🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <7653@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:

>>An "epistemological nightmare".  I like that.  Yes, it certainly
>>leaves the epistemology looking very weird.  My zombie twin, after
>>all, will have just the same beliefs and puzzlement, but he won't
>>have qualia at all.  Furthermore, on most of the usual accounts
>>of justification, he seems to be just as *justified* in his belief
>>that he has qualia as I am. 
>
>This sort of thing is one reason why I think the "disposition
>to behave" version of belief is a such a lose.

Maybe so, but in any case, beliefs aside, it's clear that my zombie
twin would go around *claiming* to have qualia, even though he
didn't, and one can ask similar questions about the justification
of those claims.

>>On the first question, though, it seems to me that the functional
>>explanation of why we think we have qualia may actually be
>>quite straightforward.  In fact, it seems to me that any
>>system with a reasonable capacity for perceptual discrimination,
>>say between different waveforms of light, as well as a reasonable
>>capacity for reflection, would have such beliefs.  They make
>>certain discriminations (causally) between different kinds of
>>waveforms, A and B, and then you ask them how they made the
>>discrimination.
>
>Where do the qualia come in?

The qualia don't come in to this explanation, as this is an
explanation of *behaviour*, and as such is entirely physical.

>>My paper "Consciousness and Cognition" gives a somewhat more
>>detailed account of why a system should think that it had qualia,
>>in terms of information-flow within the system. 
>
>BTW, I can't print the ".ps" file.  I can print lots of other
>".ps" files, but I suspect most of them derive from ".dvi" files.
>I can ghostview it, though.

The PS file was derived from a Mac.  Most systems seem to be able
to print it.  I can send you a copy, if you like.  (Incidentally,
my new flagship paper "Can Consciousness be Reductively Explained?"
will be available soon.)

-- 
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."