Re: Dean Zimmerman, Dispatches from the zombie wars, Times Literary Supplement April 28, 2006: Review of Daniel C. Dennett’s Sweet dreams. Philosophical obstacles to a science of consciousness and Gregg Rosenberg’s, A Place for Consciousness.
Zimmerman’s review of Rosenberg‘s book is admirably detailed; the one of Dennett’s book, less so; and both reviews are indecisive: Are Rosenberg’s detailed arguments based on what he can imagine about “zombies” – hypothetical creatures that can “think” and act, but cannot feel — an intellectually rigorous exercise? Or is Dennett right to think not? Zimmerman takes no stance and doesn’t give the reader a basis for taking one either. He does, however, restate in passing a truism in philosophy whose truth it might be useful to call into question: “there is…no…’way that it feels’ to believe the Pythagorean Theorem.”
Most of what we believe/think/know is latent or “implicit ” (dare I say “zombic”?) I don’t carry around, actively, my knowledge of what is and is not bigger-than-a-breadbox, or that a mouse, in particular, is not. But when I am actually thinking about whether or not a mouse is bigger-than-a-breadbox, and have it in mind that it is indeed not, there is something that “online” belief-state feels like, just as there is something that a tickle or seeing yellow feel like. Yet surely it is the capacity for that online feeling state that distinguishes me from a zombie that has all my offline thinking and acting capacity, but no feeling.
So it won’t do to try to separate the problem of knowledge – offloading it onto computation – and try to treat tickles separately. The real zombie problem is not whether or not there can be zombies, but how and why we are not zombies. And that problem (the “mind/body” problem) is hard (and, I think, insoluble) for one simple reason: Because “how” and “why” are causal, functional questions. And feelings can only have causal power on pain of telekinetic dualism (“mind over matter”), which surely all evidence from physics contradicts. So Dennett might well be right that this problem cannot be solved by an exercise in imagination (although he is surely wrong that it is not a problem at all!).
The “zombie” problem, in other words, is the problem of explaining (nontelekinetically) how and why human (and animal) adaptive functions are felt, rather than merely “functed”…
If a “belief” is not to be merely a behavioral disposition, or merely the possession of certain data (which would then apply to any dynamical system, animate or otherwise, hence would not be something mental at all), then a belief can only be what it feels like to believe that P. And what it feels like to believe that P is not (in general) the same as what it feels like to believe that Q. Beliefs are as different as flavours, indeed as different as instances of tasting flavours (and no two instances of any feeling are identical, as we know from the philosopher [sic] Jorge Luis Borges, and his “Funes el memorioso“!).
It’s less a stance on the usefulness of arguments from imaginability that would be interesting, than its reasons. Dan gave some pretty snappy examples that seemed to reduce arguments from presence (or absence) of imagination to absurdities: Can they be resurrected? (I tend to think not: I can imagine making a perpetual motion machine too, and trisecting an angle…)
“Panpsychism” entails such a nightmarish mereological explosion/implosion (if we rightly use our imaginations and see how it pans out all the way to its logical conclusion) as to (I’ll bet) be provably incoherent; or if not that, then as implausible as anything an epsilon short of being provably self-contradictory can be…