Re: ZOMBIE: Now

From: Madame Ubiquitous (eileen.krasowski@yale.edu)
Date: Mon Dec 20 1999 - 02:33:01 MST


>I "know" it as well as a zombie "knows" anything: I use the term correctly
>as far as anyone else can tell.

That's not what I mean. Essentially, Kant would argue that we have no
direct experience of the world, that everything comes to us essentially
piecemeal as it passes through the filters of our senses, and that our mind
then constructs the world as we "know" it out of those pieces. Without such
construction, what we would basically have is meaningless raw data that we
would be unable to make heads or tails of. I'm starting to ponder the
possibility that qualia can be equated to mental superglue of
sorts...uber-concepts which fill in the incomplete spaces left by our
partial perception and allow us to "know" a complete picture. Zombies, it
would seem, do not possess this superglue, but rather just deal with raw
data (why they shamble so slowly, perhaps? I mean, processing time has got
to suck...). So, without that superglue, how do you "know"? It would seem
to me knowing requires a complete picture.

Eileen



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