On 19 January 2015 at 14:01, David Nyman <[email protected]> wrote:
But if zombies were *logically* impossible, as I believe Dennett for > example claims, then it would be analytically true, not a contingent fact. I'd like to amplify here a little in light of my longer response to you about comp and the Hard Problem. Dennett's public and oft-repeated position is that physics has primacy over (for example) computation or logic. In other words, he believes that before something can be deemed computational or logical, it must first be physical. My point is that, given this prior commitment, he actually has no basis for any claim that zombies are *logically* impossible unless they are first *physically* impossible. However, the fact is (as notoriously argued by Chalmers, for example) that we have precisely zero evidence that zombies are physically impossible. In point of fact they would appear to be physically *inevitable*, given that the system of physical relation appears (very convincingly) to be both causally sufficient and causally closed. The conjunction of this inconvenient fact with a prior commitment to physical naturalism often seems to result in a kind of cognitive dissonance. In Dennett's case this leads to a denial that consciousness can be distinguished from our 'judgements' about it (i.e. it is an 'illusion') which is superficially at least consistent, though ultimately self-defeating. Smolin's unwillingness to deny consciousness, by contrast, pushes him into frank inconsistency. We need something better than either of these positions. David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
