I think of Escher's drawings as visual paradoxes - representations of something which seems real but which obviously can't be, as they are drawn from multiple dimensions. As such they're tangential to the main point, but they do illustrate the way in which something can be 'incoherent' - like, not make visual sense - but still be, at least, represented. — Wayfarer
Is it possible for a concept to be incoherent yet conceivable? Can you give examples? — Real Gone Cat
I don't know - could be my Aspergers - but to me, incoherent = inconceivable. — Real Gone Cat
In ordinary language the term "conceive" is often loosely used, in a manner equivalent to "imagine". — Cabbage Farmer
Thinking versus imagining
First, the concepts that are the constituents of intellectual activity are universal while mental images and sensations are always essentially particular. Any mental image I can form of a man is always going to be of a man of a particular sort -- tall, short, fat, thin, blonde, redheaded, bald, or what have you. It will fit at most many men, but not all. But my concept 'man' applies to every single man without exception. Or to use my stock example, any mental image I can form of a triangle will be an image of an isosceles , scalene, or equilateral triangle, of a black, blue, or green triangle, etc. But the abstract concept triangularity applies to all triangles without exception. And so forth.
Second, mental images are always to some extent vague or indeterminate, while concepts are at least often precise and determinate. To use Descartes’ famous example, a mental image of a chiliagon (a 1,000-sided figure) cannot be clearly distinguished from a mental image of a 1,002-sided figure, or even from a mental image of a circle. But the concept of a chiliagon is clearly distinct from the concept of a 1,002-sided figure or the concept of a circle. I cannot clearly differentiate a mental image of a crowd of one million people from a mental image of a crowd of 900,000 people. But the intellect easily understands the difference between the concept of a crowd of one million people and the concept of a crowd of 900,000 people. And so on.
Third, we have many concepts that are so abstract that they do not have even the loose sort of connection with mental imagery that concepts like man, triangle, and crowd have. You cannot visualize triangularity or humanness per se, but you can at least visualize a particular triangle or a particular human being. But we also have concepts -- such as the concepts law, square root, logical consistency, collapse of the wave function, and innumerably many others -- that can strictly be associated with no mental image at all. You might form a visual or auditory image of the English word “law” when you think about law, but the concept law obviously has no essential connection whatsoever with that word, since ancient Greeks, Chinese, and Indians had the concept without using that specific word to name it. You might form a mental image of a certain logician when you contemplate what it is for a theory to be logically consistent, or a mental image of someone observing something when you contemplate the collapse of the wave function, but there is no essential connection whatsoever between (say) the way Alonzo Church looked and the concept logical consistency or (say) what someone looks like when he’s observing a dead cat and the concept wave function collapse.
I can conceive or imagine p-bread that is molecule-for-molecule the same as ordinary bread, but that does not nourish human organisms when processed in the ordinary way by ordinary human mouths and stomachs. — Cabbage Farmer
Humans are 'beings'. To fulfil the definition of 'being' is to have an 'inner life'. The whole discussion is simply an abundant illustration of the intellectual bankruptcy of what passes for 'philosophy' in the American academy. — Wayfarer
So you can imagine something that is at once identical and yet completely different? — Wayfarer
I am arguing that if something is in the category of incoherent then it is necessarily in the category of inconceivable. — Real Gone Cat
materialism has a mind/body problem until the day arrives that all of the mind can be understood in material terms. — Marchesk
Doesn't have to be magic to be conceivable. — Marchesk
'Conceivability' in the sense of 'being able to imagine something' doesn't count for much, does it? — Wayfarer
Are you arguing that a vague, confused, unclear concept is conceivable? All are synonyms for incoherent. — Real Gone Cat
So you can imagine something that is at once identical and yet completely different?
That seems both incoherent AND inconceivable to me, on the grounds that it contravenes the law of identity. — Wayfarer
Some remarks on the distinction between concepts and imagination by Ed Feser: — Wayfarer
I imagine that Yellow-Eyed Cabbage Farmer is identical to Brown-Eyed Cabbage Farmer in every respect but this one. — Cabbage Farmer
if there were machines [i.e. 'p zombies'] that resembled our bodies and if they imitated our actions as much as is morally possible, we would always have two very certain means for recognizing that, none the less, they are not genuinely human. The first is that they would never be able to use speech, or other signs composed by themselves, as we do to express our thoughts to others. For one could easily conceive of a machine that is made in such a way that it utters words, and even that it would utter some words in response to physical actions that cause a change in its organs—for example, if someone touched it in a particular place, it would ask what one wishes to say to it, or if it were touched somewhere else, it would cry out that it was being hurt, and so on. But it could not arrange words in different ways to reply to the meaning of everything that is said in its presence, as even the most unintelligent human beings can do. The second means is that, even if they did many things as well as or, possibly, better than anyone of us, they would infallibly fail in others. Thus one would discover that they did not act on the basis of knowledge, but merely as a result of the disposition of their organs. For whereas reason is a universal instrument that can be used in all kinds of situations, these organs need a specific disposition for every particular action.
Are you familiar with the loose, ordinary-language senses of "imagine" and "conceive" I've indicated? Do you think there is another, perhaps narrower, conception of such terms, more suitable to the present context? — Cabbage Farmer
Don't you agree with me that the philosophical discourse about p-zombies seems a frivolous and misleading waste of time, and teaches us nothing about the nature of consciousness? — Cabbage Farmer
Oh yes I most certainly do, but there is some entertainment to be had in saying why. But I am still at a loss why so much ink is spilled over the question. — Wayfarer
For that matter, I can imagine a being with a radically different type of inner life - an alien intelligence perhaps - but not one with no inner life, because then, how would they simulate an answer to the question, 'how do you feel about X'? — Wayfarer
Yes, it's not a "being" (in the sense you're using, viz., having an inner life). — jamalrob
Assuming that one is a physicalist, any answer to that question (even our answer) is simply a physical response — Michael
Which reduces everything to stimulus and response... — Wayfarer
In any case, if the responder has no inner life, then the response 'I feel good about it', is actually a falsehood, obviously, because they don't feel anything.
So at best, again, it's a simulacrum.
If it's conceivable then consciousness can't be identical to behaviour/function/brain states, etc, because if it were identical to one of these things then p-zombies would be a contradiction. — Michael
Those sorts of things are only imaginable if you ignore some details, if you change some of the stipulations (so that you're not actually imagining it to be identical physically, to be undergoing the same processes, etc.), or if you simply don't understand how those things work--how vibrating strings produce sound, etc. — Terrapin Station
In my opinion it isn't conceivable though, unless we do the same thing we'd have to do in order to say, "Imagine an acoustic guitar that's exactly the same physically as normal acoustic guitars, that's undergoing the same processes, etc., but that can not produce any sound," or "imagine an elevator that's exactly the same physically as normal elevators, that's undergoing the same processes, etc., but that can not go up and down."
Is it conceptually necessary that vibrating strings produces sound, or is it just a physical fact? — Michael
Chalmers will claim that we can conceive of it — Michael
That's the whole point. You can't have physical facts as they are--which is what the thought experiment stipulates, yet have a human that's not sentient. The idea is incoherent. — Terrapin Station
Yeah, of course, but that doesn't make it so.
Sound (the sound of a guitar string in this case) is identical to physical structure/processes of a guitar.
Only if consciousness is just a physical thing. — Michael
But the claim is that because p-zombies are conceivable then consciousness isn't just a physical thing. — Michael
You seem to be begging the question by claiming that it isn't conceivable because consciousness if a physical thing.
Yes, and the same is true when you claim that we can't conceive of it. — Michael
Which it obviously is. — Terrapin Station
Only if it's begging the question to say that it isn't conceivable that a guitar would make no sound or that an elevator wouldn't go up and down.
The p-zombie argument attempts to show that it isn't. — Michael
If consciousness is physical then we can't conceive of a p-zombie — Michael
The word robot comes from the word slave, because they can never be born free -- perhaps they could emancipate themselves, all skynet style. — Wosret
If we can conceive of a p-zombie then consciousness isn't physical
We can conceive of a p-zombie
Therefore, consciousness isn't physical — Michael
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