Richard2 comments on A Priori - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 October 2007 09:02PM

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Comment author: Richard2 12 October 2007 06:52:00AM 0 points [-]

g - No, by 'conceptually possible' I mean ideally conceptually possible, i.e. a priori coherent, or free of internal contradiction. (Feel free to substitute 'logical possibility' if you are more familiar with that term.) Contingent failures of imagination on our part don't count. So it's open to you to argue that zombies aren't conceptually possible after all, i.e. that further reflection would reveal a hidden contradiction in the concept. But there seems little reason, besides a dogmatic prior commitment to materialism, to think such a thing. Most (but admittedly not all) materialist philosophers grant the logical possibility of zombies, and instead dispute the inference to metaphysical possibility. This seems no less ad hoc. Anyway:

"I would like to know... why you think conceptual possibility has anything to do with actual possibility."

I actually wrote a whole thesis on this very question, so rather than further clogging the comments here, allow me to simply provide the link. If you're interested enough to read all that, and still have any objections to my view afterwards, I'd be very interested to hear them - my comments are open. For this page, though, I think I should bow out, unless Eliezer sees fit to address the concerns I raised about the original topic, and especially his treatment of the a priori.