I just noticed that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Zombies was recently updated (authored by Robert Kirk, who’s book I reviewed for phil. psych). I was pleased to see that my JCS paper was mentioned in the “anti-zombie argument for physicalism” section. But Kirk cites my paper as arguing that “we should reject the inference from conceivability to possibility”. It is true that others that have pressed versions of the ‘anti-zombie’ argument for this conclusion, I am not one of them. I want to grant the link between conceivability and possibility. It is true that I harbor empiricist leanings but if I were a rationalist I would find Chalmers’ CP thesis very attractive; but even so the zombie argument is inconclusive because we cannot simply assert that zombies are conceivable.
My complaint against the zombie argument has always been that the move from (1) ‘zombies seem conceivable to me’ to (2) ‘zombies are ideally conceivable’ is question begging. The only thing we really have evidence for is (1) but it is (2) that is actually used in the zombie argument. That this move is illegitimate is shown by the fact that shombies and zoombies seem conceivable to me (and others it turns out) but if I were to then say that they were ideally conceivable I would be accused of begging the question. Both zombies and shombies seem conceivable but only one of them can actually be ideally conceivable and importantly we have no a priori reasons that can decide which is which. Rather what seems to be happening is that one’s intuitions are tracking the theory that one accepts, perhaps implicitly. Thus we don’t know if zombies are ideally conceivable at this point. Nor do we know if shombies are. Both seem to be conceivable to various people but we don’t have enough empirical knowledge of the brain to decide. From this I draw the meta-lesson that we should deprioritize the a priori arguments for and against physicalism. What we need to do now is focus on specific theories of consciousness (like higher-order theories, say ) and brain science. Even if we can in principle know a priori that the mind is just the brain, or that it isn’t, the way that we will come to know is empirical (just like water and H2O: even if it is in principle knowable a priori that water is H2O (because on can deduce one set of facts from the other) we discovered it empirically. A priori arguments played no positive role in the discovery).
The Conceivability of Shombies
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I really like this class of arguments. You, Guiltiero, Marton, Frankish and others that have proposed them should put them together into a volume. THen Chalmers’ response. Then group reply. Then CHalmers final response. Bam book. Only have to get Chalmers to agree 🙂
But what sort of empirical findings could possibly decide the issue one way or the other? I mean, that’s sort of the whole point, isn’t it? The zombie argument is not something that will be decided by anything found on an fMRI scan or in a wet lab.
Personally, my eyes tend to glaze over when people start splitting hairs over different flavors of conceivability,
neccessity or possibility, and I suspect that it is all a subtle conspiracy to shift the burden of proof. Physics, and the supervening hard sciences, are incredibly successful. There is a rock-solid strict entailment from the fundamental particles and the four forces on one hand, and, say, a hurricane on the other. There is a strict entailment from the mean kinetic energy of the molecules of gas in a room and the room’s temperature. The entailment can involve astronomical numbers of
particles, but no one doubts ironclad truth of the entailment. The fact that there is no obvious entailment from
particles and forces on one hand to phenomenal facts on the other ought to be embarrassing to the physicalist. This
is the notorious explanatory gap, and as far as I’m concerned, the value of the whole zombie thought experiment is
simply that it points this out. That is all the zombie argument has to do to make its point, and the only adequate
rebuttal to it would be to lay out such an entailment, if not in detail, at least in principle.
-John Gregg
https://home.comcast.net/~johnrgregg
Richard, thanks for the post. I feel the same way: the main interest of shombies etc is not that they question the link from conceivability to possibility but that they expose the whole zombie conceivability argument as inconclusive (regardless of why).
Eric, thanks for the suggestions. I have no time to pursue it at the moment, but if someone else does…
JG, yes, fundamental physics entails facts about hurricanes, and that is relatively obvious–because we’ve already done most of the relevant science! It’s slightly less obvious in the case of consciousness because more of the relevant science remains to be figured out. But even there, it’s still pretty obvious (to me) that the physical facts entail the facts about consciousness.
There remains the project of giving an adequate metaphysical account of qualitative facts. That is indeed a non-empirical project, but for that purpose thought experiments about zombies do not help one bit.
There is a rock-solid strict entailment from the fundamental particles and the four forces on one hand, and, say, a hurricane on the other.
No such thing. Any such entailment is purely hyperbolic, based on the clear truth that no one has good support that anything _else_ is causative of the phenomena of hurricanes.
If we _really_ had “rock-solid” strict entailment, we’d be able to predict hurricanes far, far better than we can.
What’s ironclad here is the doctrine, not the practice 🙂
Hi Eric and Gualtiero, a book is good idea. Pete (Mandik) and I talked about editing a volume like this (Rise of the Zombies was the tentative title if I recall correctly) centered on the recent spat of physicalist philosophers saying they are zombies (Colin Allen is the most recent) and the shombie arguments…but we thought of it as mostly a in-house dispute amongst physicalists…it never got past the beginning panning stages though…maybe we should revisit it?
Based on the all-important sociological tool of saying whatever I think, I believe there is a relatively large and broad audience for zombie arguments and their refutation/elaboration. Please do it! Some are unpublished, hard to find, etc.. Could even try to commision something from Dennett in there that would be entertaining 🙂 I wish I had something new and intelligent to say about zombies to contribute.
Sure, it would be a little esoteric, but the arguments from waning of materialism are pieces of crap for the most part, but that somehow got published by OUP. People buy based on the topic, not the content. Zombies are hot in the popular consciousness about consciousness, do it before it’s too late!!
However, if there is anything about conscious states being states of which we are conscious in the book, I will have to boycott it Leiter style.
Re the shombie argument, the usual response must be that zombie- and shombie-conceivings are not on a par, right?
I mean, z-conceiving involves conceiving of a possible world (the zombie world), while sh-conceiving involves conceiving (more or less) that
some creatures are conscious merely in virtue of their physical makeup. That is, it implies conceiving that there are no z-worlds.
One could say that conceivings give us more reliable access to existence claims about possible worlds (e.g., ‘there is a z-world’) than to non-existence claims, which is what is needed for sh-conceivability.
I’m sure you’ve gone through this argument in your papers. I should read them before posting 🙂
Manolo, thanks for bringing this up because yours is a common misconception. The fact is that the two conceivability claims have exactly the same logical strength. Under standard modal logics such as S5, conceiving zombie worlds implies conceiving that there are no shombies worlds and vice versa. Under non-standard modal logics, you can have both zombie worlds and shombie worlds at the same time.
This is just a quick follow up on Manolo’s comment. It seems to me that someone could say that there’s the following important difference between Z-conceivability and S-conceivability. S-conceivability requires conceiving that some creatures are Gs by virtue of being Fs whereas Z-conceivability requires conceiving that there can be Fs without Gs. It might be thought that one sort of exercise is easier or more reliable than the other.
Not that I have any sympathy with that line, mind you. I tried running the following objection (inspired by a remark of Sorensen’s). I can conceive of creatures that conceive of the impossible. If such creatures are possible, conceivability doesn’t entail possibility. if such creatures are not possible, there’s a yawning gap between what it seems we can conceive and what we can conceive. Either way, there’s no epistemically unproblematic link between what it seems we can conceive and what’s genuinely possible. So, I think my attitude is similar to Gualtiero’s (and many others here, I imagine). Even if we can’t quite decide why appeals to conceivability are a fallible guide to modal facts, appeals to conceivability are a fallible guide.
Hi, Gualtiero, thanks for your reply. I see that conceiving a zombie world is enough to conclude that there are no shombie worlds: something is a sh-world only if there are no z-worlds. But (a conceivabilist would maybe want to say) the fact remains that conceiving a sh-world is “more difficult” in a sense that the following analogy brings out:
Finding our that there is a white crow implies finding out that not all crows are black; also, finding out that all crows are black implies finding out that there are no white crows. But it’s still easier to find a white crow than to find out that all crows are black.
That is: logical strength is not the only relevant dimension against which we should assess both sh- and z- hypotheses, but also what we may call ‘epistemic accessibility’: establishing that there are zombies involves only “finding” a z-world; while establishing that there are shombies implies finding out that there are no z-worlds.
Let me say, though, that I (emphatically) do not believe that zombies are met. possible. Also, let me apologise again for jumping in without having read the relevant papers.
Have to agree, more or less. Humean skepticism says we never really know. The entailments are associational, instrumentalist. Doesn’t mean they are wrong, just means even rock-solid strict entailment, isn’t rock-solid or strict, and maybe not even entailment!
Hi Manolo, thanks for your response. I’m not sure I follow what you are saying. (Assuming S5 as a modal logic.) Yes, establishing that there are sh-worlds implies finding out that there are no z-worlds, but by the same token, establishing that there are z-worlds implies finding out that there are no sh-worlds. Or to use your other formulation, something is a sh-world only if there are no z-worlds, but by the same token, something is a z-world only if there are no sh-worlds. The two situations are exactly parallel.
I think that both zombies and shombies are conceivable. I also can easily conceive that there are a few subtle entities in the future of physics that will help better explain the behavior of electrical storms (including hurricanes).
The best these thought experiments can do is keep us aware of open options to explain our world. In that regard I think they do succeed 🙂
Hi Manolo and Gualtiero,
Hi Clayton, thanks for the comment!