> Philosophical Zombies are like you and me, but they do not have phenomenal properties. On my view, Illusionism, there is no difference between us and a zombie so defined. An intrinsic physical duplicate of me that had no phenomenal properties would not differ from me in any intrinsic respect, because I already lack phenomenal properties.
Can you expand on what you take ‘phenomenal’ to refer to here? What would having phenomenal consciousness actually look like?
One thing I think illusonism struggles with that quietism does a better job of explaining is the semantics of the word ‘phenomenal’.
If you want to say phenomenal properties don’t exist then it’s not clear what they pick out as a referent. Kind’ve like how Elan vital doesn’t exist so it doesn’t refer properly.
And if you want to say humans lack phenomenal consciousness I’m inclined to say you’re using the word differently to how phenomenal realists use it.
Sorry I meant to reply to this when I liked it and then forgot!
I intend ‘phenomenal’ in the sense that philosophers of mind intend it e.g. the characteristic qualitative character of things like pain, or seeing red. The ‘what-it-is-likeness’ of those experiences.
I don’t think denying the existence of something necessarily makes the problem of defining the term more difficult, since the illusionist thesis also includes that we have mistaken beliefs that we have these sorts of qualitative properties of our experiences which help us acquire the concept. Aether also doesn’t exist, but I think I know what aether is supposed to be, and what it would refer to if that thing was there.
I think we need to be a little careful/precise here.
If we deny that experience has a characteristic qualitative character we’re veering dangerously into territory where the argument can just be dismissed as obviously false and I think this is where illusonism often gets stuck in the public discourse because people will say “What? Are you denying there’s something characteristic in my experience of redness when I see red? That’s insane!”
I think the strongest way of formulating this is to say that there’s no categorical property involved in phenomenally conscious experience. For example, chairs exist but there’s no categorical property of “chairness” above and beyond the structure of chairs. Waves exist but there’s no property of “waviness” which is instantiated when a wave forms.
This clarifies the point - we’re not denying that redness exists or that experience has a characteristic red quality. We’re denying that a categorical property is required to explain it above and beyond the functional/structural facts.
I also think this is disanalogous with the aether example. Aether is a structure of physical theories (namely a medium through which light was supposed to have needed to propagate.) It can be specified mathematically so it’s a structural property rather than a categorical one. You can just look at the world in third-person and see it’s not there.
I don’t think it’s obviously false. I think qualities are properties of objects (objects are red, green, etc) and I think experiences don’t have those properties, and so I deny they have a qualitative character. Now, I know phenomenal realists will insist that they don’t mean you have a red experience *in the same sense* that we say a chair is red. The experience is *phenomenally* red. At this point, I get quietist sympathies. Prior, I think I understand what they mean (this is I think what sense data theorists meant, or something close, and so I don’t think this reading is unfair on my part of at least some phenomenal realists) and I just deny that it is true. My experiences aren’t red. There is no red thing in my mind. I have experiences *of* red things, but the representation is not itself red. That’s how I see the thrust and parry of this dispute going, just so you can see the full picture of where I’m coming from.
So I don’t deny that there is something characteristic of red experiences, and that characteristic feature(s) may involve qualitative properties. I just deny that a red experiences is characteristically *itself* red.
I don’t really like the categorical distinction, because I don’t think I understand that concept unless it just means not functional. But then we are just saying a phenomenal property is a non-functional property analytically, so functionalism is analytically false, which seems wrong unless lots of philosophers are very confused.
I don’t take your point about aether. It seems as though you think categorical properties are not externally observable. Again, this just seems like the phenomenal realist is begging the question against physicalism. But also I don’t think we ‘just saw’ that aether wasn’t there.
A naive definition of ‘phenomenal’ refers to any properties which are qualitative/characteristic of an experience. e.g. the taste of coffee, the vivid colour of red. So when you say:
> I don’t deny that there is something characteristic of red experiences, and that characteristic feature(s) may involve qualitative properties.
This is in danger of not being an illusionist position because illusionists need to deny the existence of phenomenal properties.
I proposed using the categorical/dispositional distinction (following the distinction made by Armstrong) to clarify what the illusionist is denying. Frankish has a nice paper called de-psychologising the mind where he takes a line like this.
Roughly, dispositional properties are tied to what an object would do e.g. glass is *fragile* because it would shatter when struck, salt is *soluble* because it would dissolve in water. Categorical properties are tied to things that are actual and occurrent e.g. shape, size etc..
I’m fine to gloss categorical properties as non-functional for the purposes of the conversation although they’re slightly different.
> a phenomenal property is a non-functional property analytically, so functionalism is analytically false, which seems wrong unless lots of philosophers are very confused.
The proposal is instead of accepting the naive definition of phenomenal, the illusionist could identify phenomenal properties with categorical properties. Then they can deny that categorical properties play a fundamental role in conscious experience (although we mis-represent the dispositional/structural properties and think they’re categorical.) So functionalism isn’t analytically false on this picture, functionalists simply deny that non-functional properties play a role in consciousness and if those non-functional properties are called ‘phenomenal’ then they can be illusionists as well because they’re denying the existence of phenomenal properties.
To be clear, I don’t actually buy this line because I think experience has both a categorical and dispositional component (you’re disposed to stop at a red traffic light because of its categorical redness as well as the functional profile it realises) but I think it’s a clean way for the illusionist to be explicit about what’s being denied.
On the aether point I’m just saying that aether was a structural extension of physics that we did experiments (Michelson-Morley) and found didn’t exist - the structure wasn’t instantiated in nature. This is different to a categorical property not existing.
Can you expand on what you take ‘phenomenal’ to refer to here? What would having phenomenal consciousness actually look like?
ToB can correct me, but I think a canonical instance of having phenomenal consciousness would be experiencing intense pain with its characteristic, unmistakable qualitative feel. Illusionists deny there are any such qualitative, non-conceptual feels; there are only conceptual and propositional contents in experience, among them the false belief - a conceptual misrepresentation - that pain has a qualitative aspect. On illusionism vs. phenomenal realism see my critique of @Keith Frankish’s reactivity schema theory at https://naturalism.org/philosophy/consciousness/why-qualia-arent-like-unicorns-a-defense-of-phenomenal-realism
Can I ask, in brief, how you’d classify your position in philosophy of the mind? I assume based off your website you are a phenomenal realist and also endorse naturalism. Does that mean you endorse physicalism? Or do you think naturalism is compatible with dualism?
I count myself as a representationalist about phenomenal consciousness: sensory qualities like pain are, I’d suggest, a species of representational content. As a naturalist I keep my metaphysical options open since I don’t think naturalism is committed to physicalism or any other metaphysics, only to an essentially empirical, observational epistemology (science being the exemplar) kept honest by philosophy. Physicalism is attractive for naturalists given that science generally deals in mind-independent observables, but of course consciousness is hard to assimilate to physicalism since it’s neither mind-independent nor observable. But such assimilation isn’t necessarily ruled out.
Substance dualism too is not ruled out by naturalism, but we don’t have observational evidence for two sorts of stuff, one physical, one mental. Still, Chalmers is a naturalist dualist, near as I can tell. One thing to note is that the mental-physical distinction is itself a feature of our representational take on the world, so physicalism (that only one side of this distinction is real) isn’t prior to representation, but a function of it, thus potentially defeasible depending on where we end up in naturalizing representation. Here’s a bit on how the mental-physical distinction is generated within consciousness: https://www.naturalism.org/philosophy/consciousness/the-appearance-of-reality#toc-4-the-mentalphysical-distinction-as-a-representational-p-Z3z2tsq9
Thanks for the explanation and link. I read the whole thing and I think I agree with all of it with one exception. I particular endorse the idea that our conscious experience consists of qualia, and that qualia isn’t something we are need to additionally experience. That is, I don’t see my mental image of an apple, the mental image of the apple is part of my mental world, and being part of my mental world is what it means to see. This is exactly why a homunculus isn’t necessary and there is no infinite regress. I also like the analogy of game pieces in this passage:
“Logically, the RS can’t be in a direct representational, epistemic relationship with its own front-line, basic elements of representation; it doesn’t and can’t (directly) represent them (they represent the world for the RS), so they won’t be facts about which it could be wrong or right, but just counters (pieces) in the game of representation”.
My only hang up with representationalism is it makes it seem like qualia don’t exist, or do exist but in some lesser way. I think it is clear that they fully exist, even if they are epiphenomenal, they still in some sense exist just as much as the physical world. That’s why I classify myself as a dualist. I realize you say that qualia are “system-real”, but that still seems like a caveat where none should exist — that is, qualia exists simpliciter. I know it seems a bit strange to say that brain states represent qualitative states, and in turn those qualitative states represent the physical world. Why not cut out the middle man and just say the brain states represent the physical world? But I think the middle step is necessary to spell out and consider it fully real since that is literally where I live.
You may counter that qualitative states and brain states are two different but real perspectives on the same underlying reality. Maybe I’m simple minded, but I see everything through the lens of objects that exist. I don’t know what a perspective is other than a set of objects exists (and is representing something else). So if there is a mental and physical perspective, they are made out of different objects.
But still, it’s refreshing to read your stuff as you write in a technically accurate but readable way, and it overall very much jives with my own way of seeing thing.
I think it is clear that they [qualia] fully exist, even if they are epiphenomenal, they still in some sense exist just as much as the physical world. That’s why I classify myself as a dualist.
I agree that experienced sensory qualities (I avoid the term “qualia” given its dualist connotations) are as real as the external objects which they represent since in fact they are how said objects appear to us. This is to say that our representational reality (conscious experience and scientific practice) is as real as that which it represents, represented reality (the world as it appears in consciousness and in science). So I’m not sure there’s a dualism of two sorts of substances, physical and mental, it’s rather that there are two unavoidable sides of the representational relation: representational content (the qualitative and quantitative appearance of the apple) and that which appears in terms of that content but that we take to exist independently of it (the apple itself). This 2019 JCS paper develops the idea of representational vs represented reality, https://naturalism.org/philosophy/consciousness/locating-consciousness-why-experience-cant-be-objectified
I worry whether there are different senses of “belief” that it’s running together. I can think of 3 at least relevant ones:
1) Occurrent beliefs.
2) Certain sorts of dispositions to form occurrent beliefs.
3) Certain sorts of functional roles, making us talk, act, etc. in certain ways.
Obviously zombies would have (3). We can still think that (1) requires phenomenal consciousness though (if you want to say that saying something can be occurent without being phenomenal, let me just add a “phenomenal” in the definition of (1)).
Now, the example of your belief in it being monday seems to me to be ambiguous between (2) and (3), depending on how we flesh out the details. If it’s (2) then we can say that your zombie twin wouldn’t have that belief, even if you have it without ever having any associated phenomenology.
When a phenomenal realist (or at least when I qua phenomenal realist) says that zombies don’t have beliefs, it’s (1) and (2) they’re talking about. And if you’re a phenomenal realist, (1) and (2) will presumably be the only sorts of beliefs that you’re ever aware of from the first person—the sorts of beliefs that you actually experience yourself as having. And that crucially includes your belief in phenomenal consciousness.
As for whether zombies would have minds, that seems largely to be a semantic dispute to me.
Why think that those are the only three options, such that ‘implicit belief’ is ruled out? It seems like (2) is the wrong analysis of implicit beliefs (it may be sufficient but I don’t think it’s necessary) which cases of prejudicial belief show. In cases of prejudicial belief the person isn’t necessarily disposed to form the occurrent belief, even if they do genuinely implicitly believe it. You might say this falls under 3 but these people often come to realize they had these mistaken beliefs later on in life, and that it wasn’t merely them behaving as if they did.
I guess it’s also an interesting question of whether something can be disposed to do something it can’t. I think I agree with you that that is impossible (e.g. a bouncy ball that is frozen solid can’t bounce) though there are some odd cases (e.g. a bouncy ball nailed to the wall also can’t bounce, though this is due to the manifestation condition of the disposition being impossible to meet per the nail, whereas in the zombie case we suppose the manifestation of the disposition is impossible for the zombie rather than the manifestation condition).
Anyway, certainly I agree this argument doesn’t show zombies can have phenomenal beliefd, or ‘occurrent beliefs.’ I intend the argument here to be as modest as it looks, because I think people stumble at even the very modest point. If occurrent beliefs always have a phenomenal character then zombies can’t have them. I’m not sure I think that is true of occurrent beliefs (in a non-technical understanding of that term), but it’s harder for me to provide an uncontroversial argument for that! I guess I’m not so sure my beliefs at front of mind always appear to have a phenomenal character. I think I often for beliefs on the basis of my experiences, and then it can be difficult to tease apart where the phenomenal properties attributed to the experience vs the belief start and end, but often I think they end before the belief starts!
Right, I didn’t mean them to be exhaustive, and it wasn’t really essential that (2) be a complete account. The point was just that you can come up with definitions that allow for non-occurrent beliefs for which phenomenal consciousness still turns out to be necessary.
Regarding the case of prejudicial beliefs, it’s right that those might not fall under (2). I don’t quite get your response to the idea that they’d fall under (3) though. It’s not that things of (3) aren’t “beliefs” per se. If someone has a prejudicial belief of form (3) it’s not just that they behave as if they have that belief, but they really do have that belief in some sense—namely there is some entity (which we can call the belief) in their psychology that plays the role of that belief.
In any case, these sorts of prejudicial beliefs are an edge case kind of belief, where it’s sort of unclear to me whether we’re better off lumping them as “beliefs” or some other “belief-like non-conscious attitude”. And that’s exactly the point:
We can have more or less strict senses of “belief”. One would be occurent belief, another would be the disposition to have occurent beliefs, yet another would be something along the lines of (3) which can capture prejudicial beliefs, etc.
Talking about “belief” simpliciter muddles things. And once we make the disambiguation, the thesis that zombies have beliefs becomes a lot more qualified! Sure, zombies have beliefs of kind (3), but they don’t have beliefs of the kinds (1) and (2) if you’re a phenomenal realist. And that’s a very important qualification, because if you think that your belief in phenomenal properties or in your qualitative experience or whatever is (often) of the (1) and (2) type, you might well grant that zombies technically have beliefs of the form (3), but that doesn’t vindicate illusionism, given that the sense in which zombies believe in phenomenal properties is very different from the way in which we do.
But I think I agree with what you say about the modest point in the last paragraph, in that everyone should certainly grant that zombies have beliefs of the austere form discussed! I just think any resistance to that comes from running together various senses of “belief” (as discussed), and once we disentangle that it shows why you’re clearly right in one sense—but I also think it shows that you being right in this sense doesn’t have particularly large implications for what you should make of illusionism.
What you should make of the possibility of illusionism will instead come down to the sort of thing you point at in the end: Whether our occurrent beliefs ever have a phenomenal component. I guess I’d be inclined to say so (when I think about the fact that it’s Sunday, I picture a calendar, have some feelings associated with the “vibe” of Sunday, etc.), but I’m not too sure.
(Ended up answering this in a bit of a tangled way, lol. Regarding your middle point, maybe you can get the result that zombies can be disposed to have phenomenal beliefs in some 4D-chess way, but it seems a little tangential, even though it’s a fun question!)
I see, I think I was confused about what you were saying. Because you disambiguated belief into three ‘options,’ only one of which you called a belief (occurrent belief) I thought you were saying the other two types weren’t really ‘beliefs’ per se. I though you meant that (2) and (3) weren’t really beliefs, and so my argument didn’t show that zombies could have beliefs, but only have (3). That was just a misreading on my part. I’m happy to say beliefs take different forms, and some of those forms zombies can’t have, and if the forms zombies can’t have are the ones that we have, then my argument doesn’t do much to vindicate Illusionism, and I think that’s exactly your point here so maybe we just agree.
On your second to last point, I do think there would be value in showing that some of our beliefs we commonly call ‘occurrent’ are not phenomenal, as I think that should make you think Illusionism is more of a live option, though I agree you ultimately have to show that none of our beliefs are phenomenal to get Illusionism going.
On your last point: yea, the answer to my puzzle there would have to be something very tech-y about your analysis of dispositions. You might be able to get it that some intrinsic property P is the basis of a disposition that has a phenomenal consequence C (e.g. leads to some phenomenal experience or phenomenal belief or whatever) in circumstance Q, and that even though C is impossible something could still have the intrinsic property P which is the basis of the disposition, and thus still has the disposition, even though the disposition could never be manifested. That is, again, very tech-y though and probably doesn’t lead to anything important. I just have dispositions on the brain so your comment had me thinking about it.
(Not Silas but I think I get the point he’s making!)
If the term isn’t initially obvious we could just define an occurrent belief as a belief that has a phenomenal feel which we recognize. But a more neutral definition might be something like ‘a belief which explicitly features in our reasoning processes in a way that we recognize.’ An example: I might think to myself “Oh, I’m hungry. I want an apple. I have an apple in my fridge! I should go grab that.” The belief that I have an apple in my fridge is, in that instance, occurent. Contrast that with my visit to the grocery store. I go to the grocery store, and I don’t pick up any apples. The reason I do not is because I believe I already have them at home (I am stipulating this, it is of course possible that the fruit section was defended by a brigade of vegetable enthusiasts who wanted to dissuade any would-be fruit eaters, but suppose that my apple-belief is what explains my behavior). My belief that I have an apple in my fridge is, in this instance, non-occurrent because it does not explicitly feature in my reasoning process in a way that I recognize.
Recognizing is a species of belief. I recognize my first-order belief by having a higher-order belief about it. Does the recognition-based definition of occurrent belief require the higher-order belief to itself be occurrent? If so, then the definition is circular. If not, then is being occurrent a property of everything that is the target of a belief, or just of beliefs that are targets of other beliefs?
Is recognizing a species of belief? It probably entails a belief, but recognizing seems more like an act, like directing your eyes here or there. It’s an act of attention direction, so I recognize something I have to attend to that thing. “Attending is a species of belief,” says a cartoon inclined philosopher. I don’t think so. Again, I think it may entail a belief but is not itself one. It’s an act of redistributing cognitive resources, and making certain mental items available for other mental activities that were not available before.
A parody: Is a triangle a species of shape? Being triangular entails more than just being a shape. For example, it requires having angles. “having angles is a species of shape” says a cartoon inclined philosopher. I don’t think so. /End parody.
Anyway, recognition is a species of knowing which in turn is a species of belief. The relevant sense of species-hood is transitive. So, I win. To illustrate: Larry recognizes that the thing rooting around in his garbage can is a raccoon. Given that recognition is factive, it follows that it is indeed a racoon. Larry isn’t just attending to the garbage can. He is caused by the racoon to apply his concept of a racoon to the present situation and form the belief that that thing is a racoon. He not only believes it, it’s also a true belief. It might also be a justified true belief too. I sort of don’t care, since we were talking about beliefs anyway. I don’t have much use or respect for so-called occurrent beliefs, especially when being occurrent is supposed to be tied to being conscious.
I should have been more careful. I think its a conceptual truth that your recognition of something causes you to have a belief. So there is no entailment from ‘you recognized’ to ‘you believe’, but there is an entailment from ‘you recognized’ to ‘you’ve been caused to believe’ from which you can infer ‘you believe.’ I also agree recognition is factive, so I agree that the caused belief has to be true for it to be a genuine case of recognition. So recognizing is a species of attending, it is factive and causes a belief, but is not itself the belief.
——
Actually I think the above might be wrong and I have to think more. Suppose I define a term ‘noticed-running,’ ‘X noticed-runs iff they run and their running causes them to believe that they are running’ “Noticed-running is an act, and if I noticed run then I am caused to believe that I am running, but noticed-running is not itself the belief that I am running.” But maybe noticed-running isn’t really an act, because of how we’ve defined it. Running is an act, but we’ve defined a term where we refer to acts that have a certain causal consequence. It’s like saying “X cube-runs iff they run and there is a 5 meter cube in time square.” Is ‘cube-running’ an act? Well, not really. So anyway I have to think more about it. Left the first paragraph in case you’d like gloating material. Curious what @Silas Abrahamsen thinks.
So I think I agree with ToB. I guess you can define it in a phenomenal way. But if your don't think there is P-consciousness, you can maybe define it in terms of what is an explicit part of your reasoning or something along those lines
So, like, an occurrent belief is just a belief, right? The “occurrent” doesn’t add anything. Unless you wanted to distinguish what’s explicit from what’s merely implied (implicit) by what’s explicit. Or to distinguish a disposition to form a belief from the actualization of that disposition, aka the actual belief. But otherwise, there isn’t a proper subset of beliefs that are the something-its-like-to-believe-them variety.
So I think I agree with ToB. I guess you can define it in a phenomenal way. But if your don't think there is P-consciousness, you can maybe define it in terms of what is an explicit part of your reasoning or something along those lines
Aren't beliefs here like memories? I can remember a lot of different things, but at any given moment I am most likely not experiencing any memories. To remember is to call something latent to mind. A p-zombie definitionally isn't calling anything to mind because they're nothing there. (I mean it's silly to say what they are and aren't doing as it's like arguing about what food goblins like to eat.)
But either way, the article's direction of argument is not convincing. A colour blind person might believe they're seeing their missing colours because they misunderstand the strong sense in which others mean the term "green". But it's a false belief about terms of use, not a belief formed from their actual experience (which, after all, can eventually be distinguished from other people's experiences).
I don't have a view of whether they can have beliefs (it depends whether you define belief functionally or not, also p-zombies can't exist so it's a bit like arguing angels on pinheads).
I'm saying they (as defined) can't have content-full beliefs about phenomenal experiences (like colours!) because they don't have phenomenal experience. I was trying to tease out the distinction with the colourblind person. Such people have an experience (a gred haze) which they might have false beliefs about, but those beliefs are distinguishable from the beliefs a non-colourblind person has, after all, we can discover whether or not someone is colourblind.
Well, it depends on whether the beliefs are about phenomenal experiences. When I have the belief that today is Tuesday, the content of that belief involves no phenomenal properties, so in so far as that zombie has that belief, we share a belief. I don’t see why zombies couldn’t have beliefs about phenomenal experiences though. I can have beliefs about non-existent things. I also don’t think a severely deuteranomalous colorblind individual has a false belief when they believe that there are shades of green that they cannot see.
They have a false belief if they believe they are seeing what everyone is calling green and then later they have their sight fixed and realise that they definitely never saw what other people were seeing.
You can have beliefs about unicorns. You can clearly have beliefs about zombies. But you can't have beliefs about the character of experiences you're not able to have. For example, I can rotate an apple in my mind. I believe the apple is rotating clockwise. A p-zombie cannot rotate an apple in their mind, they definitionally do not have mental imagery, they cannot have a belief about what direction the apple is rotating because there is no such apple.
Why can’t I have beliefs about the character of experiences I can’t have? Why can’t, for instance, a highly deuteranomalous color blind person believe that the colors they can’t see look more like green than blue?
Also it’s not definitional that zombies lack mental imagery. The only definitional truth about zombies is that they lack phenomenal properties. Even if zombies can’t have mental imagery, it isn’t analytically true that they can’t have mental imagery.
(They did have a false belief before, I just meant that they just knew thaf it had been false when their sight was cured.)
In the more green than blue case, they're again misunderstanding language. Its like if you said "I believe I despise my friend" because you thought "despise" meant "like". You don't really believe you despise your friend, even if you think everyone else uses the word that way. "It looks more green to me", buddy you've never seen a green, you don't know what that word means.
As for mental imagery, okay I'll drop the argument. I think it's probably pointless to talk about what zombies can and can't experience, as the whole zombie argument is wrongfooted. (You obviously disagree, but qualia is causally efficacious: you know your mental imagery from phenomenal features, as with other experiences).
>"You still have a mind while you are unconscious (i.e. knocked out or deeply asleep)."
Is the correctness of this claim supposed to be obvious? It's not clear to me whether or not someone in such a state should be said to "have a mind." I would lean towards saying they don't.
Really? I think when I consider how I typically talk about people’s minds, it isn’t something intermittent. I think I have always had a mind (at least, since I was very young). There are some more extreme cases where I think I’d agree with you (I.e. in a persistent vegetative state) but I don’t think I cease to have a mind when I go to sleep, or when I get knocked out.
That’s mostly an intuition report though, if you don’t find those cases persuasive I’ll have to mull over more if I have an argument for it.
I would say it’s an inherent ambiguity in the folk concept of mind, or at least in my own personal version of that folk concept.
My basic inclination is to use “mind” and “belief” to refer to processes and dispositions associated with conscious thought. I can feel the force of the intuition that something like belief can exist without being present to consciousness. But I would hesitate to affirm that “unconscious beliefs” are truly beliefs, strictly speaking. And it seems distinctly odd to say that an entity could possess “beliefs” without being conscious at all.
I agree that we should analyze belief dispositionally (or at least I’m very sympathetic to that view) but I think dispositions are also persistent! A ball remains elastic even if it cannot be bounced. Even if you think a belief is a disposition to do or say something as a result of certain mental activity, that’s totally compatible with belief’s not requiring consciousness, since dispositions can persist despite them being ‘barred’ from their manifestation condition. Presumably though you think the disposition’s intrinsic basis is in the mental stuff, my point is just that beliefs being dispositions doesn’t count against either thesis (imo it probably counts in favor of the possibility of beliefs sans consciousness.)
I guess I just don’t see the pull against affirming that you can have beliefs without being conscious, precisely because of the sleep cases. I guess the other point is that certain other faculties we often associate with conscious things seem as though they can be possessed by things without consciousness (sensory abilities like hearing or seeing for instance) and those when I think about someone who sleep walks I think I have a similar intuition where I feel like they must be seeing in a different sense than I see. But I think that’s just mistaken, see has just the same sense there, just as spiders see in the same sense of the word ‘see’ that describes my perceptive abilities. I guess another way into that idea is to pick your favorite non-conscious living animal, and ask whether you think it could have beliefs/a mind.
In cases of non-human “cognition,” I tend to attribute beliefs and consciousness either together or not at all. If we gently brush the leaf of a venus flytrap, does it “believe” there is an insect there, ready to become its next meal? I’m not sure how best to answer this question, but to the extent that I would consider an affirmative answer, I would also be inclined to affirm the venus flytrap is conscious.
I guess this inclination is due to the fact that I don’t feel any pull towards non-functionalist accounts of consciousness, so it’s mysterious to me what it would mean to say an entity possesses a mind, but not a conscious mind. At most I think it makes sense to say that an entity can possess some of the functions and properties associated with mind, without being conscious. But I would also equally say it can possess some of the properties associated with consciousness, without being conscious. For me, consciousness and mentality are both vague predicates, but I regard them as analytically co-referring. (I stand in stark disagreement with Chalmers on this point.)
The sleep-walker case is more interesting, and perhaps revealing of a more fundamental difference in our attitudes. I take it you would say that when (e.g.) Timothy Chalamet is sleepwalking, he “sees” his surroundings and processes information about what he sees, thus exhibiting mentality without consciousness. By contrast, I would say: some entity sees its surroundings and processing that information; that entity is a conscious entity. It’s just that it’s not Timothy Chalamet. It’s something (/someone?) else. It just happens to share a body with the star of the Dune movies.
This is because I regard being Timothy Chalamet as another vague predicate, whose reference is to be explained in functional terms. Part of the functional specification presumably involves some degree of psychological continuity with the various other entities at different points in time that we think of as being Timothy Chalamet. So Sleepy Chalamet doesn’t make the cut. But the fact that Timothy doesn’t have access to Sleepy’s thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions doesn’t give us grounds to deny that Sleepy is conscious. If we’re willing to grant that Sleepy has thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions, then I think we should also be willing to grant that Sleepy is “conscious.”
Good case, I think we definitely depart in our intuitions on the Chalamet case (I want to say that Chalamet sees his surroundings unconsciously). I agree I attribute beliefs and mentality together, and that tends to go along with consciousness but not always. I think dogs have minds and are conscious, but bugs probably aren’t conscious and they maybe have minds. I agree both predicates are vague, and I would also analyze them functionally, but I think the state of consciousness, which requires the ability to be conscious of something, is strictly more demanding than the state of having a mind.
If you are fine with something possessing some of the properties associated with consciousness without being conscious though, I don’t see why you’d reject the claim about zombies having beliefs. You’d presumably reject the second argument I give for them having minds, but you could accept that zombies have beliefs and deny they have minds for the sole reason that having beliefs is one of the necessary functions for having a mind, but is not alone sufficient.
One other case I’m curious for your take on is blindsight. Suppose we have Zendaya cortically blinded (sticking with Dune characters), and she develops blindsight as a result, being able to report the color of objects with 80% accuracy, despite reporting a total absence of visual phenomenality. I think I would want to say that she is still seeing, but her visual experiences don’t have any visual phenomenal properties (they might induce other phenomenal sensations in her e.g. maybe seeing the color red makes her angry, but thats an emotion rather than a phenomenal visual experience). There, would you deny that she is seeing?
I think P-zombies are inconceivable, so I’m not too concerned about the zombie part of the argument. I’m more interested in the questions surrounding how we should apply these terms to animals, people with neurological damage, AI systems, etc.
The blindsight case is interesting. I’m not sure about my preferred position on that. I think it’s another one of those cases where there isn’t a single correct answer — our heuristics based on evolved and culturall inherited presumptions of organismal cohesiveness break down, so we need to shift to a more precise specification of what’s going on.
As a first draft, I might be inclined to say something like the following: part of the entity we are calling “Zendaya” sees objects, can make mostly accurate reports about them, and therefore has conscious of them (this last inference is presumably what you would disagree with); another part of “Zendaya” does not see the objects, is not conscious of them, and can report that it does not see them.
This doesn’t seem entirely satisfactory, but I don’t think we should expect to arrive at a satisfactory description of such cases just by deploying folk concepts in a sufficiently sophisticated fashion. We’re going to need to move past the first-level heuristics and talk about the details.
As someone who thinks functionalism is on the right track, I strongly suspect that when someone is sleepwalking, they are making use of some of the same mental functions as they use when they are awake, as it seems implausible to me that evolution has equipped us with a separate set of functions for use when we are unconscious. From that perspective, it seems unnecessarily complicated to suppose that it is not the sleepwalker's functions that are being used, but instead those of some mysterious and hard-to-identify other.
I would mostly agree with this, except that I think “Timothy Chalamet” just designates one specific bundle of functions, while “Sleepy Chalamet” refers to another bundle of functions that overlaps extensively with the functions of Timothy Chalamet.
I don’t think this is particularly mysterious, except to the extent that we don’t usually think about mereological problems of identity (e.g. the “Problem of the Many”) as these apply to persons. Once we do start pondering those sorts of problems, I would say Timothy and Sleepy seem about equally mysterious.
1) I think premise 2 is false. You seem to be using the term "phenomenal" in a very narrow sense. Again, you don't define how you're using it, but you seem to only be referring to our physical sense (5 senses), and not much else. I still think (and this argument doesn't do much to sway me against this) that it is like something to believe it is Tuesday, and that is a different phenomenal state than believing it is Monday. I'm not saying changing your mind about what day it is would necessarily feel any different (it wouldn't necessarily change your emotions or sense experience)—maybe it would; maybe it wouldn't. But, it would still constitute a different phenomenal state, and that's what is relevant here.
2) I think the argument is either invalid or doesn't prove enough. If the conclusion ("zombies can have beliefs") means zombies can have both implicit and explicit beliefs, then this conclusion doesn't follow from premises 3 and 4. But if the conclusion only means "zombies can have implicit beliefs" then this doesn't do enough work to establish illusionism. If zombies only have implicit beliefs, they are still very different than us.
This isn’t an argument for illusionism. It’s an argument for the claim that zombies can have beliefs. It shows they can have implicit beliefs in particular.
I’m not using phenomenal in a narrow sense. If my implicit beliefs change, the phenomenal character of my experience doesn’t change. If there is no change in how things feel (feel understood in a broad phenomenal sense, including phenomenal sensory, emotional, etc feelings) then there is no change in phenomenal properties.
The idea of Tuesday is not an actively held belief but part of a model based on experience phenomena in the same way health is a model not a belief. I don’t actively believe I am healthy, as opposed to feeling sick when phenomena change, and I believe it's Tuesday because I went to sleep on monday. You are trying to isolate that relational, modular belief from the web of phenomena that supports it.
the zombie has no animating spirit to make a model of the world through phenomena at all. If it acts, it acts based on some other mechanism that is magical. It eats brains because some chemical acts on it, not because eating brains is good or bad or it even experiences eating people as good; it’s not a cannibal. it acts like one.
Also getting annoyed at how philosophers conflate ideas with zombies; if you can reproduce a person perfectly it is a clone, and you cannot remove any quality from it without explaining how. If it outputs human behavior it is a mimic and you need to explain how it can mimic.
essentially you are believing in miracles with a p-zombie, lol; they have theodicies too, the theodicy is how the mechanism works to replicate the human aspects without being human. Trying to use them to talk about humans makes no sense.
I randomly started thinking of this paper again and came back to reread. fuck it's good. I mean the hard problem gets btfoed, zombies plausibly have not only beliefs but full on memory, and the whole debate becomes much less interesting/productive
I think you do a nice job sticking to points of agreement between phenomenal realists and illusionists. As a phenomenal realist I agree zombies can have beliefs. Another argument is that I think it is useful to talk about say what ChatGPT believes even if ChatGPT isn't phenomenally conscious.
> Philosophical Zombies are like you and me, but they do not have phenomenal properties. On my view, Illusionism, there is no difference between us and a zombie so defined. An intrinsic physical duplicate of me that had no phenomenal properties would not differ from me in any intrinsic respect, because I already lack phenomenal properties.
Can you expand on what you take ‘phenomenal’ to refer to here? What would having phenomenal consciousness actually look like?
One thing I think illusonism struggles with that quietism does a better job of explaining is the semantics of the word ‘phenomenal’.
If you want to say phenomenal properties don’t exist then it’s not clear what they pick out as a referent. Kind’ve like how Elan vital doesn’t exist so it doesn’t refer properly.
And if you want to say humans lack phenomenal consciousness I’m inclined to say you’re using the word differently to how phenomenal realists use it.
Sorry I meant to reply to this when I liked it and then forgot!
I intend ‘phenomenal’ in the sense that philosophers of mind intend it e.g. the characteristic qualitative character of things like pain, or seeing red. The ‘what-it-is-likeness’ of those experiences.
I don’t think denying the existence of something necessarily makes the problem of defining the term more difficult, since the illusionist thesis also includes that we have mistaken beliefs that we have these sorts of qualitative properties of our experiences which help us acquire the concept. Aether also doesn’t exist, but I think I know what aether is supposed to be, and what it would refer to if that thing was there.
I think we need to be a little careful/precise here.
If we deny that experience has a characteristic qualitative character we’re veering dangerously into territory where the argument can just be dismissed as obviously false and I think this is where illusonism often gets stuck in the public discourse because people will say “What? Are you denying there’s something characteristic in my experience of redness when I see red? That’s insane!”
I think the strongest way of formulating this is to say that there’s no categorical property involved in phenomenally conscious experience. For example, chairs exist but there’s no categorical property of “chairness” above and beyond the structure of chairs. Waves exist but there’s no property of “waviness” which is instantiated when a wave forms.
This clarifies the point - we’re not denying that redness exists or that experience has a characteristic red quality. We’re denying that a categorical property is required to explain it above and beyond the functional/structural facts.
I also think this is disanalogous with the aether example. Aether is a structure of physical theories (namely a medium through which light was supposed to have needed to propagate.) It can be specified mathematically so it’s a structural property rather than a categorical one. You can just look at the world in third-person and see it’s not there.
I don’t think it’s obviously false. I think qualities are properties of objects (objects are red, green, etc) and I think experiences don’t have those properties, and so I deny they have a qualitative character. Now, I know phenomenal realists will insist that they don’t mean you have a red experience *in the same sense* that we say a chair is red. The experience is *phenomenally* red. At this point, I get quietist sympathies. Prior, I think I understand what they mean (this is I think what sense data theorists meant, or something close, and so I don’t think this reading is unfair on my part of at least some phenomenal realists) and I just deny that it is true. My experiences aren’t red. There is no red thing in my mind. I have experiences *of* red things, but the representation is not itself red. That’s how I see the thrust and parry of this dispute going, just so you can see the full picture of where I’m coming from.
So I don’t deny that there is something characteristic of red experiences, and that characteristic feature(s) may involve qualitative properties. I just deny that a red experiences is characteristically *itself* red.
I don’t really like the categorical distinction, because I don’t think I understand that concept unless it just means not functional. But then we are just saying a phenomenal property is a non-functional property analytically, so functionalism is analytically false, which seems wrong unless lots of philosophers are very confused.
I don’t take your point about aether. It seems as though you think categorical properties are not externally observable. Again, this just seems like the phenomenal realist is begging the question against physicalism. But also I don’t think we ‘just saw’ that aether wasn’t there.
Just to clarify the dialectic a little:
A naive definition of ‘phenomenal’ refers to any properties which are qualitative/characteristic of an experience. e.g. the taste of coffee, the vivid colour of red. So when you say:
> I don’t deny that there is something characteristic of red experiences, and that characteristic feature(s) may involve qualitative properties.
This is in danger of not being an illusionist position because illusionists need to deny the existence of phenomenal properties.
I proposed using the categorical/dispositional distinction (following the distinction made by Armstrong) to clarify what the illusionist is denying. Frankish has a nice paper called de-psychologising the mind where he takes a line like this.
Roughly, dispositional properties are tied to what an object would do e.g. glass is *fragile* because it would shatter when struck, salt is *soluble* because it would dissolve in water. Categorical properties are tied to things that are actual and occurrent e.g. shape, size etc..
I’m fine to gloss categorical properties as non-functional for the purposes of the conversation although they’re slightly different.
> a phenomenal property is a non-functional property analytically, so functionalism is analytically false, which seems wrong unless lots of philosophers are very confused.
The proposal is instead of accepting the naive definition of phenomenal, the illusionist could identify phenomenal properties with categorical properties. Then they can deny that categorical properties play a fundamental role in conscious experience (although we mis-represent the dispositional/structural properties and think they’re categorical.) So functionalism isn’t analytically false on this picture, functionalists simply deny that non-functional properties play a role in consciousness and if those non-functional properties are called ‘phenomenal’ then they can be illusionists as well because they’re denying the existence of phenomenal properties.
To be clear, I don’t actually buy this line because I think experience has both a categorical and dispositional component (you’re disposed to stop at a red traffic light because of its categorical redness as well as the functional profile it realises) but I think it’s a clean way for the illusionist to be explicit about what’s being denied.
On the aether point I’m just saying that aether was a structural extension of physics that we did experiments (Michelson-Morley) and found didn’t exist - the structure wasn’t instantiated in nature. This is different to a categorical property not existing.
Can you expand on what you take ‘phenomenal’ to refer to here? What would having phenomenal consciousness actually look like?
ToB can correct me, but I think a canonical instance of having phenomenal consciousness would be experiencing intense pain with its characteristic, unmistakable qualitative feel. Illusionists deny there are any such qualitative, non-conceptual feels; there are only conceptual and propositional contents in experience, among them the false belief - a conceptual misrepresentation - that pain has a qualitative aspect. On illusionism vs. phenomenal realism see my critique of @Keith Frankish’s reactivity schema theory at https://naturalism.org/philosophy/consciousness/why-qualia-arent-like-unicorns-a-defense-of-phenomenal-realism
Can I ask, in brief, how you’d classify your position in philosophy of the mind? I assume based off your website you are a phenomenal realist and also endorse naturalism. Does that mean you endorse physicalism? Or do you think naturalism is compatible with dualism?
I count myself as a representationalist about phenomenal consciousness: sensory qualities like pain are, I’d suggest, a species of representational content. As a naturalist I keep my metaphysical options open since I don’t think naturalism is committed to physicalism or any other metaphysics, only to an essentially empirical, observational epistemology (science being the exemplar) kept honest by philosophy. Physicalism is attractive for naturalists given that science generally deals in mind-independent observables, but of course consciousness is hard to assimilate to physicalism since it’s neither mind-independent nor observable. But such assimilation isn’t necessarily ruled out.
Substance dualism too is not ruled out by naturalism, but we don’t have observational evidence for two sorts of stuff, one physical, one mental. Still, Chalmers is a naturalist dualist, near as I can tell. One thing to note is that the mental-physical distinction is itself a feature of our representational take on the world, so physicalism (that only one side of this distinction is real) isn’t prior to representation, but a function of it, thus potentially defeasible depending on where we end up in naturalizing representation. Here’s a bit on how the mental-physical distinction is generated within consciousness: https://www.naturalism.org/philosophy/consciousness/the-appearance-of-reality#toc-4-the-mentalphysical-distinction-as-a-representational-p-Z3z2tsq9
Thanks for the explanation and link. I read the whole thing and I think I agree with all of it with one exception. I particular endorse the idea that our conscious experience consists of qualia, and that qualia isn’t something we are need to additionally experience. That is, I don’t see my mental image of an apple, the mental image of the apple is part of my mental world, and being part of my mental world is what it means to see. This is exactly why a homunculus isn’t necessary and there is no infinite regress. I also like the analogy of game pieces in this passage:
“Logically, the RS can’t be in a direct representational, epistemic relationship with its own front-line, basic elements of representation; it doesn’t and can’t (directly) represent them (they represent the world for the RS), so they won’t be facts about which it could be wrong or right, but just counters (pieces) in the game of representation”.
My only hang up with representationalism is it makes it seem like qualia don’t exist, or do exist but in some lesser way. I think it is clear that they fully exist, even if they are epiphenomenal, they still in some sense exist just as much as the physical world. That’s why I classify myself as a dualist. I realize you say that qualia are “system-real”, but that still seems like a caveat where none should exist — that is, qualia exists simpliciter. I know it seems a bit strange to say that brain states represent qualitative states, and in turn those qualitative states represent the physical world. Why not cut out the middle man and just say the brain states represent the physical world? But I think the middle step is necessary to spell out and consider it fully real since that is literally where I live.
You may counter that qualitative states and brain states are two different but real perspectives on the same underlying reality. Maybe I’m simple minded, but I see everything through the lens of objects that exist. I don’t know what a perspective is other than a set of objects exists (and is representing something else). So if there is a mental and physical perspective, they are made out of different objects.
But still, it’s refreshing to read your stuff as you write in a technically accurate but readable way, and it overall very much jives with my own way of seeing thing.
I think it is clear that they [qualia] fully exist, even if they are epiphenomenal, they still in some sense exist just as much as the physical world. That’s why I classify myself as a dualist.
I agree that experienced sensory qualities (I avoid the term “qualia” given its dualist connotations) are as real as the external objects which they represent since in fact they are how said objects appear to us. This is to say that our representational reality (conscious experience and scientific practice) is as real as that which it represents, represented reality (the world as it appears in consciousness and in science). So I’m not sure there’s a dualism of two sorts of substances, physical and mental, it’s rather that there are two unavoidable sides of the representational relation: representational content (the qualitative and quantitative appearance of the apple) and that which appears in terms of that content but that we take to exist independently of it (the apple itself). This 2019 JCS paper develops the idea of representational vs represented reality, https://naturalism.org/philosophy/consciousness/locating-consciousness-why-experience-cant-be-objectified
Good post!
I worry whether there are different senses of “belief” that it’s running together. I can think of 3 at least relevant ones:
1) Occurrent beliefs.
2) Certain sorts of dispositions to form occurrent beliefs.
3) Certain sorts of functional roles, making us talk, act, etc. in certain ways.
Obviously zombies would have (3). We can still think that (1) requires phenomenal consciousness though (if you want to say that saying something can be occurent without being phenomenal, let me just add a “phenomenal” in the definition of (1)).
Now, the example of your belief in it being monday seems to me to be ambiguous between (2) and (3), depending on how we flesh out the details. If it’s (2) then we can say that your zombie twin wouldn’t have that belief, even if you have it without ever having any associated phenomenology.
When a phenomenal realist (or at least when I qua phenomenal realist) says that zombies don’t have beliefs, it’s (1) and (2) they’re talking about. And if you’re a phenomenal realist, (1) and (2) will presumably be the only sorts of beliefs that you’re ever aware of from the first person—the sorts of beliefs that you actually experience yourself as having. And that crucially includes your belief in phenomenal consciousness.
As for whether zombies would have minds, that seems largely to be a semantic dispute to me.
Why think that those are the only three options, such that ‘implicit belief’ is ruled out? It seems like (2) is the wrong analysis of implicit beliefs (it may be sufficient but I don’t think it’s necessary) which cases of prejudicial belief show. In cases of prejudicial belief the person isn’t necessarily disposed to form the occurrent belief, even if they do genuinely implicitly believe it. You might say this falls under 3 but these people often come to realize they had these mistaken beliefs later on in life, and that it wasn’t merely them behaving as if they did.
I guess it’s also an interesting question of whether something can be disposed to do something it can’t. I think I agree with you that that is impossible (e.g. a bouncy ball that is frozen solid can’t bounce) though there are some odd cases (e.g. a bouncy ball nailed to the wall also can’t bounce, though this is due to the manifestation condition of the disposition being impossible to meet per the nail, whereas in the zombie case we suppose the manifestation of the disposition is impossible for the zombie rather than the manifestation condition).
Anyway, certainly I agree this argument doesn’t show zombies can have phenomenal beliefd, or ‘occurrent beliefs.’ I intend the argument here to be as modest as it looks, because I think people stumble at even the very modest point. If occurrent beliefs always have a phenomenal character then zombies can’t have them. I’m not sure I think that is true of occurrent beliefs (in a non-technical understanding of that term), but it’s harder for me to provide an uncontroversial argument for that! I guess I’m not so sure my beliefs at front of mind always appear to have a phenomenal character. I think I often for beliefs on the basis of my experiences, and then it can be difficult to tease apart where the phenomenal properties attributed to the experience vs the belief start and end, but often I think they end before the belief starts!
Right, I didn’t mean them to be exhaustive, and it wasn’t really essential that (2) be a complete account. The point was just that you can come up with definitions that allow for non-occurrent beliefs for which phenomenal consciousness still turns out to be necessary.
Regarding the case of prejudicial beliefs, it’s right that those might not fall under (2). I don’t quite get your response to the idea that they’d fall under (3) though. It’s not that things of (3) aren’t “beliefs” per se. If someone has a prejudicial belief of form (3) it’s not just that they behave as if they have that belief, but they really do have that belief in some sense—namely there is some entity (which we can call the belief) in their psychology that plays the role of that belief.
In any case, these sorts of prejudicial beliefs are an edge case kind of belief, where it’s sort of unclear to me whether we’re better off lumping them as “beliefs” or some other “belief-like non-conscious attitude”. And that’s exactly the point:
We can have more or less strict senses of “belief”. One would be occurent belief, another would be the disposition to have occurent beliefs, yet another would be something along the lines of (3) which can capture prejudicial beliefs, etc.
Talking about “belief” simpliciter muddles things. And once we make the disambiguation, the thesis that zombies have beliefs becomes a lot more qualified! Sure, zombies have beliefs of kind (3), but they don’t have beliefs of the kinds (1) and (2) if you’re a phenomenal realist. And that’s a very important qualification, because if you think that your belief in phenomenal properties or in your qualitative experience or whatever is (often) of the (1) and (2) type, you might well grant that zombies technically have beliefs of the form (3), but that doesn’t vindicate illusionism, given that the sense in which zombies believe in phenomenal properties is very different from the way in which we do.
But I think I agree with what you say about the modest point in the last paragraph, in that everyone should certainly grant that zombies have beliefs of the austere form discussed! I just think any resistance to that comes from running together various senses of “belief” (as discussed), and once we disentangle that it shows why you’re clearly right in one sense—but I also think it shows that you being right in this sense doesn’t have particularly large implications for what you should make of illusionism.
What you should make of the possibility of illusionism will instead come down to the sort of thing you point at in the end: Whether our occurrent beliefs ever have a phenomenal component. I guess I’d be inclined to say so (when I think about the fact that it’s Sunday, I picture a calendar, have some feelings associated with the “vibe” of Sunday, etc.), but I’m not too sure.
(Ended up answering this in a bit of a tangled way, lol. Regarding your middle point, maybe you can get the result that zombies can be disposed to have phenomenal beliefs in some 4D-chess way, but it seems a little tangential, even though it’s a fun question!)
I see, I think I was confused about what you were saying. Because you disambiguated belief into three ‘options,’ only one of which you called a belief (occurrent belief) I thought you were saying the other two types weren’t really ‘beliefs’ per se. I though you meant that (2) and (3) weren’t really beliefs, and so my argument didn’t show that zombies could have beliefs, but only have (3). That was just a misreading on my part. I’m happy to say beliefs take different forms, and some of those forms zombies can’t have, and if the forms zombies can’t have are the ones that we have, then my argument doesn’t do much to vindicate Illusionism, and I think that’s exactly your point here so maybe we just agree.
On your second to last point, I do think there would be value in showing that some of our beliefs we commonly call ‘occurrent’ are not phenomenal, as I think that should make you think Illusionism is more of a live option, though I agree you ultimately have to show that none of our beliefs are phenomenal to get Illusionism going.
On your last point: yea, the answer to my puzzle there would have to be something very tech-y about your analysis of dispositions. You might be able to get it that some intrinsic property P is the basis of a disposition that has a phenomenal consequence C (e.g. leads to some phenomenal experience or phenomenal belief or whatever) in circumstance Q, and that even though C is impossible something could still have the intrinsic property P which is the basis of the disposition, and thus still has the disposition, even though the disposition could never be manifested. That is, again, very tech-y though and probably doesn’t lead to anything important. I just have dispositions on the brain so your comment had me thinking about it.
what’s an occurrent belief?
(Not Silas but I think I get the point he’s making!)
If the term isn’t initially obvious we could just define an occurrent belief as a belief that has a phenomenal feel which we recognize. But a more neutral definition might be something like ‘a belief which explicitly features in our reasoning processes in a way that we recognize.’ An example: I might think to myself “Oh, I’m hungry. I want an apple. I have an apple in my fridge! I should go grab that.” The belief that I have an apple in my fridge is, in that instance, occurent. Contrast that with my visit to the grocery store. I go to the grocery store, and I don’t pick up any apples. The reason I do not is because I believe I already have them at home (I am stipulating this, it is of course possible that the fruit section was defended by a brigade of vegetable enthusiasts who wanted to dissuade any would-be fruit eaters, but suppose that my apple-belief is what explains my behavior). My belief that I have an apple in my fridge is, in this instance, non-occurrent because it does not explicitly feature in my reasoning process in a way that I recognize.
Recognizing is a species of belief. I recognize my first-order belief by having a higher-order belief about it. Does the recognition-based definition of occurrent belief require the higher-order belief to itself be occurrent? If so, then the definition is circular. If not, then is being occurrent a property of everything that is the target of a belief, or just of beliefs that are targets of other beliefs?
Is recognizing a species of belief? It probably entails a belief, but recognizing seems more like an act, like directing your eyes here or there. It’s an act of attention direction, so I recognize something I have to attend to that thing. “Attending is a species of belief,” says a cartoon inclined philosopher. I don’t think so. Again, I think it may entail a belief but is not itself one. It’s an act of redistributing cognitive resources, and making certain mental items available for other mental activities that were not available before.
A parody: Is a triangle a species of shape? Being triangular entails more than just being a shape. For example, it requires having angles. “having angles is a species of shape” says a cartoon inclined philosopher. I don’t think so. /End parody.
Anyway, recognition is a species of knowing which in turn is a species of belief. The relevant sense of species-hood is transitive. So, I win. To illustrate: Larry recognizes that the thing rooting around in his garbage can is a raccoon. Given that recognition is factive, it follows that it is indeed a racoon. Larry isn’t just attending to the garbage can. He is caused by the racoon to apply his concept of a racoon to the present situation and form the belief that that thing is a racoon. He not only believes it, it’s also a true belief. It might also be a justified true belief too. I sort of don’t care, since we were talking about beliefs anyway. I don’t have much use or respect for so-called occurrent beliefs, especially when being occurrent is supposed to be tied to being conscious.
I should have been more careful. I think its a conceptual truth that your recognition of something causes you to have a belief. So there is no entailment from ‘you recognized’ to ‘you believe’, but there is an entailment from ‘you recognized’ to ‘you’ve been caused to believe’ from which you can infer ‘you believe.’ I also agree recognition is factive, so I agree that the caused belief has to be true for it to be a genuine case of recognition. So recognizing is a species of attending, it is factive and causes a belief, but is not itself the belief.
——
Actually I think the above might be wrong and I have to think more. Suppose I define a term ‘noticed-running,’ ‘X noticed-runs iff they run and their running causes them to believe that they are running’ “Noticed-running is an act, and if I noticed run then I am caused to believe that I am running, but noticed-running is not itself the belief that I am running.” But maybe noticed-running isn’t really an act, because of how we’ve defined it. Running is an act, but we’ve defined a term where we refer to acts that have a certain causal consequence. It’s like saying “X cube-runs iff they run and there is a 5 meter cube in time square.” Is ‘cube-running’ an act? Well, not really. So anyway I have to think more about it. Left the first paragraph in case you’d like gloating material. Curious what @Silas Abrahamsen thinks.
So I think I agree with ToB. I guess you can define it in a phenomenal way. But if your don't think there is P-consciousness, you can maybe define it in terms of what is an explicit part of your reasoning or something along those lines
So, like, an occurrent belief is just a belief, right? The “occurrent” doesn’t add anything. Unless you wanted to distinguish what’s explicit from what’s merely implied (implicit) by what’s explicit. Or to distinguish a disposition to form a belief from the actualization of that disposition, aka the actual belief. But otherwise, there isn’t a proper subset of beliefs that are the something-its-like-to-believe-them variety.
So the types of non-phenomenal beliefs that ToB mentioned in the post I think would fit under the non- occurrent beliefs on either definition.
So I think I agree with ToB. I guess you can define it in a phenomenal way. But if your don't think there is P-consciousness, you can maybe define it in terms of what is an explicit part of your reasoning or something along those lines
i don’t
Aren't beliefs here like memories? I can remember a lot of different things, but at any given moment I am most likely not experiencing any memories. To remember is to call something latent to mind. A p-zombie definitionally isn't calling anything to mind because they're nothing there. (I mean it's silly to say what they are and aren't doing as it's like arguing about what food goblins like to eat.)
But either way, the article's direction of argument is not convincing. A colour blind person might believe they're seeing their missing colours because they misunderstand the strong sense in which others mean the term "green". But it's a false belief about terms of use, not a belief formed from their actual experience (which, after all, can eventually be distinguished from other people's experiences).
Beliefs are similar to memories in that both are persistent in a way that experiences are not.
I’m not sure I understand why you think the argument isn’t convincing. If zombies can have false beliefs that also shows they can have beliefs.
I don't have a view of whether they can have beliefs (it depends whether you define belief functionally or not, also p-zombies can't exist so it's a bit like arguing angels on pinheads).
I'm saying they (as defined) can't have content-full beliefs about phenomenal experiences (like colours!) because they don't have phenomenal experience. I was trying to tease out the distinction with the colourblind person. Such people have an experience (a gred haze) which they might have false beliefs about, but those beliefs are distinguishable from the beliefs a non-colourblind person has, after all, we can discover whether or not someone is colourblind.
Well, it depends on whether the beliefs are about phenomenal experiences. When I have the belief that today is Tuesday, the content of that belief involves no phenomenal properties, so in so far as that zombie has that belief, we share a belief. I don’t see why zombies couldn’t have beliefs about phenomenal experiences though. I can have beliefs about non-existent things. I also don’t think a severely deuteranomalous colorblind individual has a false belief when they believe that there are shades of green that they cannot see.
They have a false belief if they believe they are seeing what everyone is calling green and then later they have their sight fixed and realise that they definitely never saw what other people were seeing.
You can have beliefs about unicorns. You can clearly have beliefs about zombies. But you can't have beliefs about the character of experiences you're not able to have. For example, I can rotate an apple in my mind. I believe the apple is rotating clockwise. A p-zombie cannot rotate an apple in their mind, they definitionally do not have mental imagery, they cannot have a belief about what direction the apple is rotating because there is no such apple.
Why did they not have a false belief before?
Why can’t I have beliefs about the character of experiences I can’t have? Why can’t, for instance, a highly deuteranomalous color blind person believe that the colors they can’t see look more like green than blue?
Also it’s not definitional that zombies lack mental imagery. The only definitional truth about zombies is that they lack phenomenal properties. Even if zombies can’t have mental imagery, it isn’t analytically true that they can’t have mental imagery.
(They did have a false belief before, I just meant that they just knew thaf it had been false when their sight was cured.)
In the more green than blue case, they're again misunderstanding language. Its like if you said "I believe I despise my friend" because you thought "despise" meant "like". You don't really believe you despise your friend, even if you think everyone else uses the word that way. "It looks more green to me", buddy you've never seen a green, you don't know what that word means.
As for mental imagery, okay I'll drop the argument. I think it's probably pointless to talk about what zombies can and can't experience, as the whole zombie argument is wrongfooted. (You obviously disagree, but qualia is causally efficacious: you know your mental imagery from phenomenal features, as with other experiences).
>"You still have a mind while you are unconscious (i.e. knocked out or deeply asleep)."
Is the correctness of this claim supposed to be obvious? It's not clear to me whether or not someone in such a state should be said to "have a mind." I would lean towards saying they don't.
Really? I think when I consider how I typically talk about people’s minds, it isn’t something intermittent. I think I have always had a mind (at least, since I was very young). There are some more extreme cases where I think I’d agree with you (I.e. in a persistent vegetative state) but I don’t think I cease to have a mind when I go to sleep, or when I get knocked out.
That’s mostly an intuition report though, if you don’t find those cases persuasive I’ll have to mull over more if I have an argument for it.
I would say it’s an inherent ambiguity in the folk concept of mind, or at least in my own personal version of that folk concept.
My basic inclination is to use “mind” and “belief” to refer to processes and dispositions associated with conscious thought. I can feel the force of the intuition that something like belief can exist without being present to consciousness. But I would hesitate to affirm that “unconscious beliefs” are truly beliefs, strictly speaking. And it seems distinctly odd to say that an entity could possess “beliefs” without being conscious at all.
I agree that we should analyze belief dispositionally (or at least I’m very sympathetic to that view) but I think dispositions are also persistent! A ball remains elastic even if it cannot be bounced. Even if you think a belief is a disposition to do or say something as a result of certain mental activity, that’s totally compatible with belief’s not requiring consciousness, since dispositions can persist despite them being ‘barred’ from their manifestation condition. Presumably though you think the disposition’s intrinsic basis is in the mental stuff, my point is just that beliefs being dispositions doesn’t count against either thesis (imo it probably counts in favor of the possibility of beliefs sans consciousness.)
I guess I just don’t see the pull against affirming that you can have beliefs without being conscious, precisely because of the sleep cases. I guess the other point is that certain other faculties we often associate with conscious things seem as though they can be possessed by things without consciousness (sensory abilities like hearing or seeing for instance) and those when I think about someone who sleep walks I think I have a similar intuition where I feel like they must be seeing in a different sense than I see. But I think that’s just mistaken, see has just the same sense there, just as spiders see in the same sense of the word ‘see’ that describes my perceptive abilities. I guess another way into that idea is to pick your favorite non-conscious living animal, and ask whether you think it could have beliefs/a mind.
In cases of non-human “cognition,” I tend to attribute beliefs and consciousness either together or not at all. If we gently brush the leaf of a venus flytrap, does it “believe” there is an insect there, ready to become its next meal? I’m not sure how best to answer this question, but to the extent that I would consider an affirmative answer, I would also be inclined to affirm the venus flytrap is conscious.
I guess this inclination is due to the fact that I don’t feel any pull towards non-functionalist accounts of consciousness, so it’s mysterious to me what it would mean to say an entity possesses a mind, but not a conscious mind. At most I think it makes sense to say that an entity can possess some of the functions and properties associated with mind, without being conscious. But I would also equally say it can possess some of the properties associated with consciousness, without being conscious. For me, consciousness and mentality are both vague predicates, but I regard them as analytically co-referring. (I stand in stark disagreement with Chalmers on this point.)
The sleep-walker case is more interesting, and perhaps revealing of a more fundamental difference in our attitudes. I take it you would say that when (e.g.) Timothy Chalamet is sleepwalking, he “sees” his surroundings and processes information about what he sees, thus exhibiting mentality without consciousness. By contrast, I would say: some entity sees its surroundings and processing that information; that entity is a conscious entity. It’s just that it’s not Timothy Chalamet. It’s something (/someone?) else. It just happens to share a body with the star of the Dune movies.
This is because I regard being Timothy Chalamet as another vague predicate, whose reference is to be explained in functional terms. Part of the functional specification presumably involves some degree of psychological continuity with the various other entities at different points in time that we think of as being Timothy Chalamet. So Sleepy Chalamet doesn’t make the cut. But the fact that Timothy doesn’t have access to Sleepy’s thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions doesn’t give us grounds to deny that Sleepy is conscious. If we’re willing to grant that Sleepy has thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions, then I think we should also be willing to grant that Sleepy is “conscious.”
Good case, I think we definitely depart in our intuitions on the Chalamet case (I want to say that Chalamet sees his surroundings unconsciously). I agree I attribute beliefs and mentality together, and that tends to go along with consciousness but not always. I think dogs have minds and are conscious, but bugs probably aren’t conscious and they maybe have minds. I agree both predicates are vague, and I would also analyze them functionally, but I think the state of consciousness, which requires the ability to be conscious of something, is strictly more demanding than the state of having a mind.
If you are fine with something possessing some of the properties associated with consciousness without being conscious though, I don’t see why you’d reject the claim about zombies having beliefs. You’d presumably reject the second argument I give for them having minds, but you could accept that zombies have beliefs and deny they have minds for the sole reason that having beliefs is one of the necessary functions for having a mind, but is not alone sufficient.
One other case I’m curious for your take on is blindsight. Suppose we have Zendaya cortically blinded (sticking with Dune characters), and she develops blindsight as a result, being able to report the color of objects with 80% accuracy, despite reporting a total absence of visual phenomenality. I think I would want to say that she is still seeing, but her visual experiences don’t have any visual phenomenal properties (they might induce other phenomenal sensations in her e.g. maybe seeing the color red makes her angry, but thats an emotion rather than a phenomenal visual experience). There, would you deny that she is seeing?
I think P-zombies are inconceivable, so I’m not too concerned about the zombie part of the argument. I’m more interested in the questions surrounding how we should apply these terms to animals, people with neurological damage, AI systems, etc.
The blindsight case is interesting. I’m not sure about my preferred position on that. I think it’s another one of those cases where there isn’t a single correct answer — our heuristics based on evolved and culturall inherited presumptions of organismal cohesiveness break down, so we need to shift to a more precise specification of what’s going on.
As a first draft, I might be inclined to say something like the following: part of the entity we are calling “Zendaya” sees objects, can make mostly accurate reports about them, and therefore has conscious of them (this last inference is presumably what you would disagree with); another part of “Zendaya” does not see the objects, is not conscious of them, and can report that it does not see them.
This doesn’t seem entirely satisfactory, but I don’t think we should expect to arrive at a satisfactory description of such cases just by deploying folk concepts in a sufficiently sophisticated fashion. We’re going to need to move past the first-level heuristics and talk about the details.
As someone who thinks functionalism is on the right track, I strongly suspect that when someone is sleepwalking, they are making use of some of the same mental functions as they use when they are awake, as it seems implausible to me that evolution has equipped us with a separate set of functions for use when we are unconscious. From that perspective, it seems unnecessarily complicated to suppose that it is not the sleepwalker's functions that are being used, but instead those of some mysterious and hard-to-identify other.
I would mostly agree with this, except that I think “Timothy Chalamet” just designates one specific bundle of functions, while “Sleepy Chalamet” refers to another bundle of functions that overlaps extensively with the functions of Timothy Chalamet.
I don’t think this is particularly mysterious, except to the extent that we don’t usually think about mereological problems of identity (e.g. the “Problem of the Many”) as these apply to persons. Once we do start pondering those sorts of problems, I would say Timothy and Sleepy seem about equally mysterious.
I have two problems with the argument:
1) I think premise 2 is false. You seem to be using the term "phenomenal" in a very narrow sense. Again, you don't define how you're using it, but you seem to only be referring to our physical sense (5 senses), and not much else. I still think (and this argument doesn't do much to sway me against this) that it is like something to believe it is Tuesday, and that is a different phenomenal state than believing it is Monday. I'm not saying changing your mind about what day it is would necessarily feel any different (it wouldn't necessarily change your emotions or sense experience)—maybe it would; maybe it wouldn't. But, it would still constitute a different phenomenal state, and that's what is relevant here.
2) I think the argument is either invalid or doesn't prove enough. If the conclusion ("zombies can have beliefs") means zombies can have both implicit and explicit beliefs, then this conclusion doesn't follow from premises 3 and 4. But if the conclusion only means "zombies can have implicit beliefs" then this doesn't do enough work to establish illusionism. If zombies only have implicit beliefs, they are still very different than us.
This isn’t an argument for illusionism. It’s an argument for the claim that zombies can have beliefs. It shows they can have implicit beliefs in particular.
I’m not using phenomenal in a narrow sense. If my implicit beliefs change, the phenomenal character of my experience doesn’t change. If there is no change in how things feel (feel understood in a broad phenomenal sense, including phenomenal sensory, emotional, etc feelings) then there is no change in phenomenal properties.
No, there is a flaw here.
The idea of Tuesday is not an actively held belief but part of a model based on experience phenomena in the same way health is a model not a belief. I don’t actively believe I am healthy, as opposed to feeling sick when phenomena change, and I believe it's Tuesday because I went to sleep on monday. You are trying to isolate that relational, modular belief from the web of phenomena that supports it.
the zombie has no animating spirit to make a model of the world through phenomena at all. If it acts, it acts based on some other mechanism that is magical. It eats brains because some chemical acts on it, not because eating brains is good or bad or it even experiences eating people as good; it’s not a cannibal. it acts like one.
Also getting annoyed at how philosophers conflate ideas with zombies; if you can reproduce a person perfectly it is a clone, and you cannot remove any quality from it without explaining how. If it outputs human behavior it is a mimic and you need to explain how it can mimic.
essentially you are believing in miracles with a p-zombie, lol; they have theodicies too, the theodicy is how the mechanism works to replicate the human aspects without being human. Trying to use them to talk about humans makes no sense.
I randomly started thinking of this paper again and came back to reread. fuck it's good. I mean the hard problem gets btfoed, zombies plausibly have not only beliefs but full on memory, and the whole debate becomes much less interesting/productive
w deacon
well yeah of course they do 🤷🏼♀️
Cool post man
I think you do a nice job sticking to points of agreement between phenomenal realists and illusionists. As a phenomenal realist I agree zombies can have beliefs. Another argument is that I think it is useful to talk about say what ChatGPT believes even if ChatGPT isn't phenomenally conscious.