From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Subject: Re: Dualism
Organization: Indiana University
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 22:48:50 GMT

In article <7692@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:

>Sure, but if the "behavior" side wins completely enough they leave the
>other side without any words with which to say what they want to say.
>They can't talk about an aspect or component of belief any more,
>because a belief is just a disposition to behave w/o any conscious
>component.  So they have to resort to something much more convoluted
>and indirect.

It's straightforward to e.g. talk about "conscious belief" or
"functional belief", making the split explicitly where it matters.
Believe me, though, there are a whole lot of people who are not
functionalists about mind in general, in the philosophy of mind,
who have come to the position that some kind of functionalist 
analysis of belief is the most appropriate.  With almost all
mental notions there is a phenomenal (experiential) and functional
(causal/explanatory) aspect.  For some, these aspects are pretty
evenly split -- e.g. "pain".  For something like "sensation", maybe
the phenomenal is stronger; for "perception", maybe the causal is
stronger.  For belief, it seems to most that the causal is much more
central.  However, it's easy to make the distinction explicitly
where necessarily.

Certainly it's the case that sliding over these distinctions can
cause a lot of trouble.  For instance, I think that a conflation
of the phenomenal and functional senses of "seeming" is at
the root of Dennett's argument about "real seeming", toward
the end of his book on consciousness.

>I'm not sure just what you have in mind by "conscious feel".
>For instance, I can think to myself "I believe I'm in Edinburgh"
>(and in fact I do believe this).  Or I can think to myself
>"do I believe that I'm in Edinburgh"?.  So I have a certain 
>sort of conscious, language-level access to at least some beliefs.
>But does a "conscious feel" occur somewhere along the way as,
>maybe, part of the belief?  I don't know.  My thoughts certainly
>seem to have a feel, in the sense that it's like something to
>have them.  Is your functional account of belief supposed to
>what it's like to have beliefs and thoughts about them?

Well, it seems to be that there are only two basic kinds of phenomena
to be explained, in mentality.  There's (1) the causation of behaviour,
and (2) the conscious feel (the "what it's like").  There's no third
thing, as far as I can tell.  Any aspect of belief that's not
phenomenal is just causation.  Certainly, however, we can't expect
the causal part to explain the phenomenal part (I don't understand
your last question above, as you well know that I don't think any
functional account can explain the "what it's like" of mentality).

>Well, I said "something", not necessarily a physical duplicate,
>because I wanted to establish a more general point.  Can we agree
>that a correct explanation for some effect has to identify the actual
>causes of that effect (and that it's not enough to come up with some
>_other_ causes that would have the same effect)?

If neurons cause the behaviour in the zombie, then neurons
cause the behaviour in me.  (Maybe the consciousness "also" causes
the behaviour in me, but I don't know what that would come to.)

>If so, what you say above would be right only if my conscious experience
>has no causal role in forming my beliefs about consciousness.  And I
>think it's just false that it has no such role.

Well, if so, you're probably going to want to deny the logical
possibility of zombies.  But you'd better find a *prior* reason
for doing so -- i.e. a demonstration of a conceptual incoherence
in the notion.  You can't just assert that it's logically impossible,
in order to make a desired conclusion come out right.

>The idea that my experience has no impact on these beliefs seems
>completely fantastic to me.  And if it turns out to be true it
>will be a pretty sad day for us all.

Well, I think the real story will be a complex double-aspect story
in which both the physical and consciousness will be seen as two
aspects of something grander, such as Information with a capital I
(don't ask me what that is).  So then they'll be two parts of
the same story.  There's no escaping, though, that the physical part
of the story alone will give you an explanation sufficient to predict
behaviour.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."