Eugine_Nier comments on By Which It May Be Judged - LessWrong
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I'm not a positivist, and I don't argue like one. I think nearly all the arguments against the possibility of zombies are very silly, and I agree there's good prima facie evidence for dualism (though I think that in the final analysis the weight of evidence still favors physicalism). Indeed, it's a good thing I don't think zombies are impossible, since I think that we are zombies.
My reason is twofold: Copernican, and Occamite.
Copernican reasoning: Most of the universe does not consist of humans, or anything human-like; so it would be very surprising to learn that the most fundamental metaphysical distinction between facts ('subjective' v. 'objective,' or 'mental' v. 'physical,' or 'point-of-view-bearing' v. 'point-of-view-lacking, 'or what-have-you) happens to coincide with the parts of the universe that bear human-like things, and the parts that lack human-like things. Are we really that special? Is it really more likely that we would happen to gain perfect, sparkling insight into a secret Hidden Side to reality, than that our brains would misrepresent their own ways of representing themselves to themselves?
Occamite reasoning: One can do away with the Copernican thought by endorsing panpsychism; but this worsens the bite from the principle of parsimony. A universe with two kinds of fundamental fact is less likely, relative to the space of all the models, then one with one kind (or with many, many more than two kinds). It is a striking empirical fact that, consciousness aside, we seem to be able to understand the whole rest of reality with a single grammatical kind of description -- the impersonal, 'objective' kind, which states a fact without specifying for whom the fact is. The world didn't need to turn out to be that way, just as it didn't need to look causally structured. This should give us reason to think that there may not be distinctions between fundamental kinds of facts, rather than that we happen to have lucked out and ended up in one of the universes with very few distinctions of this sort.
Neither of these considerations, of course, is conclusive. But they give us some reason to at least take seriously physicalist hypotheses, and to weight their theoretical costs and benefits against the dualists'.
We've thrown out the idea of subjective experience, of pure, ineffable 'feels,' of qualia. But we retain any functionally specifiable analog of such experience. In place of qualitative red, we get zombie-red, i.e., causal/functional-red. In place of qualitative knowledge, we get zombie-knowledge.
And since most dualists already accepted the causal/functional/physical process in question (they couldn't even motivate the zombie argument if they didn't consider the physical causally adequate), there can be no parsimony argument against the physicalists' posits; the only argument will have to be a defense of the claim that there is some sort of basic, epistemically infallible acquaintance relation between the contents of experience and (themselves? a Self??...). But making such an argument, without begging the question against eliminativism, is actually quite difficult.
The problem is that we already have two kinds of fundamental facts, (and I would argue we need more). Consider Eliezer's use of "magical reality fluid" in this post. If you look at context, it's clear that he's trying to ask whether the inhabitants of the non-causally stimulated universes poses qualia without having to admit he cares about qualia.
Eliezer thinks we'll someday be able to reduce or eliminate Magical Reality Fluid from our model, and I know of no argument (analogous to the Hard Problem for phenomenal properties) that would preclude this possibility without invoking qualia themselves. Personally, I'm an agnostic about Many Worlds, so I'm even less inclined than EY to think that we need Magical Reality Fluid to recover the Born probabilities.
I also don't reify logical constructs, so I don't believe in a bonus category of Abstract Thingies. I'm about as monistic as physicalists come. Mathematical platonists and otherwise non-monistic Serious Scientifically Minded People, I think, do have much better reason to adopt dualism than I do, since the inductive argument against Bonus Fundamental Categories is weak for them.
I could define the Hard Problem of Reality, which really is just an indirect way of talking about the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
As Eliezer discuses in the post, Reality Fluid isn't just for Many Worlds, it also relates to questions about stimulation.
Here's my argument for why you should.
Only as a side-effect. In all cases, I suspect it's an idle distraction; simulation, qualia, and born-probability models do have implications for each other, but it's unlikely that combining three tough problems into a single complicated-and-tough problem will help gin up any solutions here.
Give me an example of some logical constructs you think I should believe in. Understand that by 'logical construct' I mean 'causally inert, nonspatiotemporal object.' I'm happy to sort-of-reify spatiotemporally instantiated properties, including relational properties. For instance, a simple reason why I consistently infer that 2 + 2 = 4 is that I live in a universe with multiple contiguous spacetime regions; spacetime regions are similar to each other, hence they instantiate the same relational properties, and this makes it possible to juxtapose objects and reason with these recurrent relations (like 'being two arbitrary temporal intervals before' or 'being two arbitrary spatial intervals to the left of').