logical bob wrote:

Thommo wrote:Just bookmarking for spectation purposes, since the reason for the thread was too many cooks in t'other one. Good luck, enjoyed the OP Lbob.

Thanks, and your contributions are always relevant and welcome. It was actually a post of yours that triggered the thought. You said recently that the easiest response might be to just accept you were a p-zombie. It prompted me to dig out a couple of books I hadn't looked at for a while.

Well, a few words, since the thread isn't racing away like the other did.

I'm very sympathetic to this view, I'm not sure what it means to say I have a "red qualia" or "am a p-zombie". What if my "red qualia" was swapped with my "blue qualia", how could I know? My memories of seeing things that were red would still match my experience of seeing red, I'd still describe the things I see the same way. What if one of my qualia were turned off? What if all of them were turned off? How could I in "metaphysical principle" detect such a change? If I do reject that these things are "ontological objects", then what's left of "subjective awareness" but a rather dismal Cartesian theatre? A homunculus in a machine?

The whole affair smells suspicious. Phenomenal quality, "what it is like"-ness doesn't stack up at all. There's no evident difference between recognising red and "subjectively experiencing red". I see this as like saying that once you know what's happening to every part of the water, you know everything there is to know about waves in that water, there's no additional mystical "wave-ness". Once you know what all the players (referee, crowd, pitch, ball, weather etc. for those who are picky) are doing you know everything about the football match, there's no additional "social truth" of football. The social truth is simply the actions of the individuals looked at as a sum. If this kind of reductive explanation can work, then there's a much larger hurdle in declaring the hard problem than someone like David Chalmers acknowledges.

If there are no mental entities, then "I" don't exist, which is where most of us balk?

To accept that I am a p-zombie is, at first sight at least, to accept that other people may reasonably treat me as a non-sentient lump, which is reasonably frightening? The whole matter of the evolved trick of using ToM to predict people and also see them as conscious, is tied in with our evolved ability to cooperate, and with partly innate moral intuitions about how sentient beings should or should not be treated.

zoon wrote:If there are no mental entities, then "I" don't exist, which is where most of us balk?

To accept that I am a p-zombie is, at first sight at least, to accept that other people may reasonably treat me as a non-sentient lump, which is reasonably frightening? The whole matter of the evolved trick of using ToM to predict people and also see them as conscious, is tied in with our evolved ability to cooperate, and with partly innate moral intuitions about how sentient beings should or should not be treated.

I'm not sure any of those things follow. If there are no mental entities then "you" exist, but as an object, not as an object AND a separate subject. Similarly if everyone is a p-zombie, then the basis for differentiating sentience is not and never was what you're now implying it was - so nothing has in fact changed that justifies "reasonably treating you as a non-sentient lump".

If I say there's no forest above and beyond the trees (plants, fungus and animals) that make it up, that doesn't mean that there are no ecological consequences of running a road through the middle of it because the forest is now an "illusion", "composite" or "alternate description" instead of a "thing in its own right". The consequences are just the same.

This is why I gave the example of water waves. They aren't extra things, but you can still talk about them. But it's sleight of hand to pretend a description of every physical fact about water is lacking something if not expressed in the language of waves.

If all that sounds a bit far fetched, then all I can do is point out how the demise of vitalism (and associated beliefs, such as animism) has not affected differing attitudes towards life as compared to non life. The value and beauty of a species lies in its richness and complexity, not in a unique and unreproducible "fundamental nature or spirit".

If everyone is a p-zombie, then what, in your view, would be a basis for differentiating sentience? (I would have expected that everyone being a p-zombie is another way of saying that sentience doesn't exist.)

Perhaps I'm thinking in legal/moral terms: if there are laws about not driving roads through forests, and somebody then claims that forests don't exist, they are no more than the sum of the trees etc, then the laws are going to need to be rewritten to describe just what kind of collections of trees are to be protected from roads. If we are p-zombies, then just what kinds of collections of molecules are to count as sentient for social purposes?

I do agree in principle that we are (almost certainly) no more than matter operating according to the laws of physics, but until we understand and can manage our brains as the essentially non-private mechanisms they are, we are stuck with the evolved guesswork of assuming for practical purposes that mental entities exist? To follow your analogies, where people are concerned, we can only think effectively (so far) in terms of forests and waves; if we try to count the trees or understand the forces on water molecules we rapidly get lost?

Many of our social structures depend heavily on ignorance, on our inability to know or control exactly what is going on in another person's brain. Science may undermine that useful ignorance? It's not obvious how the resulting power struggles could play out.

zoon wrote:
To accept that I am a p-zombie is, at first sight at least, to accept that other people may reasonably treat me as a non-sentient lump, which is reasonably frightening?

Actually I am quite a stupid p-zombie. I fooled myself into thinking everyone else is sentient and even worse that I am sentient.

If you want to be treated as a non-sentient lump start a conversation with Hack ... just joking ... sort of.

zoon wrote:If there are no mental entities, then "I" don't exist, which is where most of us balk?

To accept that I am a p-zombie is, at first sight at least, to accept that other people may reasonably treat me as a non-sentient lump, which is reasonably frightening? The whole matter of the evolved trick of using ToM to predict people and also see them as conscious, is tied in with our evolved ability to cooperate, and with partly innate moral intuitions about how sentient beings should or should not be treated.

Except humans treat others as non-sentient all the time, hence why we have the ability to harm other people intentionally. If we were acutely aware of their sentience at all times I dunno if we could ever intentionally bring harm to others. Hence why people that do this tend to get called things like "unfeeling monsters".

I know this isn't typically covered by the p-zombie thing, but are some animals p-zombies? That is, what is the least complex animal that you'd say has sentience? Is it a gradient or a binary state? Does it even make sense to apply the notion of p-zombies to animals, or is the idea too incoherent to do so? If so, why can we apply it to humans?

igorfrankensteen wrote:It seems to me that you are confusing the models we use to discuss these things, with the things themselves.

That's another way of saying what zoon later in the thread tried to say. It's always nice when 'things themselves' try to stick their necks out.

And the confusion alluded to, if present at all in the OP, is nothing compared to the confusion implicit in using the word 'model' when 'metaphor' would be better suited. We use models to predict things, and we use metaphors to discuss things, and sometimes we even use the word 'model' metaphorically, as you do, here, but it's probably worth noting when we decide to do that, because otherwise it's heading toward the cargo cult science I referred to in the other thread.

Saying that there are no spoons is perhaps a little like saying there isn't a model at a higher level that we are promised simply by claiming to 'investigate' cognition. The 'awareness' that idealists talk about is another way of making metaphors at a 'higher' level, the way some people sometimes use the word 'supervene'. Maybe someday, maybe someday.

It's also a metaphor to say, like David McC does, that human cognition 'emulates' computation. Metaphorically, what a swell notion. I could also say that a brick thrown at 20000 kmph from an altitude of 100 km emulates the passage of the space shuttle through the upper atmosphere.

Boyle wrote:

zoon wrote:If there are no mental entities, then "I" don't exist, which is where most of us balk?

To accept that I am a p-zombie is, at first sight at least, to accept that other people may reasonably treat me as a non-sentient lump, which is reasonably frightening? The whole matter of the evolved trick of using ToM to predict people and also see them as conscious, is tied in with our evolved ability to cooperate, and with partly innate moral intuitions about how sentient beings should or should not be treated.

Except humans treat others as non-sentient all the time, hence why we have the ability to harm other people intentionally. If we were acutely aware of their sentience at all times I dunno if we could ever intentionally bring harm to others. Hence why people that do this tend to get called things like "unfeeling monsters".

I know this isn't typically covered by the p-zombie thing, but are some animals p-zombies? That is, what is the least complex animal that you'd say has sentience? Is it a gradient or a binary state? Does it even make sense to apply the notion of p-zombies to animals, or is the idea too incoherent to do so? If so, why can we apply it to humans?

We don't understand our brains scientifically, as mechanisms, and so we don't understand the intuitions about sentience which are crucial to our unique form of evolved cooperation. We probably switch our sympathies on and off in subtle ways without noticing.

Reverting to the topic, I think I'm objecting to the view that a wave is any less real than the water molecules it's made up of, they are equally valid ways of carving up reality? Perhaps the problem is that if large numbers of people are claiming wrongly that waves have a reality of their own because they follow rules that cannot be reduced to the behaviour of the water molecules, then there is a feeling among physicalists that the reality of waves needs to be denied altogether. If we treat another person as a subject, say, feeling pain, and everyone agrees that person is feeling pain, then that pain is real enough? If everyone also agrees that if we understood ourselves scientifically as mechanisms, then "pain" and "subject" would probably be discarded as crude and inaccurate models, it would still be OK to treat them as real enough, while they are still useful?

Boyle wrote:Except humans treat others as non-sentient all the time, hence why we have the ability to harm other people intentionally.

I think I'm much more inclined to harm someone who I think is sentient and who I also think is trying to harm me. Otherwise, what's to fear? I figure I should be able to outwit a p-zombie by engaging it in a little game of moral Russian Roulette. The non-zombie will just refuse to play.

zoon wrote:IMany of our social structures depend heavily on ignorance, on our inability to know or control exactly what is going on in another person's brain.

Whether or not you're tempted to manipulate attitudes toward 'sentience' depends to a large extent on the level of anxiety you feel about whether or not the human project will succeed, however YOU define success, and how much you feel we need a substitute to replace the old certainties about moral lawgivers.

This is not as much of a derail as it might first appear, considering how tied to certainties about REALITY we can manage to get tangled in when we talk about spoons. If we want our language about 'sentience' to give us some results, panic isn't the quickest way to get there. If you don't want results, but simply want to hum some eternal verities, carry on splendidly.

zoon wrote:[If we treat another person as a subject, say, feeling pain, and everyone agrees that person is feeling pain, then that pain is real enough?

We have to be careful here, because a particularly high-strung individual might have a total meltdown over a hangnail. I'm sure you recognize the type.

All I'm saying is that I think the human condition is absurd, and if there are spoons, it becomes difficult for anyone to think that; for example, pain goes up on some meta-level. It doesn't mean you can't try to make something of the human condition beyond absurdity, even if there are no spoons. But that's your job, not mine, and the fact that you don't want to see the human condition as absurd doesn't automatically produce any spoons.

Cito di Pense wrote:

Boyle wrote:Except humans treat others as non-sentient all the time, hence why we have the ability to harm other people intentionally.

I think I'm much more inclined to harm someone who I think is sentient and who I also think is trying to harm me. Otherwise, what's to fear? I figure I should be able to outwit a p-zombie by engaging it in a little game of moral Russian Roulette. The non-zombie will just refuse to play.

Tricky zombies act just like people though, so it'd refuse to play but without cause. True determined freedom.

zoon wrote:

Boyle wrote:

zoon wrote:If there are no mental entities, then "I" don't exist, which is where most of us balk?

To accept that I am a p-zombie is, at first sight at least, to accept that other people may reasonably treat me as a non-sentient lump, which is reasonably frightening? The whole matter of the evolved trick of using ToM to predict people and also see them as conscious, is tied in with our evolved ability to cooperate, and with partly innate moral intuitions about how sentient beings should or should not be treated.

Except humans treat others as non-sentient all the time, hence why we have the ability to harm other people intentionally. If we were acutely aware of their sentience at all times I dunno if we could ever intentionally bring harm to others. Hence why people that do this tend to get called things like "unfeeling monsters".

I know this isn't typically covered by the p-zombie thing, but are some animals p-zombies? That is, what is the least complex animal that you'd say has sentience? Is it a gradient or a binary state? Does it even make sense to apply the notion of p-zombies to animals, or is the idea too incoherent to do so? If so, why can we apply it to humans?

We don't understand our brains scientifically, as mechanisms, and so we don't understand the intuitions about sentience which are crucial to our unique form of evolved cooperation. We probably switch our sympathies on and off in subtle ways without noticing.

Reverting to the topic, I think I'm objecting to the view that a wave is any less real than the water molecules it's made up of, they are equally valid ways of carving up reality? Perhaps the problem is that if large numbers of people are claiming wrongly that waves have a reality of their own because they follow rules that cannot be reduced to the behaviour of the water molecules, then there is a feeling among physicalists that the reality of waves needs to be denied altogether. If we treat another person as a subject, say, feeling pain, and everyone agrees that person is feeling pain, then that pain is real enough? If everyone also agrees that if we understood ourselves scientifically as mechanisms, then "pain" and "subject" would probably be discarded as crude and inaccurate models, it would still be OK to treat them as real enough, while they are still useful?

I'm sure we do switch sympathies on and off. It'd be difficult to make it through the day if you were consumed by all the emotions going on around you. Psychics have it pretty hard.

The reality of waves as wholly separate from the behavior of molecules that make up the wave gets denied, yes, because it's not a separate reality. It's a different description of the same reality. It's the utility of the description, as you point out, that validates our use. Using a simple sin wave function to predict the behavior of water waves or waves in a string or sound waves or EM waves seems to work in a surprising number of cases and so we use it, but that doesn't mean the description is it's own reality separate from the description of the constituent parts. I can describe the function of the engine room or bilges or pilot house of a ship but I'm still in the same ship.

I don't think we need to use full description of everything at every stage to make practical use, so I agree that describing pain in it's own little bubble can be done in a useful way. It's, as you say, real enough.

igorfrankensteen wrote:It seems to me that you are confusing the models we use to discuss these things, with the things themselves.

Certainly I'm talking about the language we use to talk about the mental rather than the mental itself. This should hardly be surprising since I'm arguing that we can't intelligibly talk about the mental itself. This is the philosophy forum, so it shouldn't be inappropriate to deploy the tools of philosophy, once described as a battle against the bewitchment of intelligence by means of language. I'm talking about reification which is, if not a linguistic act in itself, at least a consequence of language.

logical bob wrote:
Numbers are a good example of non-referring nouns. OK, you could ask a mathematician to define 7.95 as a set-theoretic construct, but if that was the sense in which it was £7.95 for the saag aloo then you'd need a training in foundational mathematics just to go for a curry. We use number language, but as a wise man once said, at no point during the transaction is the meaning of number words in question. It's in something like this sense that we use language about the mental.

The thing about subjective events is that they are fundamentally private. This makes it very difficult to have names that refer to them. In public language we can establish that we're using the same names to refer to the same things, either by pointing to them or by defining them. Neither of these are an available strategy with the subjective.

The meaning of many words is fixed by its extension (what it directly refers to, such as [over there is] a tree). Of course, many words don't have an extension (having no such relation with physical/observable entities). Words which do not refer directly to something observable/physical are legion and obvious examples include God, justice, nothing, politics, santa, etc.. Such words are defined by what certain philosophers have said is its intension (the defining list of attributes we associate with that word). For example, santa is defined as a man who wears red, has a white beard, delivers presents on Xmas day, etc.. Note then that all physical/observable words have both intensions and extensions, whereas abstract concepts are constructs of the mind/brain which only have intensions. So, only in the case of physical/observable entities is the intension of a word dependent upon the empirical properties of the thing it refers to. When it comes to 'intensional' concepts, the meaning of a word has to be determined by reason and/or imagination alone. For example, one can use reason (as I have, at some point) to define the meaning of God via attributes consistent with such a concept. Or else, one can just use the imagination to define an entity such as santa.

The point is that [probably] most words in any dictionary will be words devoid of 'extensional' meaning. Yet you're here suggesting that 'the I' (and its experiences/attributes) does not exist. So, deprived of this 'belief attribution' explanation (which I note zoon has objected to already), how does someone like you - an eliminativist, basically - explain the origin of not just many/most of the words within our dictionary, but also the behaviour we observe in humans as they play-out these definitions?

A small percentage of people report that coriander/cilantro tastes like soap. It's a genetic thing, apparently. But if you gave a name to the way coriander tastes to you, that name would convey nothing to anyone else.

That's not true. For example, if there were a marketing campaign to advise people that coriander tastes like chocolate, then sales in coriander would rocket. You know this too. Alternatively, if there were a marketing campaign to advise people that coriander tastes like an extremely hot curry, then most/many people would avoid trying it (certainly myself), since it seems that most people don't like the taste of extremely hot curries. Ironically, as it happens, I've recently discovered [by accident] just how tasty coriander is. I've been adding it to many of our meals!

... The point is that there IS a common understanding of taste (and smell), contrary to what you have stated, sufficient to influence behaviour significantly.

The best I could do would be imagine what coriander (or soap, if you're one of the unlucky minority) tastes like to me. Which isn't the same thing. The names of subjective entities would be empty terms.

Hence, nobody should buy into this idea of yours. There have been numerous times in my life when someone has said something like "it tastes like x" or that "it smells like y" where I have agreed, sufficient for me to know that we're all having similar experiences, regardless of whether we like/dislike those experiences. The like/dislike part is the subjective aspect of the issue. The same principles apply to 'observation', where it is entirely obvious that we agree upon our experiences of 'seeing', otherwise the possibility of an objective science [grounded within observation] would be impossible. Again, whether we like/dislike what we are seeing is the subjective aspect of this.

So if we are able to meaningfully communicate using words such as pain, fear, joy and love, and I take it to be self evident that we are, then these words are not names referring to mental entities and we need to dig a little deeper if we want to understand how that kind of language works.

As explained above, many of these words have no extension, so cannot be a reflection of anything 'physical'. You can delve as deep as you like, but this is a fact which you will have to embrace within any physicalist narrative that you might want to put up your sleeve at some later point.

The question of whether or not mental entities are physical should not arise.

That's nonsense, given that many/most words have no 'extension'.

There are no such entities.

Then WHY are they profuse and evidently understandable within our dictionaries? You seriously need to address this question, for it completely undermines your point-of-view.

zoon wrote:Reverting to the topic, I think I'm objecting to the view that a wave is any less real than the water molecules it's made up of, they are equally valid ways of carving up reality?

Waves aren't subject to the point I was making in the OP because the word wave does refer. It carries public meaning because we can all know what it refers to.

Every object we encounter is a collection of molecules. Whether or not tables and cars are real, there would be no utility at all in avoiding high level descriptions. You have to bear in mind that we don't know what the fundamental units of matter are, so it can't be essential in allowing us to talk about things made of matter. Insisting on giving a lost motorist directions at a molecular level would get nothing done.

There would be a problem if someone was saying that we needed a more generous ontology to accommodate irreducible car nature or to account for the fundamental waviness of waves.

That "reification" is itself a "thing" makes me chuckle.

James, that's a good post and a very pleasant surprise. I won't be getting to grips with it tonight but I will respond.

logical bob wrote:James, that's a good post and a very pleasant surprise. I won't be getting to grips with it tonight but I will respond.

Well, given the time it's a very pleasant surprise that you won't be responding tonight, otherwise you wouldn't be giving it much thought. And it requires much thought. Sleep well.

logical bob wrote:James, that's a good post and a very pleasant surprise.

A stirring tribute indeed, in a thread such as this. How ladle it get until you respond?

I have a hunch that Bob wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth, as some are, so is just expressing his envy.