The Zombie Argument
人皮囊论证
• avid John Chalmers (born
20 April 1966) is
an Australian philosopherspe
cializing in the area
of philosophy of
mind and philosophy of
language, whose recent work
concerns verbal disputes. He
is Professor of Philosophy
and Director of the Centre
for Consciousness at
the Australian National
University. He is also Visiting
Professor of Philosophy
at New York University.
• A philosophical zombie or pzombie in the philosophy of
mind and perception is a
hypothetical being that is
indistinguishable from a normal
human being except in that it
lacks conscious
experience, qualia,
or sentience.[1]When a zombie
is poked with a sharp object,
for example, it does not feel
any pain though it behaves
exactly as if it does feel pain (it
may say "ouch" and recoil from
the stimulus, or tell us that it is in
intense pain).
• 1. Physicalism is the view that the physical world is all there is. If they
are right, then other true factual statements are nothing but the redescription of the physical. Think about how the God created the
world in a physicalist framework.
• 2. So if physicalism is right, accounts for consciousness should be redescriptions of the physical.
• 3. There should be Zombies, whose physical properties are like
normal persons, but lacking consciousness.
• 4. So from the physical perspective, the absence of consciousness
makes explanatory problem for physicalism. Or in other words, there
is a “explanatory gap” between having the physical and lacking the
mental.
• 5. Therefore, physicalism is false.
• Here consciousness means “qualia”.
• Qualia ( /ˈkwɑːliə/ or /ˈkweɪliə/), singular "quale" (Latin
pronunciation: [ˈkwaːle]), from a Latin word meaning for "what
sort" or "what kind," is a term used in philosophy to refer to
subjective conscious experiences as 'raw feels'.
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1.Zombies are conceivable.
2.Whatever is conceivable is possible.
3.Therefore zombies are possible.
Or more technically,
1. Zombies are conceivable in some thought experiments.
2. Whatever exits in a thought experiment exists in a possible
world.
• 3. Therefore there are zombies in some possible worlds.
• It is important to remember that physicalism cannot hold if
zombie exits in even one possible world.
• Chalmers finds the conceivability of zombies ‘obvious’:
he remarks that ‘it certainly seems that a coherent
situation is described; I can discern no contradiction in
the description’ (1996, p. 96). However, intuition is
something that cannot be relied on in philosophy. We
need more detailed justifications.
• Suppose a person is progressively being deprived of qualia in
one sense modality (感官道) after another, even though most of
the time he continues to produce behavior that would have been
appropriate if he had retained full consciousness. As soon as all
his sense modalities have been affected, his patterns of
behavior revert to normal; but the suggestion is that it is at least
intelligible to say he has become a zombie (Kirk 1974a).
• EVALUATION:
• However, this line of reasoning falls well short of establishing
that zombies are really conceivable. It seems to depend on
much the same cluster of intuitions as the original idea.
• Another thought experiment involves a team of microLilliputians(小人国成员) who invade Gulliver‘s head（格列佛
的脑袋）, disconnect his afferent （感受的） and efferent
（效应的） nerves, monitor the inputs from his afferent nerves,
and send outputs down his efferent nerves to produce behavior
indistinguishable from what it would have been originally. The
resulting system has the same behavioral dispositions as Gulliver
but (allegedly) lacks sensations and other experiences, contrary
to the ‘Entailment Thesis’, according to which the physical facts
entail the psychological facts (Kirk 1974b).
•
• Suppose a population of tiny people disable your brain and
replicate its functions themselves, while keeping the rest of your body
in working order; each homunculus （小人）uses a cell phone to
perform the signal-receiving and -transmitting functions of an
individual neuron. Now, would such a system be conscious? Intuitively
one may be inclined to say obviously not. Some, notably functionalists,
bite the bullet and answer yes. However, the argument does not
depend on assuming that the homunculus-head would not be conscious.
It depends only on the assumption that its not being conscious is
conceivable — which many people find reasonable. In Chalmers's
words, all that matters here is that when we say the system might lack
consciousness, ‘a meaningful possibility is being expressed, and it is
an open question whether consciousness arises or not’ (1996, p. 97). If
he is right, then the system is not conscious. In that case it is already
very much like a zombie, the only difference being that it has little
people where a zombie has neurons.
• According to verificationism (证实主义), a (declarative)
sentence is meaningful just in case its truth value can be verified.
This entails that unverifiable sentences are literally meaningless,
so that no metaphysical claim according to which unobservable
nonphysical items exist can be true. However, since our ability to
think and talk about our experiences is itself a problem for
verificationism, to presuppose it when attacking the zombie
idea would beg the question.
• Or in another way, “Zombies are conceivable” is meaningless
because the very statement cannot be verified.
• The second idea is Wittgenstein's ‘private language argument’.
Although not crudely verificationistic, it depends on the
assumption that in order for words to be meaningful, their use
must be open to public checking. If sound, therefore, it would
seem to prove that we cannot talk about qualia in the ways that
defenders of the zombie possibility think we can; the
checkability assumption therefore also seems question-begging
in this context.
• Or in another way, “Zombies are conceivable” is meaningless
because the very statement is not checkable in the public
square. So, it should be someone’s private language. But
Wittgenstein has told us that private language is impossible.
• According to the third idea, behaviorism, there is no
more to having mental states than being disposed to
behave in certain ways. As a possible basis for
attacking the zombie idea, behaviorism is in a similar
situation to verificationism and the private language
argument. Obviously zombies would satisfy all
behavioral conditions for full consciousness, so if we
could know a priori that behaviorism was correct,
zombie worlds would be inconceivable for that reason.
• A much more widely supported approach to the mental is functionalism: the
view that mental states are not just a matter of behavior and dispositions,
but of the causal or other ‘functional’ relations of sensory inputs, internal
states, and behavioral outputs. (Note that unless the nature of the internal
processing is taken into account as well, then functionalism falls to most of the
usual objections to behaviorism, for example to the ‘homunculus-head’
described in the last section.) Since zombies would satisfy all the functional
conditions for full consciousness, functionalism entails that zombies are
impossible. Of course functionalism cannot just be presupposed when
attacking the zombie idea: that would hardly be any better than
presupposing behaviorism. But increasingly sophisticated versions of
functionalism are being formulated and defended today, and any arguments
for functionalism are a fortiori arguments (“更何况论证”) against the
possibility of zombies.
• NOTE: The Latin phrase argumentum a fortiori denotes "argument 'from [the]
stronger [reason]'." For example, if it has been established that a person is
deceased, then one can, with equal or greater certainty, argue that the
person is not breathing.
• 1. Suppose that zombies are conceivable.
• 2. A fortiori, possible worlds in which qualia are nothing but epiphenomenal
qualia are conceivable (if the stronger thesis holds, the weaker one does as
well). That is to say, people there do have qualia (in this sense they are not
zombies), but the qualia do not have any causal power , or causally inert (in
this sense these persons are similar to zombies).
• 3. So in these worlds, people cannot have any ‘epistemic contact’ with those
experiences or qualia.
• 4. So these epiphenomenal qualia contribute nothing to people’s mental life.
• 5. But by definition, e-qualia are accessible to people. Being known is some
causal relationship.
• 6. (5) contradicts (4).
• 7. Hence, epiphenomenal worlds are not conceivable.
• 8. Therefore, zombies are not conceivable .(If the weaker thesis cannot hold,
the stronger cannot as well.)
• A number of philosophers argue that Kripke‘s ideas about a
posteriori necessary truth (后验必然真理) facilitate the defense
of physicalism. They urge that even if a zombie world is
conceivable, that does not establish that it is possible in the way
that matters. Conceivability is an epistemic notion, they say,
while possibility is a metaphysical one: ‘It is false that if one can
in principle conceive that P, then it is logically possible that P; …
Given psychophysical identities, it is an ‘a posteriori’ fact that
any physical duplicate of our world is exactly like ours in
respect of positive facts about sensory states’
• Saul Aaron Kripke (born
November 13, 1940) is
an American
philosopher andlogician. He is a
professor emeritus at Princeton
and teaches as a Distinguished
Professor of Philosophy at
the CUNY Graduate Center.
Since the 1960s Kripke has
been a central figure in a
number of fields related
tomathematical
logic, philosophy of
language, philosophy of
mathematics,metaphysics, episte
mology, and set theory.
• The metaphysical distinction between necessary and contingent truths has
also been related to a priori and a posteriori knowledge. A proposition that
is necessarily true is one whose negation is self-contradictory (thus, it is said to
be true in every possible world). Consider the proposition that all bachelors
are unmarried. Its negation, the proposition that some bachelors are married,
is incoherent, because the concept of being unmarried (or the meaning of the
word "unmarried") is part of the concept of being a bachelor (or part of the
definition of the word "bachelor"). To the extent that contradictions are
impossible, self-contradictory propositions are necessarily false, because it is
impossible for them to be true. Thus, the negation of a self-contradictory
proposition is supposed to be necessarily true. By contrast, a proposition that
is contingently true is one whose negation is not self-contradictory (thus, it is
said that it is not true in every possible world). As Jason Baehr states, it
seems plausible that all necessary propositions are known a priori, because
"[s]ense experience can tell us only about the actual world and hence about
what is the case; it can say nothing about what must or must not be the case."
• Kripke
also
raised
the
prospect
of
a
posteriori necessities — facts that are necessarily true,
though they can be known only through empirical
investigation. Examples include “Cicero is Tully”,
“Water is H2O” and other identity claims where two
names refer to the same object.
• EPISTEMOLOGY CANNOT BE CONFUSED WITH
METAPHYSICS!
• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/#2