Friday, January 28, 2011

The Waning of Materialism

Edited by Koons and Bealer.

206 comments:

«Oldest   ‹Older   201 – 206 of 206
Blue Devil Knight said...

Panpsychists and property dualists have a lot of trouble with this scenario (e.g., Chalmers). Indeed, most antimaterialists fall into one of these camps.

A subset of substance dualists can get out of it, but at the cost of saying identical brain states don't imply same ability to think about experiences. I know some substance dualists will be fine with that...

But the problem is the materialist can use this thought experiment to take Mary to the woodshed. Mary2 has the same concepts as Mary1, and who's to say that lightning is needed to reconfigure her this way?Could she restructure her visual system with microstimulation, or even just via her experience in the black and white lab ? Not clear at all.

Blue Devil Knight said...

In sum, Lightning Mary undermines the antimaterialist use of Mary (as I said fifteen posts ago). It isn't meant to harm antimaterialism, but the antimaterialists use of Mary to help their cause. It cuts Mary's legs off as an antiphysicalist argument (though some materialists wouldn't think Mary2 has the same thoughts because they are not internalists about phenomenal content or concepts).

Gibbering Loon said...

Perhaps I'm dense, but I'm not really seeing this at all.

Suppose Chalmersian prop-dualism is true. Then if Mary2 is functionally equivalent to Mary1, then of course the experiences/concepts will be the same. But why is this an objection?

You claim that it harms the anti-materialist use of Mary, presumably by showing that Mary can acquire a knowledge of colors via other means than actually experiencing colors, right? But the knowledge arguer isn't committed to the claim that knowledge must always come through this avenue, only that we intuitively recognize that this avenue CAN provide us with such knowledge.

Blue Devil Knight said...

GibberingLoon: then the materialist says great: if she has the same knowledge before she leaves, the argument against physicalism fails. The whole point is that by having the experience you learn something new. This would undercut that.

Gibbering Loon said...

"then the materialist says great: if she has the same knowledge before she leaves, the argument against physicalism fails."

But that would only hold in the altered Lightning Mary case. It doesn't hold in the vanilla case.

All the Knowledge arguer needs is surely this:

1) Possibly, one can acquire an exhaustive physical knowledge of some aspect of reality without knowing 'what it is like' to experience it.

Not

2) Necessarily, one acquires an exhaustive physical knowledge of some aspect of reality without knowing 'what it is like' to experience it.

Lightning Mary undermines 2) but not 1).

Blue Devil Knight said...

An interesting suggestion, Loon. Then the structure of the Mary argument would be changed into a modal argument that is actually more interesting than Jakcson's original argument. A really good idea.

The main thrust, though, of the Mary argument, is that :
1) It is not possible for her to gain this knowledge without having the experience.

Which is logically equivalent to:
2) It is necessary that she cannot gain this knowledge without having the experience.
(or at least that's true in lots of modal logics, and seems primae facie plausible).

Number 1 expresses the idea that she is epistemically screened off from having knowledge of experience until she has it. That's pretty much the whole point of the Mary argument (and note I dislike the argument precisely because of its focus on knowledge rather than properties, but I'm playing along for now).

If you give up on number 1, then you are making a major concession for Materialist Mary. So if Lightning Mary makes you reject 1, that is a pretty important turn of the dialectical wheel.

«Oldest ‹Older   201 – 206 of 206   Newer› Newest»