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Manfred comments on Open thread, Aug. 03 - Aug. 09, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Wikipedia on Chalmers, consciousness, and zombies:
That kind of reasoning allows me to prove so many exciting things! I can imagine a world where gravity is Newtonian but orbits aren't elliptical (my math skills are poor but my imagination is top notch), therefore Newtonian gravity cannot explain elliptical orbits. And so on.
Am I being a hubristic idiot for thinking I can disprove a famous philosopher so casually?
The truth is usually simple, but arguments about it are allowed to be unboundedly complicated :P
Which is to say, I bet Chalmers has heard this argument before and formulated a counterargument, which would in turn spawn a counter-counterargument, and so on. So have you "proven" anything in a publicly final sense? I don't think so.
Doesn't mean you're wrong, though.
The question is, how do I tell (without reading all the literature on the topic) if my argument is naive and the counterarguments that I haven't thought of are successful, or if my argument is valid and the counterarguments are just obfuscating the truth in increasingly complicated ways?
You either ask an expert, or become an expert.
Although I'd be wary of philosophy experts, as there's not really a tight feedback loop in philosophy.