From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Subject: Re: Dualism
Organization: Indiana University
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 01:53:03 GMT

In article <1992Sep30.200149.145166@Cookie.secapl.com> frank@Cookie.secapl.com (Frank Adams) writes:

>>To say my qualia *are* the interaction of the program with the world
>>is to beg the question.  Certainly that may be where they come from.
>
>I want you to assume that you are the computer+program, not a soul
>inhabiting it.  You have carefully avoiding using that word, but it is
>nevertheless what you are assuming -- even if you are unaware that you are
>making that assumption.

Well, I cheerfully admit that I don't know what a "soul" is supposed
to be, but I always thought I didn't believe in them.  Certainly if a
soul is something "detachable" from the body, that merely "inhabits"
it and can move on after a while, or after the body dies, then I don't
believe in any such thing.  If the soul is supposed to have any
independent causal powers that don't correspond to those of the body,
then ditto.  So if a "soul" is what I believe in, then it's a very
watered-down soul indeed.

Seriously, the only aspect of thought that I've claimed is non-physical
is its phenomenology: the raw feel, if you like.  What this has to do
with a "soul" is most unclear to me.

>In the sense that a vitalist is making a logically possible hypothesis when
>they assert that artificial life might do everything a living thing can do,
>but still not be alive.  It's an empty hypothesis; it has no consequences.

No, they're not making a logically possible hypothesis.  All it *means*
to be alive is to be able to adapt, reproduce, and so on, in a certain
way: life is a functional concept.  To put it another way, all there is
about life that needs to be *explained* is adaptation, reproduction,
metabolism and the like -- the functional facts.  If a vitalist asserted
that there was something more to the notion of "life" over and above
these functional facts -- such as a "vital spirit" -- they'd be talking
about something that we'd have no reason to believe exists.

Contrast the case of consciousness.  In this case, the existence of
qualia is more or less indubitable.  And it's also quite clear that
"having qualia" doesn't *mean* "being able to function in a certain way".
With consciousness, there's an explanandum that goes unexplained after
all the associated functionality is explained.  With life, there's no
such explanandum.

>(It *is* a contingent hypothesis that any computer capable of intelligent
>behavior would have feelings.  I personally think it's true, but it might
>not be.  But I did specify that the organization of the computer+program be
>"sufficiently like" the human brain precisely to counter this objection.)

The notion that this is a contingent hypothesis is very strange -- I
believe it but I suspect that you should not.  Note that there's
nothing contingent about the make-up of the set of computer programs,
and there's nothing contingent about the subset of those that are
capable of empirical behaviour (in practice it will require empirical
investigation to determine this class, but in principle it's an
a priori matter).  Next, given that the notion of "implementation" is
fixed, the class of "computers capable of intelligent behaviour"
should also be fixed a priori.  So if one asserts that the above
hypothesis is contingent, one is asserting that the link between the
physical and consciousness is contingent, which implies dualism.
I suspect that that's not really what you meant, and that some
confusion is lurking here.

>>What other sort of explanation?  Well, if it's to be a physicalist
>>explanation, it must be an explanation of why the presence of qualia
>>is entailed by the computational organization of the system.
>
>I think that, for this, it is sufficient to point to those aspects of the
>organization which are intrinsic to its behavior as an intelligent system,
>which fill the functional role of qualia as reports of sensory information
>(note that I do not mean here that all qualia are such reports), and which
>cause the system to believe that it has qualia.  When we have explicated
>this (which we haven't yet), then for the physicalist there is nothing left
>to explain.

Of course, such an "explanation" leaves it utterly mysterious why we
*have* qualia at all.

-- 
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."