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Zombie style: Property dualism (Sean Carroll)

#1
C C Offline
What the existence of zombies would do to our philosophy of mind
http://nautil.us/issue/37/currents/zombi...e-dualists

EXCERPT: [...] Imagine a zombie stubbed its toe. It would cry out in pain, because that’s what a human would do, and zombies behave just like humans. When you stub your toe, certain electrochemical signals bounce around your connectome, and the exact same signals bounce around the zombie connectome. If you asked it why it cried out, it could say, “Because I stubbed my toe and it hurts.” When a human says something like that, we presume it’s telling the truth. But the zombie must be lying, because zombies have no mental states such as “experiencing pain.” Why do zombies lie all the time?

For that matter, are you sure you’re not a zombie? You think you’re not, because you have access to your own mental experiences. You can write about them in your journal or sing songs about them in a coffee shop. But a zombie version of you would do those things as well. Your zombie doppelgänger would swear in all sincerity that it had inner experiences, just as you would. You don’t think you’re a zombie, but that’s just what a zombie would say.

The problem is that the notion of “inner mental states” isn’t one that merely goes along for the ride as we interact with the world. It has an important role to play in accounting for how people behave. In informal speech, we certainly imagine that our mental states influence our physical actions. I am happy, and therefore I am smiling. The idea that mental properties are both separate from physical properties, and yet have no influence on them whatsoever, is harder to consistently conceive of than it might first appear....
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#2
Magical Realist Offline
A vivid reminder that we basically construct the otherness of other minds in our own consciousness rather than experience them directly. When I am identifying with another person, feeling their expressed emotions and thinking their thoughts along with them as they talk to me, I am not telepathically experiencing them as they experience themselves. It is a mix of empathy and logical inference on my own part, resulting in the experience of a subjective person behind the physical expressions of their bodies and the sound of their speaking. I am currently interested in how we construct personal otherness in other altered states of consciousness such as dreams and hallucinations. In dreams we construct other selves that we interact with. People who trip on shrooms talk about encountering various bizarre entities. In my own case I have an experience of voices who are constructed as semi-independent subpersons every bit as real as a voice on a phone. What is the nature of this personal otherness? To what extent does it entail the actual objective existence of another mind? And how would we rule out the hypothetical zombie on whom we could easily project subjective personhood but be totally mistaken at the same time?
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