zombies and consciousness jan 2006

[...]... control, and consciousness 9.2 Why the basic package seems insufficient for perceptual consciousness 9.3 The Evans-Tye model 9.4 Concepts and the acquisition of information 9.5 Registration and conceptualization 9.6 Two points about information and registration 9.7 Directly active perceptual information: instantaneity and priority 9.8 A holistic approach to direct activity 9.9 Can we really understand direct... physicalism 18 Zombies and Minimal Physicalism strings, or whatever? No We know that mountains involve nothing beyond the physical; but our explanation of relief rain is fine as it stands: only confusion and obfuscation would result from trying to express it in terms of quarks and so on Nor is there any need to attempt a ‘semantic reduction’ of the macro-vocabulary and concepts of mountains, winds, and so on,... extending our understanding to phenomenal consciousness in general will then, I claim, be relatively straightforward, and will be only briefly considered To introduce the framework I shall outline a scheme for classifying organisms and other behaving systems from the point of view of an interest in perceptual consciousness I shall argue that a necessary condition for perceptual consciousness is the... details could still be expressed down to any arbitrary degree of resolution; and the broad points I want to make still stand 10 Zombies and Minimal Physicalism imply that we must be able to construct counterparts in P to all non-physically statable truths Typically the non-physically statable truths classify and select things and properties in different ways from those provided by physics These points... surroundings, and which we call ‘mountains’ If we knew and accepted that much of what P specifies (always in its own terms, of course, not in the terms I have just used) then for us to deny that there were mountains on our planet would be inconsistent with our understanding of those words and our grasp of the concepts involved It is in that sense that it would be incoherent to assert ‘P and not-M’, and it... (1994) See also Chalmers 1996; 1999; Jackson 1994; 1998; Chalmers and Jackson 2001 Kirk 1996a advocates strict implication and descriptions in preference to supervenience and properties 12 Zombies and Minimal Physicalism different statements are true; but the strict implication thesis says nothing about those worlds ‘P’ is not a variable, standing for whatever the physical facts may happen to be in any... which is why I won’t use that expression The relation between P and M seems too straightforward and unmysterious to be labelled in such a problematic way Zombies and Minimal Physicalism 13 mountains include non-physical items, you might suspect that ‘P and not-M’ is not incoherent But that would be a mistake For two main reasons, Block and Stalnaker’s point does not undermine the argument of the last... talk and write about consciousness unless it were conscious? But the example is strictly philosophical, and this particular physical duplicate is a philosophical zombie By definition philosophical zombies are supposed to have no conscious experiences at all: ‘all is silent and dark within’.¹ All the philosophers I know—indeed all the sane people I know—agree that in fact there are no philosophical zombies. .. therefore completely specifiable by Cartesian co-ordinates and the letters ‘W’ and ‘B’ (‘W(3,4)’ means that the pixel three places in from the left and four up from the bottom is white, ‘B(0, 22)’ means that the 22nd pixel up on the left-hand edge is black, and so on.) Suppose, then, that we have a specification S of an image in those terms, and that a certain ordinary-language description D is true... ‘mental-state subjectivity’, and higher-order thought 10.15 More objections 10.16 Why there will always seem to be a gap 164 164 166 167 170 171 172 174 175 178 179 186 188 189 11 Survival of the Fittest 11.1 Scientific-psychological and neuroscientific accounts 11.2 Dualism and physicalism 11.3 Wittgenstein and Sartre 11.4 Behaviourism 11.5 Other functionalisms 11.6 Dennett on ‘multiple drafts’ and ‘Joycean machines’ .