Philosophical zombies

Zombie posterThis page on David Chalmers’ web site is way too much fun. Not content with giving us a taxonomy of zombies (including Hollywood zombies and Unix processes), he delves into cocktails, cartoons, and 1960s pop music. Of course the core of the page is the collection of links to papers on philosophical zombies: devices which seem to have become part of the standard toolkit of certain philosophers of mind. Nigel Thomas’s elegant Zombie Killer ought to have sent them all packing, but unfortunately these impossible (but arguably conceivable) undead critters just won’t stay down….

On reading philosophy and "Three Card Monte"

As I noted earlier, I’m reading David Chalmers’ “The Conscious Mind”. Early on, Chalmers lays his cards on the table: “In this book I reach conclusions that some people may think of as ‘antiscientific’: I argue that reductive explanation of consciousness is impossible, and I even argue for a form of dualism.” He acknowledges that “Temperamentally, I am strongly inclined toward materialist reductive explanation […] I hoped for a materialist theory; when I gave up on this hope, it was quite reluctantly.”
Like Chalmers, I too am temperamentally inclined towards a materialist account of consciousness. As I read the book (and I’m still finishing chapter 2 on Supervenience and Explanation), I find myself watching closely to see whether or not he smuggles in some dichotomous assumptions which might affect his eventual conclusions. It feels a bit like watching a game of Three-Card Monte to see if and when a card gets creased or a misdirection occurs. There is plenty of exceptionalism flying around. For instance he concedes that “Almost everything is logically supervenient on the physical.[…] Conscious experience is almost unique in its failure to supervene logically.” It’ll be interesting to see how he justifies this.
So far, the only troubling section (p.75) has been the way in which he asserts that “…the facts about the external world do not supervene logically on the facts about our experience.” One would expect him to treat this as a big deal: after all, as he continues, “Idealists, positivists, and others have argued controversially that they do. Note that if these views are accepted the skeptical problem [due to Hume] falls away.” And so, I think, does Chalmers’ case that there is a “deep problem” here. But then with one bound our hero is free, Indiana Jones style: “In any case, I am bypassing this sort of skeptical problem by giving myself the physical world for free.” Well, maybe – but note that he explicitly means “the external world”, and the internal/external dichotomy remains. I have a suspicion that this may be at the root of the eventual dualism, but I’ll have to read on and find out.

War and morality

I just stumbled across a very thoughtful piece by Paul Savoy in The Nation entitled The Moral Case Against The Iraq War. Here’s how Savoy frames the issue:
The problem opponents of the war have had in responding to President Bush’s claim of moral legitimacy […] is that they have addressed the moral issue in the terms the President has framed it rather than reframing the issue in their own moral terms. Talking about the world, or at least Iraq, being “better off” avoids confronting the civilian carnage caused by the war…. [W]e should be wary of talking about the overall good of society or of a particular country. There is no social entity called Iraq that benefited from some self-sacrifice it suffered for its own greater good, like a patient who voluntarily endures some pain to be better off than before. There were only individual human beings living in Iraq before the war, with their individual lives. Sacrificing the lives of some of them for the benefit of others killed them and benefited the others. Nothing more. Each of those Iraqis killed in the war was a separate person, and the unfinished life each of them lost was the only life he or she had, or would ever have. They clearly are not better off now that Saddam is gone from power.
There is only one truly serious question about the morality of the war, and that is the question posed more than fifty years ago by French Nobel laureate Albert Camus, looking back on two world wars that had slaughtered more than 70 million people: When do we have the right to kill our fellow human beings or let them be killed? What is needed is a national debate in the presidential election campaign that addresses the most important moral issue of our time. It is an issue we are required to face not only as a matter of moral obligation to all those Iraqis killed in the war, but to the 772 American servicemen and -women who, as of May 10, had lost their lives and the more than 4,000 US soldiers injured in Iraq.

Warning: Savoy describes some of the consequences of military action in graphic detail. It will turn your stomach. (If it doesn’t, you are beyond hope.) But as he writes,
Judging from the poll numbers after the fall of the Iraqi regime, the seven or eight out of ten Americans who backed the war were prepared to build the edifice of freedom and democracy on the broken bodies not of one, but of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Iraqi children killed or maimed or burned in the conflict.
[Updated: This is a useful source of supporting data, even though it only covers a few months last year.]