And I have an opinion about your belief system: I think it's logically inconsistent. — RogueAI
Do you have some good links supporting your position? — RogueAI
Mary's Room (or as it is more commonly called, "The Knowledge Argument") was actually by Frank Jackson, not Chalmers. Though I'm sure Chalmers must have talked about it in his book.
The Knowlege Argument certainly did provoke a lot of debate, and physicalists at the time presented mostly bad arguments against it. But there is still a huge challenge to it for dualists. The Knowledge Argument is not as strong against physicalism as it might appear at first: Imagine that we put a zombie version of Mary in the same circumstance. Zombie Mary would have the exact same reaction when she is let out of her black & white room as Mary would.
That's how I read it. How does Zombie Mary fit in to that? Are you claiming a p-zombie can know things??? — RogueAI
The knowledge argument also has the problem of equivocation over the sort of knowledge that Mary gains: she can only gain discursively-learnable knowledge while she is isolated, and if what she learns when she is released is not discursively learnable, then physicalism is not challenged — A Raybould
Yes, I am claiming a zombie can know things.
How could a mindless thing have knowledge? How are you defining knowledge? — RogueAI
Zombies can have minds and they can have cognition. What zombies are missing is phenomenal states. I don't see any reason at all why having phenomenal states should be a precondition for having knowledge.
You think a mind that can't be conscious can exist? That would be far different from what we commonly think of when we refer to minds. — RogueAI
I believe that there were some early theories claiming that brain states are the same as mental states (type identity theory, perhaps?) but I think they have been supplanted by the view that minds are emergent phenomena arising from the low-level activity of the brain. This sort of emergence is not a controversial or speculative idea, as we have plenty examples of this sort of thing -- for example, in a neural network that picks out images containing cats, you will not find, in its individual hardware and software components (transistors and bytes, respectively), anything that recognizes cats. More simply, if you look at a sorting algorithm, you will not find, in its steps taken individually, anything that has a sorting property -- only the complete algorithm has that.IF materialism is correct, AND brain states are the same as mental states THEN knowledge of brain states should entail knowledge of mental states. — RogueAI
Not all physicalists are persuaded by Tegmark: Scott Aaronson, who appears to be a physicalist (see my first post in this thread) is one such. — A Raybould
Real philosophizing takes a lot of careful words! — Douglas Alan
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