my body, be it directly or indirectly. As far as we're concerned, we all have some sort of access to all parts of us - physicalism, then, is claiming that the human physiology is different than we know it to be. That we have organs, basically, that we cannot access, but still get feedback from. It sounds good on paper, sure, that we don't really have access to our thoughts, blah blah blah, but when applied to the real world, it just doesn't make sense to me.

On another note . . . physicalism states, then, that our thoughts are basically a part of us. The very fact that they are a part of us means we have access to them, because we are them, and they are us.

I'm probably wrong about this, though. I'll have to read up on physicalism more . . . .
Moegreche
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Moegreche
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Duke

According to physicalism, my thoughts are as much a part of me as my foot. I have access to my foot, and all other parts of my body, be it directly or indirectly.


That's a good point. But having access to your foot is not the same as having access to your thoughts. To have access to your foot, all you'd need (I guess) is to be able to touch it. I suppose you could say that you would have to know things about your foot, i.e. it has 5 toes, it smells bad, etc. To have access to your thoughts, you need to know the content of your thoughts - what it is that you're thinking about.
For physicalism, your thoughts are composed of nothing more than particular physical states and are causally related to the physical world around you. Given this, we can construct the following thought experiment:

Let's say you're looking at a piece of paper that appears red to you. You form the belief that the piece of paper is red. You also believe that you're entertaining thoughts about a red piece of paper.
For internalists (like dualists) what makes your belief true that you are having a red experience is simply your experience. The problem with this view is that it's wide open to skepticism.
For physicalism, what makes your belief true is the physical world around you and your relation to it. It's true because that's the way the world is.
Now let's suppose the piece of paper you're looking at isn't actually red - it's white. It turns out that the white piece of paper had a bright red light underneath it that just made it look red to you.
So, on the physicalist account, you're not thinking about a red piece of paper. Instead, you're thinking about a white piece of paper that is being illuminated by a red light. But you don't know this! You think that you're thinking about a red piece of paper.
The upshot here is that you don't have access to the content of your thoughts, like you would on internalist accounts.
thisisnotanalt
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thisisnotanalt
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Farmer

To have access to your thoughts, you need to know the content of your thoughts - what it is that you're thinking about.



If I may draw a parallel here, one doesn't need to have access to the content of his or her foot in order to have access to it. Because my thoughts are supposedly all physical states and therefore a part of me, why would my thoughts have special accessibility permissions? All I need to know to have access to my foot is my perception of its existence - there's a word for that, I think, knowing where all your body parts are at a given time - and because my thoughts are physical states causally related to the physical world, that means that I should be able to confirm their content the same way as I can confirm the existence of the bones in my feet - simply by feeling that my foot is there. It seems to me, at least, that physicalism is positing that our thoughts are physically a part of us, but we can't prove that they are. In this way, it seems to have a problem very similar to the main one with dualism - the supposed link between mind and body.

Another thing about physicalism is that it implies a fundamental separation between what we really think and what we believe. Beliefs are thoughts, and if we can only believe we think something, like physicalism says, it leads to an infinite chain. 'I believe I think this, but I only believe that I believe that I think this, and I only believe that I believe that I believe that I think this' etc. I really don't understand how one can consider something like that rational - it doesn't prevent infinite skepticism or uncertainty, it breeds it.

Onto the thought experiment . . . .

Let's say you're looking at a piece of paper that appears red to you. You form the belief that the piece of paper is red. You also believe that you're entertaining thoughts about a red piece of paper.


So far, I believe that I believe that I believe that I believe that I believe that I believe that the piece of paper is red. I believe I think I'm entertaining thoughts about a red piece of paper.

For internalists (like dualists) what makes your belief true that you are having a red experience is simply your experience. The problem with this view is that it's wide open to skepticism.


I can see that, the skepticism being motivated by the fact that since we only perceive things, we only perceive the experience, and therefore it may not validate itself perfectly.

For physicalism, what makes your belief true is the physical world around you and your relation to it. It's true because that's the way the world is.


. . . which is a lot closer than a stone's throw away from the internalist standpoint, except that they believe that the experience validates itself, whereas the physicalist believes that it's red because it is that way.

So, on the physicalist account, you're not thinking about a red piece of paper. Instead, you're thinking about a white piece of paper that is being illuminated by a red light. But you don't know this! You think that you're thinking about a red piece of paper.


. . . this is where sensory perception comes in. Our perspective shows it still as a red piece of paper - it doesn't matter that the object that sparked those thoughts isn't really red, because as far as we're concerned, it is. Even though it isn't the truth, that's what we see it as, so that's how we think of it. It isn't really that we don't know the contents of our thoughts, but simply that we misinterpret what we're thinking about, and our thoughts are affected accordingly. Our brain is not omniscient, and if our brain determines something as being red and not white, but illuminated as red, we're gonna think it's red. The content of our thoughts is what we make it to be, because we make our thoughts. By the same principle, we do know what the content of our thoughts is because we manufacture our thoughts ourselves.

The upshot here is that you don't have access to the content of your thoughts, like you would on internalist accounts.


And what I'm arguing now is that physicalism seems to think that our thoughts are omniscient and necessarily correct, but we misinterpret them and believe they are something they are not. This doesn't make any sense at all - our thoughts are a product of us, we make them, we control them, and because our brain forms thoughts out of outside stimuli, it is possible for the content of our thoughts to be accessible, but wrong.

Sorry if there're any typos. I have yet another sinus infection(three cheers for getting a CT scan appointment in the next few days)and so I'm not typing at my full speed or accuracy level.
Moegreche
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Moegreche
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Duke

Your argument, alt, is something I really want to agree with. In fact, the conclusion that we don't have access to our thoughts was used as a reductio against externalist theories. But the externalists just accepted the conclusion. They end up moving the skepticism about the external world to skepticism about the internal world. It's not something I like, it's not something I agree with at all. But it is what it is.
Unfortunately, this just isn't really the format required to fairly represent physicalism. There is just soooo much background information, articles, and arguments that get us to this point that it would take more time than I have to go through it all.

I will point out a few things, though:

Having access to our thoughts just isn't like having access to some physical part of our body. Physicalists aren't going to argue that thoughts are actual physical entities, like fingers. The ultimate claim is that our mental states are identical to physical states. It's an incredibly broad claim that can be argued to imply a number of difference consequences. And while our beliefs are part of our mental state, it would be silly to say that they're physical objects.
I don't want to get caught up in this - I just wanted to bring forth the idea that we could all be p-zombies and just not know it. I realize it isn't a very convincing position on the surface, but the motivation behind it is quite strong. And again, unfortunately, it's not something we can properly delve into here.
But look back at your post at some of the criticisms you've made against physicalism. As implausible as it all sounds, many of the points you make against the theory end up begging the question.
Here's an example:

This doesn't make any sense at all - our thoughts are a product of us, we make them, we control them, and because our brain forms thoughts out of outside stimuli, it is possible for the content of our thoughts to be accessible, but wrong.

By saying our thoughts are a product of us, you are denying a physicalist premise. But you're doing so without any argument for it. I absolutely agree that it seems that way. I absolutely agree that theories that deny access to our internal thoughts are just ... unintuitive. But there's really no good way to get out of the argument. A lot of really good philosophers have tried.

All I want is for us to keep in mind an interesting response for the physicalist: what if we're all p-zombies?
At the core of this question is what does it mean to have qualia? Is this something expressible? We can define the qualia of a state as what it's like to be in that state. So being scared has a particular feel to it. And it seems to be that feeling that helps us identify the state.
But if our mental states are identical to some physical state, it seems impossible that we could wiggle our way out this. Just because something seems a certain way in no way implies that it is that way.

On a side note, I just got done writing an article on epistemic disjunctivism. It seems that more and more philosophers are starting to opt for theories that deny internal access because it gets us out of skeptical scenarios. But it's starting to look like a disjunctivist (and maybe even a physicalist) could accept physicalism while accepting that we can, in fact, access our internal states.
But good god the literature at this point gets sooooo heavy....
kingryan
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kingryan
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Farmer

a p-zombie cannot experience the true redness of an apple


I'm colourblind.

That means I am a zombie right?

Awesome!
thisisnotanalt
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thisisnotanalt
9,821 posts
Farmer

By saying our thoughts are a product of us, you are denying a physicalist premise.


I am also using a scientific fact. Unless philosophy trumps fact, I don't see the problem here. Even if we're all p-zombies, our thoughts are still there, as stuff created by our brains, even if we can only believe that we can access them. Which again leads me to the belief that physicalism doesn't stop skepticism, it infinitely creates it: we can only think we're really thinking, i.e. accessing the content of our thoughts. Which means we can only believe that we're thinking that we're thinking. But wait, believing is thinking too! Oh geez! It leads to an infinite loop of only believing, which makes it one of those infinite 'what-if' positions that's half-hearted and almost impossible to argue - and also bordering on being utterly illogical.

What I'm trying to do mostly here is get a better understanding of physicalism and the potential arguments against it, Moe. Thanks a bunch for helping me with that.
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