Yet another snowstorm this weekend, bringing us to over 90 inches for the season. It snowed most of Saturday: big, wet flakes that stuck to all the trees and left inches of slushy stuff on the driveway. Very pretty… now go away!
Rather than venture out, I spent most of the weekend curled up with philosophy. Not only do I have a mid-term paper due in a couple of weeks, and my regular reading to do for class; I also received the new Dennett book, Sweet Dreams, on Saturday. (Amazon.com is hopelessly confused about this book: in some places it says that it’s coming on April 1, in others that it’s available now, shipping in 24 hours.)
Back in November, I blogged about David Chalmers and his obsession with zombies (philosophical and otherwise). In Sweet Dreams, Dennett discusses what he calls the Zombic Hunch: the intuitive idea that there might conceivably be zombie-like creatures that are EXACTLY LIKE ORDINARY PEOPLE except that they don’t have consciousness. Personally I find the notion of zombies incoherent – even in principle – but apparently a lot of people take them seriously. Like Dennett, I find the idea of philosophers arguing about the number of zombies that can fit on the head of a pin to be slightly unedifying. Oh well. If you want to get a feel for the issue without buying Dennett’s or Chalmers’ books, you can read this account of their debate.
And now I have to finish my notes on Searle’s infuriating Chinese Room. There are some interesting issues in this famous thought experiment, but ever since I first read it in The Mind’s I (over 20 years ago) I’ve been frustrated by the blatant equivocation and contradiction in the way Searle presents it. Perhaps it’s a useful discipline for me: learning to concentrate on [the important bits of] the message without being distracted by the lousy medium.