display all the ideas for this combination of texts
4 ideas
| 2409 | Maybe dualist interaction is possible at the quantum level? [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: The only form of interactionist dualism that has seemed even remotely tenable in the contemporary picture is one that exploits certain properties of quantum mechanics. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 2.4.4) | |
| A reaction: I think he is bluffing. No doubt quantum mechanics offers many intriguing possibilities, such as the interaction of many worlds within the mind, but I am not aware that anything non-physical is ever postulated. Physicists don't deal in the non-physical. |
| 2411 | Supervenience makes interaction laws possible [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: There is an objection to dualism that it cannot explain how the physical and the nonphysical interact, but the answer is simple on a natural supervenience framework - they interact by virtue of psychophysical laws (…which are as eternal as physics). | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 2.4.6) | |
| A reaction: There are different sorts of laws. What Chalmers is hoping for would be a mere regularity, like the connection of cancer to smoking, but the objection is that the discovery of causal mechanisms, to give truly explanatory laws, is simply impossible. |
| 2424 | It is odd if experience is a very recent development [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: It would be odd for a fundamental property like experience to be instantiated for the first time only relatively late in the history of the universe, and even then only in occasional complex systems. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 3.8.4) | |
| A reaction: The assumption of this remark is that experience is 'fundamental', which seems to claim that it is a separate ontological category. Maybe, but experience doesn't seem to be a thing. 'Process' seems a better term, and that is not a novelty in the universe. |
| 2413 | If I can have a zombie twin, my own behaviour doesn't need consciousness [Chalmers] |
| Full Idea: The explanation of my zombie twin's claims does not depend on consciousness, as there is none in his world. It follows that the explanation of my claims is also independent of the existence of consciousness. | |
| From: David J.Chalmers (The Conscious Mind [1996], 2.5.2) | |
| A reaction: Epiphenomenalism says my accounts of my consciousness are NOT because of my consciousness (which seems daft). Chalmers here gives a very good reason why we should not be a friend of philosophical zombies. |