From: holmes@opal.idbsu.edu (Randall Holmes)
Subject: Re: Dualism
Organization: Boise State University
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 15:58:37 GMT

In article <BvDqLM.Iun@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
>In article <1992Sep29.154632.17451@guinness.idbsu.edu> holmes@opal.idbsu.edu (Randall Holmes) writes:
>
>>The fallacy of
>>Chalmers' argument is that he provides a general technique for
>>deducing that in _any_ situation where we have two bodies of knowledge
>>which are actually about the same referents, the referents must be
>>different;
>
>I do no such thing.  You note that my original argument said nothing
>about "identity", and that was for a reason.  Rather, it was about
>supervenience.  You'll even recall that I said the argument "there
>could be non-physical qualia, therefore qualia aren't physical"
>was invalid.  The argument I gave was very specific, regarding a set
>of facts that are supposed to logically exhaust all the facts about
>the world (i.e. the physical facts), and arguing that in fact this
>set of facts does not logically determine all the facts about the
>world.
>
>>as long as we do not realize that the objects of the two
>>domains are the same, we can imagine a world in which they turn out to
>>be different, which is a logically possible world, so the two subjects
>>are different (although they may supervene in the actual world).  The
>>fallacy is that "imaginable" is not equal to "possible"; the world
>>"imagined" in this kind of argument is actually usually "possible",
>>but the way in which we would correlate phenomena in that world with
>>phenomena in the actual world would change as soon as we had
>>sufficient information about the actual world (see my "strangeness"
>>example).
>
>Right.  In general that kind of argument from possibility to lack
>of identity breaks down because of further facts about the way the
>world is, facts contained on neither side of the equation.  In this
>case, however, one of the sides is supposed to carry all the facts
>about the way the world is (i.e. the physical facts).  So there
>isn't room for that kind of "new information".

And what I am saying is that there is nothing to indicate that the
other side involves any new information.  The facts about "qualia"
translate exactly to facts about physical states of the brain; there
is no need to maintain that there are any additional facts, as opposed
to additional sentences.  The additional questions you ask about
qualia seem to me (and my qualia have the same structure as yours, on
the whole...) to be pseudo-questions.  I think that the only thing
which we can "understand" about anything is its structure; qualia and
the brain states have precisely correlated structures and identical
"causal" relationships with the world, so I see no reason to doubt
that they are in fact the same.  I think that the "brute reality" of
anything "atomic" (physical or "subjective" -- admitting no difference
here!) is essentially inexplicable, and carries _no_ information;
thus, I don't think that the fact that physical structure X has
subjective feel Y actually gives us any additional information about X
at all, except insofar as Y has structure, whereupon you will _agree_
that the correlated X will have parallel structure, I think!  Your
argument is invalid because you _assume_ what you must prove (that
there is actually additional information (not verbiage) in talk of
qualia, over and above physical information).


>
>-- 
>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."


-- 
The opinions expressed		|     --Sincerely,
above are not the "official"	|     M. Randall Holmes
opinions of any person		|     Math. Dept., Boise State Univ.
or institution.			|     holmes@opal.idbsu.edu
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech,sci.math,sci.physics,sci.astro