From: Dan Fabulich (daniel.fabulich@yale.edu)
Date: Mon Dec 20 1999 - 03:00:19 MST
'What is your name?' 'Madame Ubiquitous.' 'Do you deny having written
the following?':
> >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.
But that's what *I* meant when I said that I "knew" quite a bit about the
physical world. I was using "know" in the functionalist sense: I meant
that I use the word in the correct way, as far as anyone can tell.
> 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.
While that, too, could plausibly *also* be called qualia, qualia are
taken, at least in part, to be the very data itself as it is presented to
our Conscious minds, even, indeed, *especially* in raw form. We zombies,
having no Mind of that sort, simply process information dumbly, as a
calculator dumbly spits out the answers to questions of arithmetic; on
some level, as dumbly as a rock falls to earth. We use words, but we
don't Understand them. We act as if we had Knowledge, but we don't. We
pause and hmmm and haw as if we were Thinking, but we aren't.
I may be a somewhat more militant zombie than Ken, however, because I am
in the habit of claiming that we are all zombies, whereas Ken's only gone
on the record saying that HE'S a zombie, but that anyone else might not
be.
-Dan
-unless you love someone-
-nothing else makes any sense-
e.e. cummings
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