Brains

X-Phi on Twitter

gualtiero piccinini — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:13:00 GMT

For any philosophers or psychologists on Twitter, experimental philosophy has started an official twitter account. To see what has been going on in the x-phi world, or to follow xphilosopher, you can follow this link: http://twitter.com/xphilosopher

New Philosophy of Science journal

edouard machery — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:52:00 GMT

Many readers of Brains should be interested by this new journal:

The European Philosophy of Science Association (EPSA) has signed a contract with Springer concerning the establishment of a new journal: the European Journal for Philosophy of Science (EJPS). The Editorial Team is a group of excellent philosophers of science with a variety of backgrounds and fields of expertise. The Editor-in-Chief is Carl Hoefer (Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain) and the deputy editor is Mauro Dorato (University of Rome III, Italy). Franz Huber (Konstanz, Germany) Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh, USA), Michela Massimi (London, UK), Samir Okasha (Bristol, UK) and Jesús Zamora (UNED, Spain) are Associate Editors. The Editorial Team will be assisted in its work by an Editorial Board of highly reputed philosophers of science from around the world.
EJPS is the official journal of EPSA and will appear three times a year, beginning in January 2011. EJPS will aim to publish first-rate research in all areas of philosophy of science. Information concerning submissions to EJPS will be announced in the forthcoming weeks by the Editorial Team.

EJPS will be publishing (among other things) articles in the philosophy of psychology, cognitive science, neuropsychology, and neuroscience.

New journal: 'Cognitive Computation'

alex morgan — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:38:00 GMT

Springer just released a new quarterly journal called 'Cognitive Computation', which might be of interest to some of the readers of this blog. The editor, Amir Hussain, summarizes the goal of the journal as follows:

"Cognitive Computation specifically aims to publish cutting-edge articles describing original basic and applied work involving biologically inspired theoretical, computational, experimental and integrative accounts of all aspects of natural and artificial cognitive systems. By establishing a forum to bring together different scientific communities, Cognitive Computation will promote a more comprehensive and unified understanding of diverse topics, including those related to perception, action, attention, learning and memory, decision making, language processing, communication, reasoning, problem solving and consciousness."

You can sign up to an RSS feed for the journal by clicking here.

What will be in anthologies 20 or 50 years from now?

Brandon Towl — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:08:00 GMT

Being a newly minted (and still jobless) PhD, I've been doing some serious thinking about projects I want to tackle in the next five years or so. One idea was to write something-- either a few papers or perhaps a book-- on interesting puzzles or problems in the Philosophy of Mind that often get overlooked in anthologies and texts on the subject. This has lead to some rumination on just what the "classical" problems are, and which might deserve to be classical, given some attention.

So I'm appealing to Brains readers for their input. To start, I'll list some of the problem areas that I've found dominate intro texts to Phil of Mind:

The Mind Body problem (and all the "isms" we learn about-- accounted for 1/2 of my undegrad POM classes)
Problems of Mental Causation (causal exclusion, projectibility, etc.)
Consciousness (its nature, scientific study, etc.)
Naturalizing content (I would include the nature of concepts here as well)
The "architecture" of the mind (GOFAI vs. connectionism, vs. dyanmical systems vs....)
The Self (its nature, representation, identity conditions, etc.)
Folk Psychology (many interesting-- and overworked-- problems here)

And as runners up...

Emotions (Their nature, content, etc.)
Embedded/embodied cognition
Possibility of animal thought/animal consciousness

Granted, these are more "problem areas" than specific problems. But I'm wondering what good, interesting problems there are that might be outside this net. A few thoughts:

Interpretation of split brain data with regards to personal identity (there was a fury of activity in the 70s, and again in the 90s, but not much I've seen since then).
Concept sharing and publicity (do we really "share" concepts, and do we really communicate competently?)
How the posits of personality psychology (e.g., personality traits) square with philsophical ideas about the mind
Cognitive basis (or perceptual, or whatever) for logic and logic learning

These are just some off-the-cuff ideas. So:

What do Brains readers feel the newest, sexiest problems or areas are? What might students be reading in anthologies 20 or 50 years from now?

Philosophers' Carnival #92

gualtiero piccinini — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 10:12:00 GMT

Here,

Back from ASSC 13

marcin milkowski — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:04:00 GMT

ASSC XIII finished on Monday but it was so packed that I needed a couple of days to rest and ruminate. Contrary to somehow disappointing TSC in Budapest in 2007, ASSC XIII was excellent, and as Thomas Metzinger stressed a couple of times, you could really see that the field is becoming mature.

There were almost 200 posters, 36 talks, 4 plenary symposia (with 3 talks each), and 6 keynote lectures... Yet, there were recurring themes - many talks were focusing on the very same ideas.

A recurring theme was a integrated information theory of consciousness, introduced at the start of the conference by Gulio Tononi during his presidential address. The idea of integrating information, and actually measuring the integration came back in a submitted talk by Christof Koch who improved over Tononi's measure of effective information by averaging it on all possible states of the network. Clearly, Tononi's and Koch's measure are not effectively computable for any non-trivial network, so an excellent symposium, chaired by Anil Seth, on measuring consciousness on the last day of the conference was a nice follow-up. Seth reviewed many measures offered so far and included his idea of measuring the integration of information by causal density (something which reminded me of Herbert Simon's frequency of interaction that is used to set off the boundary of nearly decomposable systems). To wit, all these accounts attempt at measuring the intensity of information integration, which in turn means that they measure the degree the system is not simply an aggregate of individual information processors but a system. In other words, the background assumption is that conciousness is made possible by highly integrated, information-processing systems, or it emerges in such systems (is an emergent property of the information network in Bill Wimsatt's sense in relation to individual information-processing elements).

Of course, if you mention emergence, you start thinking about Jaegwon Kim. In his keynote lecture, he tried to downplay emergence (in a similar way he did it in Kirchberg) and defended qualia epiphenomenalism, and consequently suggested that there cannot be a science of consciousness, only of the things that supervene it. Again, I am not at all convinced by his arguments, as he's making his job too easy by attacking strawmen. Kim's lecture, entitled Armchair Reflections on Consciousness and the Science of Consciousness, was indeed quite remote from the way philosophers and scientists alike took their stance on consciousness. The only other more conceptual-focused keynote lecture was held by David Papineau who was reasurring that we shouldn't worry that much about the explanatory gap (there were slight changes in his position about the antipathetic fallacy, by the way). Anyway, other keynotes and symposia were much more experimental.

Michael Tomasello and Susan Carey focused on social cognition, shared intentionality and theory of mind as relevant for consciousness (by the way, there was also a poster by Allison Gopnik). A talk by the William James Prize winner, Joel Pearson, on imagery influencing perception, showed an ingenious way of showing the role of imagery and top-down effects in consciousness (see his paper in Current Biology).

There were also many interesting symposia, and lots of excellent posters. The poster Do Dissociations Work by Elizabeth Irvine was awarded the prize of the best poster by a special commision that included Ned Block and Michael Tye. You can find all inspiring abstracts here. My own talk on computationalism fits, as you probably guessed, the information-integration theme.

100 Ways to Exercise, Increase, and Preserve Your Brain Power

gualtiero piccinini — Sat, 30 May 2009 21:36:00 GMT

Here.

Fodor's Done It Again

gualtiero piccinini — Fri, 29 May 2009 19:26:00 GMT

Jerry Fodor, LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited. Oxford, OUP, 2008.

Some quick observations on Fodor’s new book:

1. As usual, a great book: ambitious, provocative, full of ideas and arguments, and as a bonus, funny (for those who like his humor).

2. He is still a computationalist, language-of-thought representationalist, atomist and nativist about concepts, referentialist with respect to semantic content, and causal theorist about the origin of semantic content.

3. He stresses more than ever that although his theory is the best available, it fails to explain central cognitive processes. His main reason is that computation is local, whereas central cognition (e.g., inductive inference) is global. What this means is, roughly speaking, that computational processes (as he understands them) only work well when they manipulate a few representations at a time. As soon as computations try to manipulate too many representations (e.g., because they are looking for global properties of a large set of representations), they run into the intractability of the frame problem. But some cognitive processes (e.g., inductive inference) require taking into account too many representations for computational processes to be a feasible explanation of them. Fodor suggests that some “new” kind of computation might be able to explain such processes, but he doesn’t think anyone has any idea how this new kind of computation works. I wish he would have explained better why it doesn’t help to appeal to lots of parallel processes here (as, e.g., Paul Churchland does in his recent work).

4. One novelty is iconic representations, whose content is nonconceptual. Fodor argues on empirical grounds that cognition involves iconic representations as well as linguistic/conceptual ones. At the very least, iconic (nonconceptual) representations are the ones present in the “iconic buffer”, which is a processing stage postulated by some classical cognitive psychological theories. As far as I remember from his previous work, this is a new addition to Fodor’s theory.

5. As usual, Fodor relies on his semantic account of computation, according to which computation is a kind of manipulation of representations that “preserves” (some) semantic properties of the representations. This gets him into trouble when it’s time to explain how the representations acquire their content, because he can’t appeal to computational processes. (According to Fodor, for a computation to be in place, there must already be representations with their semantic properties in place.) So he ends up saying that the notion of concept learning is incoherent. Instead, he suggests that semantic content is acquired through – listen to this! – non-computational brain processes. The story gets pretty mysterious at that point; a “here a miracle happens” moment. Fodor’s own argument that acquiring semantic properties is just something the brain does is quite involved, though – he does not generate his conclusion simply on the grounds of his account of computation. But I stress the connection with the semantic account of computation because I’ve been arguing for some time that contra Fodor and many others, computation does not require representation. If I’m right, computation might help explain the origin of semantic content is ways that are precluded to Fodor et al.

6. The appeal to brain processes to explain the origin of content is surprising and ironic for someone, like Fodor, whose theory of mind seems to have been built (over many decades) by ignoring neuroscience as a matter of principle, and, occasionally, as a rationalization for why it’s ok to ignore neuroscience.

7. I strongly recommend reading this book. Like most of his previous books, it will become a standard reference for philosophers of mind.

Philosophers' Carnival #91

gualtiero piccinini — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:27:00 GMT

Here.

Symposium on Doing without Concepts in Ottawa Wednesday May 27

edouard machery — Sat, 23 May 2009 06:37:00 GMT

If you are going to the annual meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association next week (Carleton University) or if you happen to be around Ottawa, you might want to come to the symposium on Doing without Concepts Wednesday May 27 2:00-5:00pm (room: AY 101). (Program here.)

Christopher Hill (Brown), Diana Raffman (Toronto), and Stevan Harnad (Montreal) will comment on the book, and I will reply. The symposium has been organized by Jennifer Nagel. This should be a very interesting meeting on concepts and their role in cognitive science.

Edouard

More on Noe on the Origin of Cognitive Science

gualtiero piccinini — Thu, 21 May 2009 19:41:00 GMT

In a recent post, I criticized some passages from Alva Noe’s book, Out of Our Heads. I’d like to clarify some details.

First, it was pointed out to me that my tone was disrespectful. I am truly sorry about that. My comments were only aimed at the quoted claims, not the book as a whole, let alone Noe himself.

Second, I’ve spent the last decade of my life studying and publishing on cognition and computation, information processing, and related matters. When I encounter dubious claims on these topics, I feel it is my duty to correct them and try to raise the level of the debate. I’ve done it before and I will continue to do it.

Third, since I found some of Noe’s statements ambiguous, he was kind enough to email me and clarify what he meant, which in turn allows me to clarify what I object to. I greatly appreciate his help and integrity in clearing things up.

Here is the quote I commented about in my previous post: "For Hubel and Wiesel, ... cells were understood to be specialized in order to be able to "stand for" and thus represent features. This application of information theory to the brain was not new when Hubel and Wiesel set to work... Rafael Lorente de No had represented neural relations as networks already in the thirties, and his treatment had a direct influence on the work of Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, and through them, John von Neumann. (Walter Freeman, the neuroscientist, likes to say that in a way Lorente de No is the godfather of the computer)" (p. 156).

In the book, this quote is followed by a reference to Shannon and the “mathematical theory of information.”

Noe: When I mention Shannon by name I explicitly use a different phrase to refer to his theory; I speak of him as the developer of the *mathematical* theory of information and thus I contrast his contribution that of the more general ideas about information processing that have been my main focus in passages in question.

GP: Point taken. Then my objection becomes that few people will perceive the intended contrast between “theory of information” (which Noe uses for the “more general ideas about information processing”) and “mathematical theory of information” (which he uses for Shannon’s theory). When “theory of information” is used without further qualification, what is generally understood is Shannon’s theory. But this by itself is a minor point – just an example.

Noe: I am actually very interested in the historical question. In 1929 Lorente de No wrote a paper ("Studies in the structure of the cerebral cortex: I. The area entorhinalis") in which he represented neurons as standing in feedback loop relations to each other. This was brought to my attention by Walter Freeman. Ramon y Cajal forbade him to publish the paper; Ramon y Cajal thought the feedback notion was incoherent, for a cell couldn't tell input from output. Lorente de No respected his professor's wishes; he only published the paper in 1934, in a German physiology journal (not in an anatomy journal). According to Freeman, Pitts made use of this idea when developing his Boolean approach [to neural networks]… What I say -- and you have given me no reason to retract -- is that Lorente de No is the GODFATHER of the whole approach, in that he recognized that it was reasonable to think of feedback systems.

GP: Noe’s clarification of what he meant allows me to explain why his suggestion is untenable. There are several problems.

Problem 1: Feedback is not relevant to the topic at hand. I knew Lorente de No talks about closed loops of neuronal activity. It surprises me that he talked about “feedback” between neurons. But whether Lorente de No uses the word “feedback” (I haven’t checked, because I don’t have the primary source) doesn’t change my point. In fact, if he does talk about “feedback”, it makes the connection with Pitts less plausible, since McCulloch and Pitts 1943 do not talk about feedback between neurons. They talk about nets “with circles” (i.e., closed loops). But feedback certainly became a central concept in the cybernetic movement, and McCulloch discusses its importance in later works. However, there were many other people talking about feedback systems in the 1930s. For instance, McCulloch cites a 1934 paper by H.S. Black entitled “Stabilized Feedback Amplifiers”. So the fact that Lorente de No talked about feedback is not enough to conclude that he influenced McCulloch (let alone Pitts) on feedback. McCulloch cites Lorente de No as influencing him on the idea that loops of neurons are functionally important, but not on the idea of feedback (cf. “Recollections of the Many Sources of Cybernetics”). At any rate, McCulloch and Pitts 1943 do not talk about feedback, so feedback is not especially relevant here.

Problem 2: The idea of neural networks is more general than the idea of closed circuits of neurons, although networks with recurrent connections are surely an important case. So you can’t just go from “Lorente de No talked about feedback between neurons” to “Lorente de No talked about neural networks”.

Problem 3: Talking about feedback between neurons, or even talking about neural networks informally, is a far cry from developing a mathematical theory of neural networks (with or without closed loops), which is what McCulloch and Pitts did and what is relevant here (and relevant to the design of computers). Before McCulloch and Pitts, there were other people who developed mathematical theories of neural networks; notably, Rashevsky and his mathematical biophysics group. They are the people who influenced Pitts, and from whom Pitts took the question of characterizing the behavior of closed loops of neurons (as he says in one of his papers).

Problem 4: Noe has yet to provide evidence for the implausible claim that Pitts knew much if anything about Lorente de No and his ideas about closed loops of neurons (or feedback between neurons, if he talked about that) when he developed his mathematical work on neural networks. For starters, neither McCulloch and Pitts 1943 nor Pitts’s earlier publications, in which he formulated theories of neural networks, cite Lorente de No. For more details on the origin of McCulloch and Pitts’s theory, see my paper.

Problem 5: Even if Pitts had known that Lorente de No talked about feedback between neurons, that would not have helped Pitts develop his mathematical theory of neural networks. (McCulloch says that McCulloch did know about Lorente de No’s idea, although McCulloch also says that he had thought about the role of closed loops of nervous activity before reading Lorente de No (see McCulloch’s “Recollections of the Many Sources of Cybernetics”). Of course, McCulloch did not actually develop the mathematical theory of loops of neurons; Pitts did.)

Problem 6: Insofar as the “whole approach” is relevant to the design of computers, it involves the use of Boolean functions and other logic-inspired formalisms to characterize networks of simplified neurons (with or without loops). That was McCulloch and Pitts’s great contribution, and the contribution that was relevant to computer design, and there is no evidence that it owes anything to Lorente de No (cf. my paper for more details).

Problem 7: In his published passage, Noe implies that Lorente de No influenced von Neumann via his (putative) influence on McCulloch and Pitts, and thus, according to Walter Freeman, was “the godfather of the computer”. But as far as I know, the only part of McCulloch and Pitts 1943 that had an influence on von Neumann and early computer design was their theory of networks “without circles” (i.e., without closed loops). The theory of networks “with circles” – which is the part at least thematically related to Lorente de No’s ideas – is very obscure and it probably had no impact on computer design until after Kleene published his paper on finite state automata in 1956. (As far as I know, the definitive history of the impact of McCulloch and Pitts 1943 on computer design has yet to be written; it might be a nice project for someone to pick up.) Even if we suppose for the sake of the argument that Lorente de No’s writing helped McCulloch think about closed loops of neural activity (McCulloch says it did) and that McCulloch’s consequent thinking played a role in the development of McCulloch and Pitts’s mathematical theory of neural networks (a dubious claim, especially since by McCulloch’s admission, Pitts did all the technical work), it would still be a serious stretch to conclude that therefore, Lorente de No was “the godfather of the computer” (Freeman’s words according to Noe) or of “the whole approach” (Noe’s words).

Conclusion: Based on the available evidence, Lorente de No probably played a role in convincing McCulloch of the importance of closed loops of neural activity, although it appears that McCulloch discussed closed loops of neural activity before reading Lorente de No’s work on this topic. None of this had any impact on the mathematical theory of neural networks developed by McCulloch and Pitts 1943, let alone on von Neumann and computer design.

Emergence and Reduction: Call for Papers (deadline: August 15)

edouard machery — Tue, 19 May 2009 18:11:00 GMT

Emergence and Reduction in the Sciences (Second Pittsburgh-Paris Workshop)

Center for Philosophy of Science and Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh / Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques, Paris

Friday, December 11- Saturday, December 12, 2009 (possibly extending to morning, Sunday, December 13) at the Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh

The theme of the conference, emergence and reduction in the sciences, reflects the interest that these dual notions continue to attract in philosophy of science, most notably in philosophy of physics, of biology and of cognitive science. The organizers invite papers that address these dual notions in any science. Papers that connect the notions in several sciences are encouraged.

Contributors are asked to send: Paper title, abstract (500 words) and a short CV in a single pdf file to the EasyChair conference page at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=pp2 by the submission deadline. (If you are not already a registered user of www.easychair.org, you will need to create a free account as part of the submission process.) Deadline for submission: August 15 Notification of acceptance: September 15. For general inquiries, cweber23@pitt.edu

Supplementary funding may be available to provide partial support for speakers contributing papers.

Invited speakers:

Jacques Dubucs, Philippe Huneman; IHPST, Paris

Peter Machamer, Sandra Mitchell, Kenneth Schaffner; HPS, Pittsburgh

Michael Silberstein, Philosophy, Elizabethtown College

Jessica Wilson, Philosophy, University of Toronto

Did morality really evolve?

edouard machery — Sun, 17 May 2009 03:33:00 GMT

I say no. Watch the video (from my talk at UCLA in the Brain Evolution Culture series) and the Questions and Answers.

Comments and suggestions welcome as usual.

Review Article on Computationalism

gualtiero piccinini — Sat, 16 May 2009 20:22:00 GMT

My review of recent literature on Computationalism has recently been published in Philosophy Compass. I hope it will help people get up to date as well as push the debate forward. If you are interested in the paper but your library does not subscribe to the journal, feel free to contact me.

Here are some of the themes discussed in the paper:

(1) computationalism is consistent with different metaphysical views about the mind,
(2) computationalism must be grounded in an adequate account of computation,
(3) computationalism provides a mechanistic explanation of behavior,
(4) computationalism was originally introduced on the grounds of neurological evidence,
(5) all computationalists (yes, even classicists) are connectionists in the most general sense, although not all connectionists are computationalists,
(6) which, if any, variety of computationalism is correct depends on how the brain works.

ASSC XIII

marcin milkowski — Thu, 14 May 2009 21:49:00 GMT

I've just noticed that the program for ASSC XIII in Berlin (June, 5th-8th) has been published. Alas, I seem to be the only Brains contributor out there (having a talk during concurrent sessions), so I will surely report more here. I will defend a version of computationalism (more along the lines of McClamrock than Fodor), and I suspect lots of resistance.
I was studying in Berlin in 1999-2000, thought at the Freie Universitat, so it will be also something like a nostalgic trip to my home town (I felt there really at home).

Society for Philosophy and Psychology

edouard machery — Thu, 14 May 2009 00:14:00 GMT

The program for the next meeting of the SPP (June 13-15) is now available on-line. You can also register for the conference and book a room.

A few Brains readers (including Dan Weiskopf, Ken Aizawa and myself) will be presenting at the meeting, and I hope some of you will also consider coming.

I note with regret that the Brains community is not very active within the SPP - a pity given the importance of this society.

Edouard

Experimental Philosophy Society

edouard machery — Thu, 14 May 2009 00:10:00 GMT

Some readers of Brains might be interested by the recently created Experimental Philosophy Society. Our goal is, broadly speaking, to promote the use of experimental methods within philosophy.

You can join the society for a modest fee. We plan to use these fees to organize meetings at the APAs (Eastern, Central, Pacific) and to fund travel grants for graduate students involved in these meetings.

Edouard

New Extended Cognition Blog

kenneth aizawa — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:46:00 GMT

Kris Rhodes, grad student at UC-Irvine, has started The Extended Cognition Blog. I've posted an entry and a comment to help get it going. I'm betting others are welcome.

Philosophers' Carnival #90

gualtiero piccinini — Tue, 05 May 2009 18:58:00 GMT

Here.

Zombies Transcended?

Richard Brown — Tue, 05 May 2009 12:44:00 GMT

I have just read through the latest draft of fellow Brains contributor Pete Mandik's paper Transcending Zombies which he has up over at Brain Hammer. In it Pete wants to

develop advice to the reductionist about consciousness in the form of a transcendental argument that depends crucially on the sorts of knowledge claims concerning consciousness that, as crucial elements in the anti-reductionists’ epistemic gap arguments, the anti-reductionist will readily concede.

I have some qualms about the line of argument he offers. The basic argument goes as follows

P1. If I know that I am not a zombie, then phenomenal character is (a certain kind of) conceptualized egocentric content.
P2. I know that I am not a zombie.
P3. Phenomenal character is (a certain kind of) conceptualized egocentric content.
P4. Fixing my physical properties fixes my conceptualized egocentric contents.
C. Fixing my physical properties fixes my phenomenal properties.

Pete claims that the bulk of the work is done by P1. So let's look at Pet's argument for that before looking at some other issues. The basic idea is that in order for me to have certainty with respect to the fact that I am not a zombie I need to be able to have a belief that I have qualia and that needs to be true. This, however, isn't enough. I need to be able to characterize my experience in terms of concepts, represent the qualia as being mine (the representation must be egocentric in Pete's terms), and further, the conceptualized, egocentric contents must be identical to the qualitative character of my experience.

We must first point out that so far there is nothing here that the anti-reductionist need necessarily object to. They may simply affirm the line of argument while holding that the conceptualized egocentric content is not reducible to any physical state of Pete. This means that a dualist like Chalmers can accept the argument all the way to P3. So it really is P4 that is doing the heavy lifting, so let's look at the argument for it.

Pete says,

Prima facie, it looks like physical similarity would entail conceptual similarity, that my physical doppelganger is my conceptual doppelganger.

But now we have left the realm of things that are neutrally acceptable between the reductionist and the anti-reductionist! A dualist like Chalmers will insist that in so far as non-physical qualitative properties are (partly) constitutive of my phenomenal concepts, a physical duplicate of me could have a pseudo phenomenal concept but they would not have the full-blown phenomenal concept that I do. Pete is aware of this kind of objection and tries to head it off by saying,

Some, like Chalmers (2003), may object that fixing my physical properties does not fix all of my concepts, since phenomenal character is non-physical and there are some concepts, so-called direct phenomenal concepts, which can be possessed only if one has had or is having a state with phenomenal character. My main complaint against this response is that I don’t think there are such concepts as concepts one can only have if one has had or is having a state with phenomenal character. I address this issue at greater [length] elsewhere (Mandik, 2009b). One brief point to make here, though, is that really direct phenomenal concepts, concepts had only while one is currently having a state with phenomenal character seem not to be concepts at all for their violation of both the reidentifiability criterion and the criterion of endogenous triggering (Prinz 2007 pp.207-208 makes a similar point).

Since Pete gives only one reason for doubting the anti-reductionist claim, let's look at it. He objects to what he calls 'really' direct concepts by pointing out that they fail two plausible constraints on concept possession. But the anti-reductionist can agree with this and insist that a full-blown phenomenal concept is one that is partially constituted by a non-physical qualitative property and that physical duplicates can lack these non-physical properties and so lack full-blown phenomenal concepts. The anti-reductionist can agree that really direct phenomenal concepts are strange and insist that once one has acquired the relevant full-blown phenomenal concept it is available for endogenous triggering and reidentification. Thus the argument fails at what is really the crucial stage. What we need is an argument that phenomenal concepts are such that they can be acquired without having the relevant experience and that is not given (it may be given in the reference Pete cites, but the point is that since it plays a crucial role in teh argument it should be given here. What is given here is insufficient to make the point).

Secondly, it is not clear why the anti-reductionist must hold that full-blown phenomenal concepts work like this. Why couldn't they simply adapt the typical empiricist claim that full-blown phenomenal concepts are innate? It would then be the case that the we could have full-blown phenomenal concepts without having the relevant experience (though perhaps they have to be triggered or something like that). At the very least more needs to be said to make this crucial step of the argument work.

The necx stage of the argument is to try to establush that fixing Pete's physical properties fix his egocentric properties. But there is a problem with this kind of argument. Pete argues that a physical duplicate of him will necessarily have distinct egocentric properties (that duplicate will be thinking of itself, not the actual Pete). But since this is the case the argument he gives will not move the anti-reductionist. The anti-reductionist can agree that fixing Pete's physical properties fix his phenomenal properties, since the phenomenal nomologically supervenes on the physical. What should be at issue is whether or not fixing the physical properties of a physical duplicate is enouogh to fix that duplicate's egocentric contents, arguing that it works here, with these laws, is to miss the point of the zombie argument. Everyone agrees that given the way things are here in out world fixing physical properties is enough to give you phenomenal properties. The question is whether a physical duplicate has to have their phenomenal properties fixed. It is unclear how talking aout the actual Pete helps with this question. Now Pete, again, acknowledges that a move like thismight be made but says that it gets the same response as the move about phenomenal concepts already discussed. But that move is problematic, and so this move is problematic.

Therefore the advice given is not helpful advice for defeating the zombie intuitions that anti-reductionists have. The anti-reductionist can accept the argument as given by Pete while insisting that it doesn't defeat intuitions about zombies.

A better strategy is to deploy a style of argument that the anti-reductionist is committed to. This is why the zoombie and shombie arguments are better for defeating zombie inuitions. All of the moves made are identical, but opposite, to those made by the anti-reductionist. It thus becomes very clear that what we have here is two parties merely asserting that something is conceivable (zonbies & ghosts/zoombies & shombies). Since both can't really be conceivable one of us must be wrong and nothing that we know at this point can settle the issue. Thus issues about physicalism/dualism are empirical matters that cannot be settled by a priori methods.