From: Dan Fabulich (daniel.fabulich@yale.edu)
Date: Fri Dec 17 1999 - 13:37:23 MST
'What is your name?' 'Kate Riley.' 'Do you deny having written the
following?':
> >Look, what am I supposed to say? I *really believe* what I'm telling >you.
>
> Or you think you do. You could be "experiencing" the illusion of belief in
> what you're saying here.
The VERY NEXT LINE of my post said: "(No quotes again... which do I
mean?)" I was exhorting on the grounds that I really "believe," not that
I really Believe. (As usual, when I say "believe" I mean it in the
functionalist sense, and when I say Believe I mean it in the spooky
Cartesian sense.)
> Therefore, I am unconvinced that you /are/ in fact following logic
> rather than your own kind of dogma. If I am wrong, then prove it;
> don't expect me to believe you on say-so.
You have exhorted me to declare all of the first principles which I take
to be sound. As I said earlier, this would require a lot of
"introspection," since most of the time I operate on unconscious
principles rather than axioms. My argument against qualia is not
syllogistic in nature, although stating it that way greatly draws
attention to the fact that this is a disagreement over first principles.
1) We ought to accept the existence of no more entities than are
necessary to explain appearances.
2) Nothing would appear differently if qualia did not exist.
(This line is justified by the skeptical zombie thought experiment.)
3) Therefore, we ought to reject the claim that qualia exist.
I already know what your first response is going to be: "appearance is,
itself a qualia!" Stifle it. I don't mean Appearances, Appearing,
Reject, etc. I mean "appearances," "appearing" "reject," etc. Please
keep in mind that where I don't use quotes or capitalization, I WOULD be
using quotes, but find them tedious.
It would be patently contradictory to assert that all Appearances would be
the same whether Appearances existed or not. That is not my argument. I'm
arguing that that appearances would remain unchanged whether qualia
existed or not, because appearances are "appearances," not Appearances.
------
I had just said that my argument against qualia is not syllogistic in
nature, but then I proceeded to write down such a syllogism. I only did
that to draw more attention to the fact that what's REALLY in question
here is our notions of rationality, which I cannot argue against
syllogistically. Any syllogism which I provide will simply contradict the
"first principle," and therefore be unsound.
All I can do here is attempt to draw upon your own intuitions on what
constitutes rationality. Presumably you have some notion of rationality,
and under this notion of rationality, qualia are self-evident. If I've
done even HALF my job, I've shown that it is possible to operate without
this notion and still bear some semblance to what we might call
rationality. I'd still invest in my future, take action to maximize my
best interests, still problem solve in exactly the same way any other
person who accepted <qualia> as a first principle would. It would not,
despite strawman arguments to the contrary, require me to stand in front
of oncoming cars, etc. I DO "believe" the argument as I have presented it
to you; nonetheless I make sure to look both ways when crossing the
street.
So now what we need to ask ourselves is: which notion of rationality is
RIGHT? Unfortunately, in doing so, we have no notion of rationality to
which I can appeal, since it is our notions of rationality which are,
themselves, in question. After all, if you had accepted the idea that
Occam's Razor rules out a first principle like <qualia>, you would have
already accepted my argument.
However, if you regard your notion of rationality as one possible notion
of rationality which may not be correct, then maybe I have some wiggle
room. That is, if Occam's Razor applies both to our NOTIONS of
rationality, as well as to arguments within rationality, then Occam's
Razor seems to rule out a <qualia>-based notion of rationality. What this
is really doing is attempting to construct a meta-notion of rationality
which we can agree upon; I have no strong evidence that this is even
remotely plausible, or whether you will challenge the grounds of my
meta-notion the same way as you'd challenge the grounds of my original
notion. (This move is still open to you.)
Perhaps this problem is soluble... but perhaps not.
-Dan
-unless you love someone-
-nothing else makes any sense-
e.e. cummings
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:06:06 MST