My position is a variation of Anomalous Monism as championed by Donald Davidson and refined by Jaegwon Kim. I then, in theory if not in practice, champion a sharp divide between the conceptual and the non conceptual aspects of mind. There's the stuff that goes on in language: logic, intentions, folk psychology, narrative and so on. Then there's stuff that is non conceptual and smeared all over the brain. Here I take a different position which is a more straightforward property dualism: in some areas of the brain, and in some circumstances, physical events are also mental events. They are the same thing seen from two perspectives. To use the old saw c-fibres firing is pain. One is a physical and the other a mental description of the same event. Here, I'm leaning on Rudder Baker's constitution accounts.
Descartes may have 'settled' the issue with his substance dualism, but now that we don't need God to underpin our ontology and substance dualism has been systematically proven profoundly unhelpful whenever it turns up, it flabbergasts me that the parsimonious explanation of property dualism isn't more widely accepted in philosophy and science. If it were then most of the (non) problems simply evaporate.
WAB said:
IF we (meaning us collectively, not in the royal sense) are our brains, then WTF is this "illusion" of consciousness being presented to?????
Ask the wrong question and the world will cheerfully offer up the wrong answer. Information hits the brain from a wide range of sources and has to be bound to be much use. One fundamental problem the embodied brain has to solve is how to unify all of the perceptions in a way that actually allows the embodied brain to act effectively in the world.
In the brain, there is no place where it all comes together, there is no finish line at which afferent becomes efferent and there is no self. What there is, and Chalmers, who I will talk about later, is the easy problem of consciousness: we measure, discriminate, respond and act, for a start. My personal experience, and by methodologically unscientific but entirely pragmatic assumption, is that all of this happens to feel like something to everyone who isn't me.
So let's start with a P-zombie. As it happens, I don't believe human P-zombies are possible because I think functionalism is bollocks and conscious cognition takes both the meat and the motion. However, if we imagine a p-zombie, then that zombie, which you seem happy to imagine, has somehow magically solved the problem of binding all the disparate aspects of its internal and external sensory manifest - that's the hard bit of the easy problem.
More than that, it's somehow developed the ability to talk about a sense of self it doesn't have. Me, I think it would only be able to think of itself in the third person and this would be a bit of a giveaway as it would only be able to respond to its behaviour. A zombie trying to be devious would, presumably, have to whisper, very quietly and hear itself... However, it would be able to apply the intentional stance to the body it was, name it, decide what beliefs and desires that it had and, not just use them for prediction and explanation, but also, cleverly, to work out what to do next, allowing it to use logic to make both tactical and strategic decisions. It would get interests.
In time, with practice, it might come to build up a bloody great set of settled beliefs and desires. In time, it could start to look a lot like it had a first person perspective. Hell, it could even mistake that cluster of beliefs desires, folk psychological predictions, experience about the body's dispositions and so on for something more. Now imagine a Watsonian P-zombie. It's internalised that language use and predicts silently, with the brain clamping down on the muscular production of language and simply producing, then interpreting language. That's broadly what we do when thinking in words, by the way. However, again, it's a P-zombie, its behaviour is on an internal feedback loop rather than an external one, but it still doesn't feel like anything. It's got a rich model of what it does that it can use to predict, explain, justify and produce behaviour and it's perfectly capable of modelling others - as if they had intentions desires and interests.
Obviously, this embodied p-zombie brain doesn't really have beliefs and it isn't really there. But it uses the intentional stance to predict and explain behaviour. it will be able to tell stories based on personal history and, living among non zombies, would learn the grammatically correct use of personal pronouns like I. The I, as Dennett puts it, would be the centre of narrative gravity. A convenient hook for the stories. A fictional character written by the p-zombie. Mind you, it would be a fictional character able to respond to its own stories and history. That's starting to feel like a pretty rich (non) mental life.
Now, holding that story in your head, just imagine what would happen if, actually, the unification of all of the perceptions in a way that actually allows the embodied brain to act effectively in the world. happened to feel like something to have. Imagine if, before language happened, pain hurt just because sharing information in a rich manner across a brain happened to feel like something. Now you have two options here: Chalmers' option is panpsychism - all matter has a phenomenal character in the same way it has mass. Personally I see Chalmers' option as incredibly excessive.
All you have to imagine is that, in the brain, some processes that promulgate and bind information across the brain just happen to feel like something when they happen. It doesn't have to be many, because as we saw with the zombie, even a zombie can get a third person sense of self. Most of our sense of self is, as it happens, third person, just like the zombie. However, a little bit of it isn't. It just happens that, in us, it turns us from p-zombies to something a bit richer, with a spark of internal awareness of solving the easy problems that easy consciousness solves. That internal dashboard, is all it takes. all it needs. Most of the heavy lifting is already done by third person folk psychology applied recursively.
So we have two user illusions - a really basic private one that is biology in action seen from the inside (because it feels like something to discriminate, perceive, nocicept and so on) and a public one that is rather similar to the zombie one that allows us to spin stories around this little kernel of biology experienced from the inside. Put the two together and you have something that looks mysterious from the biology (because of the language, intentional stuff and so one) and looks mysterious from the personal (because of the ill understood biology). Obviously, the two are hopelessly intermingled which just makes unpicking it near impossible. As I always say, psychology has not yet had its Newton.
