Logical Supervenience

You say “All God would need to do in Chalmers’ opinion is to create physical entities and then create laws governing these entities, there is no further step of getting consciousness to go alongside the physical stuff, that’s what the laws are there for.”

In “The Conscious Mind”, page 38, Chalmers says, “If B-properties supervene logically on A-properties,t hen once God (hypothetically) creates a world with certain A-facts, the B-facts come along for free as an automatic consequence. If B-properties merely supervene naturally on A-properties, however, then after making sure of the A-facts, God has to do more work in order to make sure of the B-facts: he has to make sure there is a law relating the A-facts and the B-facts…Once the law is in place, the relevant A-facts will automatically bring along the B-facts….”

That’s what I was trying to summarize above, but in my attempt to use non-technical terms, I was unclear, when I said “there would be another step required to make consciousness exist alongside of the physical entities.” I was trying to allude to his property dualism there, but without getting into it too much. You’re right, though, it sounds like I’m making Chalmers advocate Cartesian dualism.

Also, page 124: “When God created the world, after ensuring that the physical facts held, he had more work to do (italics original). He had to ensure that the facts about consciousness held. The possibility of zombie worlds or inverted worlds shows that he had a choice….To ensure that the facts about consciousness are as they are, further features had to be included in the world.”

I think talking about property dualism in this post would have helped me be more clear that God isn’t creating another substance, but properties (consciousness, experience) that are not ontologically entailed by the A-properties (physical constituents). So I think we are on the same page… (Course, part of the problem, in my mind, is that it’s hard to explain Chalmers’ dualism without it becoming either materialism or a stronger dualism claim.)

Reductionism
Your points about reductionism are well-taken. Siderits is making a claim about ontological reductionism, not merely conceptual. However, because of the nature of Buddhist claims about truth and semantics–conventional versus ultimate truth, he has to talk about concepts. In the second part of his book, Siderits actually *kind of* “takes back” the first part, where he demonstrates Buddhist Reductionism. That’s because he’s going to talk about the idea of emptiness and anti-realism. I haven’t gotten there yet (though I have an inkling of where he’s going) so aside from the very real possibility that I’m misrepresenting Siderits, it’s also possible that he’s going to plug some of these holes later….

I was going to say more, but I won’t, just because I think I need to have the fuller context of his book to do so correctly. I’ll try to be clearer in future posts.

But your intuition “physcial entities what they are are the interactions they enter into. So that it is part of the nature of an electron that it is attracted to a positive charge. If that is the case then you can’t have the same entities without having the same laws - the laws are just a way of describing the nature of the entities, not sometihng over and above these entities” is, I think, important to refuting Chalmers and also to Siderits’ overarching argument. At least that’s my understanding.

Thanks for your comments–they’re very helpful in making sure my understanding is precise and hitting the important pieces here. I don’t know if you’ll be at the SLU Grad Conference in October, either as a participant or as an attendee, but I’ll be presenting a paper on zombies there, and belief in god (taking Pascal Boyer’s theory on religious belief and applying it to zombies). I’m trying to tighten it up this week with a bit more specifics from where Chalmers does hint at that question. You might be interested in it.

I found this entry very interesting so I thought I’d leave a few words about it.

I think an important point to keep in mind when talking about reductionism with respect of anything, and in particular with respect of the self or consciousness, is that there’s a distinciton between a metaphysical reductionism and a conceptual reductionism. The metaphysical point (with respect of the self, let’s say) is that there’s nothing more in the world that we need to posit over and above the reduction base of the self in order to *have* as self. Similarly, if we look at a cell, there’s nothing more to being a cell than having all the right parts organized in a partiuclar way (and perhaps embedded in a certain environment). The furniture of the world (to use Davidson’s phrase) does not include all the part os the cell *and* a cell. The cell *just is* the parts organized correctly.

The case of conceptual reduction is very different (both with respect of the self and with respect of cells, and many other things). The claim of conceptual reductionism is that the terms/concepts that refer to the suject matter of investigation can be captured in others terms/concepts of a more basic nature. So, in the case of a cell, we might want to say that the concept ‘cell’ can be translatable to a certain set of concepts (’nucleus’, ‘membrane’, etc.). Similarly, in the case of the self. The claim would be that the concept ’self’ is understandable in terms of *concepts* for certain psychological entities and modes of interaction. The conceptual thesis is much less convincing than the metaphisical thesis. In large part this is because the nature of concepts is tightly bound with the needs of explanation, and the criteria of good explanation are various and complex in a way that doesn’t necessarily track the metaphysical structure of the world.

So, do we need a self over and above the psychological entities we already have? The question though is misleading. Do we *need* a self? Depends on what we mean by *need*. It seems to suggest a conceptual reading of the question, and if so, then the answer seems to be that we do need a self - it plays certain explanatory roles that the mere mention of the psychological entities that are at the reduction basis of the self. However, it seems to me that the question above about the self is a metaphysical question. Does the *world* have a self that is an entity over and above… The answer to this is problematic.

For the reasons you give above, it seems that we cannot have direct (perceptual) access to a self, so why should we think that there must be one? This is where different metaphysical leanings lead to different stories. If you’re like Descartes then you have a substance-attribute conception of the world - properties are properties *of something*, so even if we only have access to the properties there must be something they are properties *of* - this we call the self. If you’re like Hume, then your reflection that you can find nothing beyond the properties leads you to make such inference - rather the self *just is* a bundle of such psychological propreties.

The point iseems to me to be that we’ve got a conflation between the two senses of reduction. It is perfectly reasonable to think that the self is metaphysically nothing over and above a bundle of properties, but that for Descarte’s and Kant’s reasoning we need it to explain things that the parts don’t explain in and of themselves, such as persistence, coherence, etc.

This is getting long so I won’t say much more, but I hope that this helps in thinking about the matter.

A point about Chalmers’ account of consciousness. If as you say, we look at what God wound need to do for there to be consciousness in the world, I think that you have a step too many. All God would need to do in Chalmers’ opinion is to create physical entities and then create laws governing these entities, there is no further step of getting consciousness to go alongside the physical stuff, that’s what the laws are there for. Chalmers’ point is that the laws are not something merely derivable from the existence of physical entities - their mode of interaction is not part of their natures) taht is why it is logically possible ot have all the same physical entities organized in all the same ways and yet not have a conscious being, since in this alternative world the laws of physics are different. There is no logical (necessitating) relation between the natures of the physcial entities and the laws of physics.

But, of course, you might think that part of what makes the physcial entities what they are are the interactions they enter into. So that it is part of the nature of an electron that it is attracted to a positive charge. If that is the case then you can’t have the same entities without having the same laws - the laws are just a way of describing the nature of the entities, not sometihng over and above these entities. This thought appeals to me much more than Chalmers’ metaphysical picture (which really follows from Armstrong’s metaphysical view of properties and laws). Thus, I find it absurd that zombies are possible, because once we have the same entities we necessarily have the same laws and hence we necessarily have consciousness.

Anyway, I’ll stop now. Hopefully these are helpful thoughts.

Best,
Arnon