The latter can either be because metaphysically boring material stuff, arranged the right way, magically gives rise to something metaphysically novel (strong emergence); or else that whatever it is that a real human is supposed to have that a philosophical zombie wouldn't -- which is not anything functional, because a zombie is functionally identical to a human -- is just something that everything has. — Pfhorrest
Why would you be surprised at the sudden emergence of something metaphysically interesting? — Isaac
Strong emergence definitionally differs from weak emergence. — Pfhorrest
Strong emergence describes the direct causal action of a high-level system upon its components; qualities produced this way are irreducible to the system's constituent parts.[11] The whole is other than the sum of its parts. An example from physics of such emergence is water, which appears unpredictable even after an exhaustive study of the properties of its constituent atoms of hydrogen and oxygen.
It’s not the interesting part, it’s the novel part. — Pfhorrest
Strong emergence definitionally differs from weak emergence. Things that meet the criteria for strong emergence are “like magic”; things that only meet the criteria for weak emergence are not. So things that are not “like magic” — not of the same character as the things compared to magic — are not meeting the criteria for strong emergence.
@Kenosha Kid, please back me up here. — Pfhorrest
The Scrabble metaphor can be pushed a bit further.The idea of the Scrabble tiles is that a new thing 'a word' has arisen randomly from the casting of the tiles, but this 'thing' is a human construct, — Isaac
That would be dandy, except that "magic" is a very vague term, often applied to things we don't quite understand but seem nevertheless real. The magic of the gap. And this is the case here: Pfhorest's use of the word 'magic' only denotes that he doesn't understand something, and thus rejects it as impossible. — Olivier5
Where did the dictionary come from? That’s where the magic happens. It’s not just building up from things inherent in the tiles, bottom-up: something other than the behavior of the tiles is exteriorly imposed on them from the top down. — Pfhorrest
Yes.So the dictionary weakly emerges from the behavior of the scrabble tiles, which as I said is fine by me. — Pfhorrest
The whole point is that many 'weak emergences' add up to a 'strong emergence'. — Olivier5
A subject's phenomenal experience of an object is, on my account, the same event as that object's behavior upon the subject, — Pfhorrest
Supernatural beings and philosophical zombies are ontologically quite similar on my account, as for something to be supernatural would be for it to have no observable behavior, and for something to be a philosophical zombie would be for it to have no phenomenal experience. Both of those are just different perspectives on the thing in question being completely cut off from the web of interactions that is reality, and therefore unreal. — Pfhorrest
Specifically, as regards philosophy of mind, it holds that when physical objects are arranged into the right relations with each other, wholly new mental properties apply to the composite object they create, mental properties that cannot be decomposed into aggregates of the physical properties of the physical objects that went into making the composite object that has these new mental properties. — Pfhorrest
From that moment it can react to inputs and produce outputs (lights, for example), whereas previously it was as dormant as a rock. — Malcolm Lett
True, because its configuration now enables all of those inanimate objects to interact in a certain way. But the kind of actions they do to each other are still actions that their constituent parts were capable of all along. Every copper atom is already capable of exchanging electrons with neighboring atoms; a closed circuit just gives a bunch of them motive and opportunity to pass electrons around with each other in a circle. — Pfhorrest
I don't see that you've accounted for qualia. Consider Mary, who is the world's foremost expert on color, but has never experienced redness. She learns to associate her intellectual knowledge with the experience only after she actually has the experience.So when it comes to phenomenal consciousness, either it is wholly absent from the most fundamental building blocks of physical things and so is still absent from anything built out of them, including humans — which I've already rejected above — or else it is present at least in humans, as concluded above, and so at least some precursor of it must be present in the stuff out of which humans are built, and the stuff out of which that stuff is built, and so on so that at least something prototypical of phenomenal consciousness as humans experience it is already present in everything, to serve as the building blocks of more advanced kinds of phenomenal — Pfhorrest
I don't see that you've accounted for qualia. Consider Mary, who is the world's foremost expert on color, but has never experienced redness. She learns to associate her intellectual knowledge with the experience only after she actually has the experience. — Relativist
Against Eliminativism
I am against eliminativism for the simple reason that I am directly aware of my own conscious experience, and whatever the nature of that may be, it seems that any philosophical argument that concludes that I am not actually having any conscious experience must have made some misstep somewhere and at best proven that something else mistakenly called "conscious experience" doesn't exist. But beyond my own personal experience, I find arguments put forth by other philosophers, such as Frank Jackson's "Mary's room" thought experiment, to convincingly defeat eliminativism, though not to defeat physicalism itself as they are intended to do.
In the "Mary's room" thought experiment, we imagine a woman named Mary who has been raised her entire life in a black-and-white room experiencing the world only through a black-and-white TV screen, but who has extensively studied and become an expert on the topic of color. She knows everything there is to know about the frequencies of electromagnetic radiation produced by various physical processes, how those interact with nerves in the eye and create signals that are processed by the brain, even the cultural significances of various colors, but she has never herself actually experienced color. We then imagine Mary leaving her room and seeing the color red for the first time, and in doing so, learning something new, despite supposedly knowing everything there was to know about color already: what the color red looks like.
This thought experiment was originally put forth to argue that there is something non-physical involved in the experience of color that Mary could not have learned about by studying the physical science of color, and I don't think it succeeds at all in establishing that, but I do think that it conclusively establishes that there is a difference between knowing, in a third-person fashion, how physical systems behave in various circumstances, and knowing, in the first person, what it's like to be such a physical system in such circumstances. In essence, I think it succeeds merely in showing that we are not philosophical zombies.
A more visceral analogous thought experiment I like to think of is that no amount of studying the physics, biology, psychology, or sociology of sex will ever suffice to answer the question "what's it like to have sex?" Actually doing it yourself is the only way to have that first-person experience; at best, that third-person knowledge of the way things behave can be instrumentally useful to recreating a first-person experience. But even then, you have to actually subject yourself to the experience to experience it, and that experience that can only be known in the first person is all that's meant by phenomenal consciousness. — Pfhorrest
One way I look it physicalism, is that if true, it should be possible, in principle, to construct a machine that operates identically to human consciousness. — Relativist
How would a machine experience qualia, in a non-zombie way? — Relativist
Instantiating the function isn't enough - a zombie could record the frequency of reflected light and proceed to function appropriately. I'll go a little further:How would a machine experience qualia, in a non-zombie way? — Relativist
The same way a human does: by instantiating the same function as a human, and so having its phenomenal experience (which correlates with function, in all things) be like that of all things that instantiate such a function, like humans. — Pfhorrest
Instantiating the function isn't enough - a zombie could record the frequency of reflected light and proceed to function appropriately. — Relativist
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