Zombie Rights

Andrew Dun

The not too distant future…

Rights Revolutions

An expanding circle…

• Women’s suffrage• Race Rights• Queer Rights• Animal Rights

• …’Zombie’ Rights?

‘Zombie’ 2.0

• uploads?• artificial intelligences?• hybrid intelligences?• non-human animals?• ‘brain in a vat’

• you?• me?

• materialists?

Ethics…

“Consciousness Matters”

• Consciousness is necessary for suffering• Consciousness is necessary for agency

• Identity, selfhood, intentionality, paying attention…

What is consciousness?

Objective: Cognitive, psychological:

• self-awareness, • self-consciousness, • introspection, • self-identity,

• relationship to environment. • Access-consciousness (Block), Available

content (Chalmers).• A complex of traits…?

Subjective: Experiential, Phenomenal

• Qualia• “What it is like”• Intrinsic• Ineffable

• Non-relational• Unified• Private

• Directly apprehensible

Truths about what it is like to be a subject that are not entailed a priori by the physical and functional truth (including the environmental truth) about that subject. (Chalmers 2002).

Which kind of consciousness is ethically important?

• Objective? Subjective?

Threats to Zombie Rights?

• Non-naturalistic worldviews• Biological Materialism (eg. Searle 1992)• General uncertainty about consciousness

• Conceivability of Zombies

Enter the Zombie…

‘My Zombie Twin’

• “This creature is molecule for molecule identical to me, and identical in all the low-level properties postulated by a complete physics, but he lacks conscious experience

entirely.” (Chalmers 1996, p 92)

Get to know your nearest zombie…

So… how to tell a zombie?

Supervenience…?

“[High level] properties supervene on [low level] properties if no two possible situations are

identical with respect to their [low level] properties while differing in their [high level]

properties” (Chalmers 1996, p 31).

More supervenience

• Logical supervenience – “…if no two logically possible situations are identical with respect to their low level properties but distinct with respect to their

high level properties.” (Chalmers 1996 p 32)• Natural supervenience – “…if any two naturally

possible situations with the same [low-level] properties have the same [high level] properties.”

(Chalmers 1996 p 34)

• -> Looking at brains won’t help!

Do zombies know they are zombies?

Do non-zombies know they are non-zombies?

p

Causal Closure

A paradox…

• “of phenomenal judgement”

…can we resolve this?

Chalmers: Judgements can be justified in the absence of a causal link -> ‘Acquaintance’

Are we barking up the wrong tree?

Re-enter…

Monism

‘Qualia’ for monist materialists

• Heterophenomenology (Dennett): “phenomenology of another not oneself”

• A method: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience etc..

Heterophenomenological Qualia

• When you say “This is my quale,” what you are singling out, or referring to, whether you realize it or not, is your

idiosyncratic complex of dispositions. You seem to be referring to be referring to a private, ineffable something-

or-other in your mind’s eye, a private shade of homogenous pink, but this is just how it seems to you,

not how it is. That “quale” of yours is a character in good standing in the fictional world of your

heterophenomenology, but what it turns out to be in the real world in your brain is just a complex of dispositions.

• (Dennett 1991, Consciousness Explained, pp 388 – 389).

~ The End ~

?

Does heterophenomenology ‘take consciousness seriously’?

• “The crucial argument seems to be… where [Dennett] claims (in effect) that what needs to be

explained is how things seem, and that his theory explainthis equivocates between a

psychological and phenomenal sense of “seem.”s how things seem. But… What the theory might

explain is our disposition to make certain judgements about stimuli, but those judgements

were never the puzzling explananda.

An uploader’s dilemma

• Will my upload just be a piece of ‘software’?…a zombie me?

• Is it at least conceivable that this will be the case?

• If it is conceivable, is it then possible?

Conceivability -> Possiblity

Chalmers: Yes!

Dennett: ‘…’

Physicalist (e.g. Levine, Loar) : No!

Physicalism (‘Type B’ Materialism)

i) Consciousness is physicalii) Consciousness is irreducible (non-reductive)

• A solution without (a clear) explanation?

Strong metaphysical necessity?‘Don’t-have-a-clue physicalism’

The story so far…

A dilemma:

Take qualia seriously, but struggle with epistemologic gap

ORClose epistemic gap, but take qualia ‘less seriously’

Ontology or Epistemology?

Where to for ‘Zombie’ Rights?

Materialist ZR

• Complex factors, but no metaphysical puzzles -> heterophenomenological approach to subjective experience, including suffering.

• Agency, responsibility -> cognitive, behavioural, psychological, sociological

• Mirrors existing approach, at least for humans. A 'common-sense materialism’.

Dualist ZR

A bifurcated self? Whose rights? Physical self? Phenomenal self?

• Physical self -> same treatment as materialist• Phenomenal self -> evaluate ethical

significance of pure experience (pure phenomenal concepts)

Ethics of ‘a pain in a box’….

Without cognition, identityA reductio?

Inflationary and Deflationary Phenomenal Concepts

• “At a first approximation, phenomenal concepts deal with the first-person aspects of the mind, and psychological concepts deal with the third-person aspects.” (Chalmers 1996, p 14).

• Direct (and pure) phenomenal concept: “partly constituted by an underlying phenomenal quality, in that the content will mirror the quality (picking out instances of the quality in all epistemic possibilities), and in that across a wide range of

nearby conceptually possible cases in which the underlying quality is varied while background properties are held constant, the content will covary to mirror the quality.”

(Chalmers 2003)

Conceptual Bindings?

Inflationary: ‘Underlying quality’ understood as an irreducible (phenomenally real) phenomenal property

Deflationary: ‘Underlying quality’ understood in materialistic (e.g. heterophenomenological) terms

Contention: Phenomenal properties such as pains only have ethical significance where associated with direct

phenomenal concepts of which they are constituents – however…

The ‘deflationary scoop’

Phenomenal concepts - > distinct psychological analogues, including direct and pseudo-direct.

Undermining constitution…

We can ‘scoop out’ deflationary (psychological) content from phenomenal concepts (and

beliefs) – chasing the ‘raw feel’ down a rabbit hole…

Conceptual Constitution

Phenomenal properties are never truly constituent - ‘surplus to requirements’.

All qualia are in this way ‘disembodied’.

Rights should be based in relationships, goals, commitments, actions.

• Contention: Psychological facts are sufficient for ethical appraisals.

Acquaintance• Chalmers: Phenomenal beliefs can be constituted by phenomenal properties by

virtue of a subject’s acquaintance with those properties…

• “Acquaintance is not itself a conceptual relation: rather, it makes certain sorts of concepts possible. And it is not itself a justificatory relation: rather, it makes certain sorts of justification possible. Phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge

require not just acquaintance, but acquaintance in the right cognitive background: a cognitive background that minimally involves a certain sort of attention to the

phenomenal quality in question, a cognitive act of concept formation, the absence of certain sorts of confusion and other undermining factors (for full justification),

and so on. But it is acquaintance with the quality or the experience itself that does the crucial justifying work.” (Chalmers 2003)

• “…acquaintance is a relation that makes possible the formation of pure phenomenal concepts, and we have seen that pure phenomenal concepts embody a certain sort of lucid understanding of phenomenal properties. So acquaintance is

a relation that makes this sort of lucid understanding possible.” (Chalmers 2003)

Epistemic gap = ethical gap

‘Lucid understanding’ -> heterophenomenology

“The question is whether I am justified in the belief, not whether my brain is justified in the belief (and if property dualism is correct there is more to me

than my brain)” [Chalmers 1996, page 198].

But: This is not a case of ‘brain and’, it’s a case of ‘brain OR’.

Distinct Selves

- Reasoning, planning, feeling, interacting self (brain)

- Experiential self (‘a phenomenal mirror’)

If constitution fails:a) We grant these selves rights distinctly?

b) Change tack?

A ‘psychological consensus’…

• For materialists, physicists and dualists (so too for proponents of ‘neutral’ or ‘diet’ qualia)..

• Metaphysical considerations ‘cancel out’ of the equation.

Can we do better?

We want:

• To ‘take qualia seriously’• To avoid the epistemic problems of dualism• To defend an intuitive view of conceivability

Can we shake the zombie off our back?

Physicalism Revisited

Can we defend a view where:

• i) possibility/conceivability relation holds • ii) qualitative states exist • iii) zombies are not possible

• iv) because zombies are not conceivable

Conceiving Zombies

Missed assumptions?

• Physical 'world for free"• Ontological hierarchy • Supervenience

• Ontological consistency

Consider…

Physical Realism: The physical world as primary.Solipsism: The phenomenal world as primary.

Which view is ‘correct’?Is there are any reason we should automatically

grant ourselves the first?

Symmetric Ontologies

Physical world as primary…

Physicality is necessary but not sufficient for phenomenal world

Phenomenality is sufficient but not necessary for physical world

And vice versa…

Symmetric Scenarios

So: Ontological and epistemic gaps are symmetric.

Paradox of physical judgement?Absent physicalia?

Inverted physicalia?

• “We need some intrinsic properties to make sense of the physical world, and we need to find a place for the intrinsic properties revealed in phenomenology. The two problems

seem to be well matched.” (Chalmers 1996 p 303).

‘Sorta’ Real

We can say that…

Qualia are ‘sorta’ real with respect to their hetereophenomenological (rich psychological)

representations

Physical properties are ‘sorta’ real with respect to phenomenal properties – they are richly

representet

Supervenience…

vs Symmetric Representation

The physical contains representations of the phenomenal

The phenomenal contains representations of the physical

Ontological Exclusivity vs Complementarity

• “...implies the impossibility of any sharp separation between the behaviour of atomic objects [i.e., objects governed by quantum mechanics] and the interaction with the measuring instruments which serve to define the conditions under which the phenomena appear....

Consequently, evidence obtained under different experimental conditions cannot be comprehended

within a single picture, but must be regarded as complementary in the sense that only the totality of the phenomenena exhausts the possible information about

the objects.” (Bohr, 1949)

Complementary Photons, Realities

• “The complementarity principle states that some objects have multiple properties that appear to be contradictory. Sometimes it is possible to switch back and forth between

different views of an object to observe these properties, but in principle, it is impossible to

view both at the same time, despite their simultaneous coexistence in reality.”

(Wikipedia – Complementarity (Physics))

Complementary Dualism

“How to kill a zombie”

Proposal: Treat all reality in a manner analogous to the complementary treatment of photons.

Complementary Symmetric Representation

Reality = “two different things but not at the same time”.

Applying Complementary Dualism

Which physical entities will have phenomenal correlates? Which phenomenal entities will

have physical correlates?

Mutual symmetric representationA natural suggestion: Intentional states – physical and phenomenal (eg. Horgan and

Tienson)

Assessment of physical systems

• Presence of physical intentionality will imply phenomenal intentionality, and vice versa

• Can therefore confidently asses phenomenal properties in terms of physical/functional

properties, as per Naturalistic Dualism

A Dual Aspect Ontology?

It-from-bit: “Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the

outside”. (Chalmers 1996, 303).

To the extent that informational or intentional states can be abstracted across ontologies…

However…

We don’t need to identify intentional states across ontologies. This is a key advantage for complementary

dualism.

Mutual global representation is sufficient. As ontologies are complementary, rather than simultaneous or

coexistent, there is no need to posit a psychophysical ‘mapping’ function between ontological particulars (i.e. specific qualitative and intentional states). (Just as we don’t seek to ‘map’ waves to particles or vice versa in

quantum systems).

Quantum Consequences?

Many minds

Complementing…

Many worlds

-> Pan-psychism, Pan-physicalism

Cogency before proof...

Complementary dualism = a new kind of physicalism

i) Supports phenomenal (and physical) realismii) Phenomenal is not ‘surplus’ to physical nor vice versa

ii) Precludes zombiesiii) Assessment of physical functional states = assessment of

phenomenal statesiv) Parsimonious, no supervenience

Supports a ‘common sense’ psychological approach to ethical questions.

In world without zombies…

zombie rights->

universal rights

Summary

• ‘Physical rights’ are enough

• Complimentary dualism -> Phenomenal realism without zombies

All Aboard!