🚀 go-pugleaf

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".

-- 
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."