torekp comments on Causal Reference - Less Wrong
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Some questions here. How do you know that other people are not p-zombies? Presumably you believe them when they say they have qualia! But then those speech acts are caused by brain states, and if qualia are epiphenomenal, the speech acts are not caused by qualia. Similarly, the correspondence you describe is between brain states and reported qualia by other people: I doubt you've ever managed to map your own brain states to your own qualia.
Related, how do you know that you were not a p-zombie every day of your life up to yesterday? Or that if you had qualia yesterday, how do you know that you didn't have a green quale when looking at red (stop) traffic lights? Well because you remember having qualia, and you remember them being the same as the qualia you have today! But then, aren't those memories encoded in brain states (neural connections and synaptic strengths)? How could qualia cause those memories to become encoded if they were epiphenomenal to brain states?
Stuff like this makes me pretty sure that epiphenomenalism is false.
Even the mental sentence, "I am seeing the apple as red", occurs shortly after the experience that warranted it. The fact that a qualitatively identical experience is happening while I affirm the mental sentence, is a separate fact. So even knowing what I'm feeling right now requires non-epiphenomenal qualia.
But couldn't the mental sentences also be part of the lower-tier shadow realm? Not my mental sentences. My thoughts are the ones I'm typing, and the ones that I act on.