Frankly, on Fridays I'm not even sure I have consciousness

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1596138]

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Comments

[nameandnature]

"reducible" is the nearest, though I suppose someone like David Chalmers could be right without interactive dualism being true (which is the usual explanation preferred by people who believe in souls and whatnot).

[andrewducker]

You can't go around saying things like that without explaining who David Chalmers is and what Interactive Dualism is :->

[nameandnature]

Chalmers is a philosopher who thinks that consciousness relies on more than physical stuff, because there is a possible (for some value of "possible" which is itself the subject of much discussion, as far as I can tell) world in which everything is physically identical to this world, but people aren't conscious. The possible world is usually called the "zombie world", and the people in it "philosophical zombies".

If I remember rightly, Chalmers does think that the physical world is casually closed, so he doesn't think that consciousness pushes back on the world, if you like: on his view, consciousness is an epiphenomenon produced by special laws about consciousness which apply in our world (he calls these "bridging laws", which is a term from the philosophy of science for laws which map one scientific theory onto another, like mapping classical thermodynamics onto statistical mechanics, say).

The strong AI people think Chalmers's idea is pretty silly, hence Yudkowsky's Philosophical Zombie Movie, in which the line "I'm Daniel Dennett, bitches" wins the Internet.

However, supernaturalists typically won't find Chalmers's ideas satisfactory either: there's a popular argument for theism which more or less runs "Fucking consciousness, how does that work?", based on the idea that atheists must also be materialists. Chalmers is an atheist non-materialist.

Interactive dualism is the view that there's some separate sort of mind stuff that causes physical stuff to happen. While Googling that, I found a useful summary of mind body relations.

[andrewducker]

Aaaah. I've read the Philosophical Zombie Movie before, and found it terribly amusing.

Interactive Dualism I could have guessed at - just hadn't bumped into Chalmers before. I remember chunks of this stuff from the philosophy I did at uni, but generally not the names of the people associated with it.

[andrewducker]

Oooh. Cool music video too. Not seen that one before.