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Abstract
Most materialist responses to the zombie argument against materialism take either a “type-A” or “type-B” approach: they either deny the conceivability of zombies or accept their conceivability while denying their possibility. However, a “type-Q” materialist approach, inspired by Quinean suspicions about a priority and modal entailment, rejects the sharp line between empirical and conceptual truths needed for the traditional responses. In this paper, I develop a type-Q response to the zombie argument, one stressing the theory-laden nature of our conceivability and possibility intuitions. I argue that our first-person access to the conscious mind systematically misleads us into thinking that the distinctive qualities of conscious experience—qualia—are nonfunctional. Qualia, I contend, are functional, even though they do not seem to be. To support my claim, I introduce the “meditations” of Rene Descartes’ zombie twin. This establishes the plausibility of an appearance/reality distinction for consciousness and it undermines various anti-materialist objections based on privileged first-person access. I conclude that the best overall theory posits an appearance/reality distinction for qualia, and this, for the type-Q materialist, is decisive.
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Acknowledgements
This paper has benefitted greatly from long-term discussions with Dave Beisecker, Richard Brown, and Pete Mandik. I hope that they generously recognize that imitation is the highest form of flattery! In addition, I’m grateful to Bredo Johnson, Ken Williford, and Uriah Kriegel. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for Philosophical Psychology. A distant ancestor of this paper was presented at the “Towards a Science of Consciousness” conference, Tucson, AZ, April 2008. I’m grateful to the audience there for helpful comments and questions.
Notes
Notes
[1] See Chalmers (Citation1996), and Kirk (Citation2005), to scratch the surface of the very large literature on zombies.
[2] Chalmers writes: “some philosophers, especially followers of Quine…reject any distinction between conceptual truth and empirical truth, or between the a priori or the a posteriori, or between the contingent and the necessary. One who is sufficiently Quinean might therefore reject the distinction between type-A and type-B materialism, holding that talk of epistemic implication and/or modal entailment is ungrounded, but materialism is true nonetheless. We might call such a view type-Q materialism” (Chalmers, Citation2003a, p. 123).
[3] Broadly, type-Q materialists reject an analytic/synthetic distinction, and therefore are dubious of a priori conceptual analyses, modal and essentialist arguments, and claims of foundationalist epistemology. They tend to embrace meaning holism, the theory-ladeness of observation, and naturalized epistemology. While type-Q materialists can embrace epistemic implication and modal entailment (pace Chalmers in note 2 above), such implications and entailments are theory relative, rather than having an independent, foundational status. For more details of type-Q see, Mandik and Weisberg (Citation2008).
[4] See Dennett (Citation1991, Citation2005) for a type-A version of this strategy; see Stalnaker (Citation2002) for a type-B version. See Chalmers (Citation2003a, p. 123), for an argument that type-Q collapses into one of the other categories.
[5] Broadly speaking, my response to the zombie argument appeals to what Güven Güzeldere calls “the integrationist intuition” (Citation1997, p. 11) the idea that the dualist (or “segregationist”) view leads to “untenable and noncommonsensical conceptions of phenomenal consciousness” (Burton, Citation2005, p. 533). Integrationists hold that qualia can be fully accounted for in causal, functional, or representational terms. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for Philosophical Psychology for recommending this helpful classification.
[6] See Levine (Citation2001, chapter 1) and Papineau (2001, chapter 1) for the challenges of defining ‘materialism’ and related terms.
[7] On this approach to establishing materialism, see Chalmers and Jackson (Citation2001), Jackson (Citation1998), Kim (Citation1998), and Lewis (Citation1972). This is not the only way to argue for materialism. A rival view argues for materialism by citing ontological simplicity (Block & Stalnaker, Citation1999; Smart, Citation1959). It may seem that my employment of Lewis-style reductive explanation clearly places my view firmly in the type-A camp. However, as will become clear in the text, my use of reductive explanation rejects the “pure” conceptual analyses usually employed in this method. What's more, my appearance/reality solution to qualia works just as well on a simplicity approach. Once the worrisome appearances of qualia are dealt with, simplicity claims gain plausibility. But I believe that embracing the Lewis model is advisable because if the solution can be shown to work in this more demanding setup, it will work in the other model of reduction as well.
[8] In various places in this paper I will refer to my account as “functionalist.” By this, I mean that qualitative states have (in principle) a complete functional analysis. This is different from views that reject a functional analysis of qualia but nonetheless identify them with physical properties of the brain. Such a move is not ruled out by my appearance/reality claim, and the appearance/reality claim for qualia could help defend such an approach as well. But I believe that if we can find a fully functionalist story, it is to be preferred from the materialist point of view. It removes the seeming “brute” nature of the identity claim. And it shows how consciousness is on par with other natural phenomena, given the success of reductive functional explanation elsewhere (Chalmers & Jackson, Citation2001; Kim, Citation1998; Lewis, Citation1994).
[9] See also Dennett (Citation1991, pp. 134 & 363–364).
[10] For more on the 2-D approach to spelling out these issues, see Chalmers (Citation1996, chapter 2, 2002). I believe that the issue can be clearly stated in both interpretations of modal logic without affecting my argument.
[11] Reference, of course, is to the standard Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch translation of the works of Descartes, and to the Adam and Tannery French edition. But perhaps reference should be to the editions of their zombie equivalents. I will ignore this complication in what follows!
[12] This may be too strong, depending on what we take “rational” to mean. All I mean here is that RZ hasn’t missed any evidence or argument that a competent, well-functioning reasoner would accept. The key point is that there does not seem to be any additional evidence available to either RZ or RD in this context.
[13] RZ's arduous attempt to avoid solipsism mirrors RD's, and though it is widely held that neither successfully established their rational foundationalism, both are hailed to this day (in their respective worlds) as “the father of modern philosophy.”
[14] This is not granted by all anti-materialists. I will consider various alternative characterizations of zombies and their beliefs (or there lack of) in the final section.
[15] Horgan et al. (Citation2006) develop their own response to internal world skepticism, invoking “phenomenal intentionality” as the key to explaining non-grippiness. I will not directly argue against this view here, but some of my remarks in the final section raise doubts about justifying their claim. Briefly, I contend that we cannot tell empirically if our phenomenal beliefs are constituted in part by phenomenal qualities, and further, there is no theoretical reason to posit this constitution. See the final section, below.
[16] Another way to view the argument of this paper is in the form of a destructive dilemma for the anti-materialist. The argument runs as follows: Either we don’t know we’re not zombies or we do know we’re not zombies. If we don’t know we’re not zombies, then anti-materialism is false for the reasons spelled out in the paper. If we do know we’re not zombies, then that fact needs explaining. The materialist's explanation of this knowledge is better than the anti-materialist's, so anti-materialism is false. I have focused mainly on the first horn of the dilemma, though I’ll spend more time dealing with the second horn in the final “objection and replies” section. For detailed defense of this argument, and a somewhat different way of characterizing the second horn of the dilemma, see Mandik (Citation2008).
[17] See footnote 22, above, in Horgan et al. (Citation2006).
[18] See Sellars (Citation1956) for the direct ancestor of these approaches. For more detail on my particular version of this approach, see Weisberg (unpublished manuscript).