Even zombies Can be Surprised: A Reply to Graham And Horgan

Topoi, 2019

Proponents of the hard problem of consciousness argue that the zombie and inverted spectrum thought experiments demonstrate that consciousness cannot be physical. They present scenarios designed to demonstrate that it is conceivable that a physical replica of someone can have radically different or no conscious experiences, that such an experience-less replica is possible and therefore that materialism is false. I will argue that once one understands the limitations that the physics of this world puts on cognitive systems, zombies and the inverted spectrum are not conceivable.

The paper focuses on some aspects of Charmers’ philosophy of mind, namely, his argument in favor of the existence of the so-called zombies. Zombies are supposed to be weird philosophical creatures endowed with all human physical properties though lacking conscious experiences and qualia. We argue against the logical possibility of conceiving zombies, thus weakening Charmers’ dualism

The Incarnate Word, 2019

The following is a paper presented for the Course Rahner and Lonergan at the University of Toronto (Winter, 2014), revised and edited Winter, 2018. Our purpose is to defend the possibility of “perceptualism,” that is to say, the position maintaining that the intelligible content of consciousness is given in perception and not posited by the activity of the subject. Assisted by the insights of Cornelio Fabro, this defense contrasts perceptualism with Bernard Lonergan’s “critical realism”. This paper focuses on the notion of experience, seemingly the basis of the opposition between perceptualism and critical realism.

dialectica 73(1-2), 105-127., 2019

The cognitive phenomenology thesis has it that conscious cognitive states essentially exhibit a phenomenal character. Defenders of ‘conservatism’ about cognitive phenomenology think that the phenomenology of thought is reducible to sensory phenomenology. In contrast, proponents of ‘liberalism’ hold that there is a proprietary, sui generis cognitive phenomenology. Horgan develops a morph-sequence argument to argue for liberalism. The argument is based on the conceivability of a cognitive phenomenology zombie, i.e. a man who does not understand Chinese but shares the behavior and sensory phenomenology with his twin who does understand Chinese. I argue that the conceivability of a cognitive phenomenology-zombie fails to settle the debate between conservatives and liberals. The roots of the ineffectiveness of the argument lie in the diverse readings of sensory phenomenology which flesh out the relation between sensory phenomenology and concepts differently but explain the conceivability of the scenario equally well. The lesson to learn is that to adjudicate the debate about cognitive phenomenology, we first have to clarify the notion of sensory phenomenology.

I give a brief precis of some of the major themes in Lyons' book. I discuss a possible connection between the question of when to count a belief as basic and when to count a state as a belief.

If zombies were conceivable in the sense relevant to the 'conceivability argument' against physicalism, a certain epiphenomenalistic conception of consciousness -the 'equalia story' -would also be conceivable. But (it is argued) the e-qualia story is not conceivable because it involves a contradiction. The non-physical 'e-qualia' supposedly involved could not perform cognitive processing, which would therefore have to be performed by physical processes; and these could not put anyone into 'epistemic contact' with e-qualia, contrary to the e-qualia story. Interactionism does not enable zombists to escape these conclusions.

Organon F, 2022

In the paper, I discuss Robert Kirk’s attempt to refute the zombie argument against materialism by demonstrating, “in a way that is intuitively appealing as well as cogent”, that the idea of phenomenal zombies involves incoherence. Kirk’s argues that if one admits that a world of zombies z is conceivable, one should also admit the conceivability of a certain transformation from such a world to a world z* that satisfies a description D, and it is arguable that D is incoherent. From which, Kirk suggests, it follows that the idea of zombies is incoherent. I argue that Kirk’s argument has several minor deficiencies and two major flaws. First, he takes for granted that cognitive mental states are physical (cognitive physicalism), although a zombist is free to—and would better—reject this view. Second, he confuses elements of different scenarios of transformation, none of which results in the incoherent description D.

Philosophical Issues, 2011

For more than a decade I have been quietly complaining that contemporary epistemology lacks an adequate answer to this question: What is the epistemic function of sensory awareness as opposed to immediate (or non-inferential) perceptual judgment? 1 It still seems to me a good complaint, and I wish to enter it again today. Perhaps one sign that the complaint is still good is that on many epistemological views, a being as close to us as is possible given that it is devoid of sensory awareness-a "zombie" if you will-could be just as wellplaced epistemically as his closest normal, fully sensate, counterpart. All the zombie would lack is the accompanying light, sound, and bodily sensational show. His beliefs could be as reliably formed as you like. They could be, in the recent terminology of Jack Lyons, vide his fine book Perception and Basic Beliefs, the output of a "primal perceptual system" that has evolved to generate reliable basic beliefs. 2 Moreover, many in a quite different epistemological tradition from Jack Lyons would say that the zombie's immediate perceptual or quasiperceptual judgments could be firmly held, non-inferential starting points, which constitute how the world immediately seems to him. They would then add that some such principle as If it immediately seems to a subject that p and he has no evidence against p, and no reason to doubt that his belief was formed in a reliable way, then he is justified in believing that p.