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Kaj_Sotala 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?
My default assumption is that if someone smart says something that sounds obviously false to me, either they're giving their words different meanings than I am, or alternatively the two-sentence version is skipping a lot of inferential steps.
Compare the cautionary tale of talking snakes.
If the tale of talking snakes really showed what it is supposed to show, we'd see lots of nonreligious people refuse to accept evolution on the grounds that evolution is so absurd that it's not worth considering. That hardly ever happens; somehow the "absurdity" is only seen as absurd by people who have separate motivations to reject it. I don't think that apes turning into men is any more absurd than matter being composed of invisible atoms, germs causing disease, or nuclear fusion in stars. Normal people say "yeah, that sounds absurd, but scientists endorse them, I guess they know what they're doing".