Chalmers writes something very interesting (in "Conscious Mind") - it's not about his Zombies per se, but what he noticed are differences in intuition among philosophers.
He says there are 3 basic views of consciousness among philosophers, type A, B and C. Type A are the "die-hard" materialists à la Dennett. The issue at hand here is the so-called "hard problem of consciousness", i.e. the question why in a materialist world there should be experience. It doesn't make sense, because we could imagine a world of human automatons (zombies) that would work just as well without conscious experience in a materialist world. It is simply unnecessary. For some philosophers (like Chalmers) this is a puzzling question; Others (the die-hard materialists) simply cannot see the problem! So:
Chalmers, p. 166
He goes on (p. 167)
So maybe this has to do with OPs: an OP's inner life is so different, their experience so impoverished, that they simply cannot see the gap between a so-called materialist world and the richness of our inner experience - because they don't have it. For them the world is "flat", "automatic", and "unmysterious".
Chalmers tries to find explanations for this "intuition gap" in his papers "Is the Hard Problem of Consciousness Universal?" and "The Meta-Problem of Consciousness" - one question he asks is why the hard problem of consciousness wasn't really seen in the history of philosophy before the 19th century?
His answer is that before then, people simply have taken dualist views for granted, and therefore the problem didn't even arise.
But I think it might go deeper than that. We know that the OP is also an authoritarian follower. So in times past, when the authorities said "there is a soul" or that "there is the body, but there is also the mind", they simply obeyed and came up with childish and primitive ideas about these things for themselves. However, once the wind changed and materialist views became somewhat acceptable in certain circles in the 19th century (the 1860ies in particular), some OPs felt "free" to express their impoverished worldview; others were appalled, but often bullied into accepting materialism, but of course they needed to bring that together with their experience - and so the "hard problem of consciousness" came to be.
However, we also know that psychopaths and some other pathologicals might be a special sort of OP that lack the "authoritarian follower" feature. They might have a similar internal make-up as the authoritarian OPs, but they are anti-social and do whatever they feel like. So it's interesting that some philosophers in the past apparently did argue for something like die-hard materialism. Chalmers names Democritus, Hobbes, and perhaps Epicurus and La Mettrie. At least for Hobbes this is no surprise - this guy delivered the mother of all schizoidal declarations!
Well, just some speculation here.
He says there are 3 basic views of consciousness among philosophers, type A, B and C. Type A are the "die-hard" materialists à la Dennett. The issue at hand here is the so-called "hard problem of consciousness", i.e. the question why in a materialist world there should be experience. It doesn't make sense, because we could imagine a world of human automatons (zombies) that would work just as well without conscious experience in a materialist world. It is simply unnecessary. For some philosophers (like Chalmers) this is a puzzling question; Others (the die-hard materialists) simply cannot see the problem! So:
Chalmers, p. 166
Type-A views come in numerous varieties - eliminativism, behaviorism, various versions of reductive functionalism - but they have certain things in common. A type-A theorist will hold that (1) physical and functional duplicates that lack the sort of experience that we have are inconceivable; (2) Mary learns nothing about the world when she first sees red ... and (3) everything there is to be explained about consciousness can be explained by explaining the performance of various functions.
He goes on (p. 167)
The central choice is the choice between type A and the rest. For myself, reductive functionalism and eliminativism seem so clearly false that I find it hard to fathom how anyone could accept a type-A view. To me, it seems that one could only accept such a view if one believed that there was no significant problem about consciousness in the first place. Nevertheless, experience indicates that almost one-third of the population are willing to accept a type-A position and do not budge. This indicates the Great Divide mentioned in the preface: the divide between views that take consciousness seriously and those that do not.
.... Both these views [type B & C] acknoledge the depth of the problem of consciousness where type-A views do not.
Ultimately, argument can take us only so far in settling this issue. If someone insists that explaining access and reportability explains everything, that Mary discovers nothing about the world when she first has a red experience, and that a functional isomorph differeing in conscious experience is inconceivable, then I can only conclude that when it comes to experience we are on different planes. Perhaps our inner lives differ dramatically. Perhaps one of us is "cognitively closed" to the insights of the other. Mor likely, one of us is confused or is in the grip of a dogma. In any case, once the dialectic reaches this point, it is a bridge that argument cannot cross. Rather, we have reached a brute clash of intuitions [...]
So maybe this has to do with OPs: an OP's inner life is so different, their experience so impoverished, that they simply cannot see the gap between a so-called materialist world and the richness of our inner experience - because they don't have it. For them the world is "flat", "automatic", and "unmysterious".
Chalmers tries to find explanations for this "intuition gap" in his papers "Is the Hard Problem of Consciousness Universal?" and "The Meta-Problem of Consciousness" - one question he asks is why the hard problem of consciousness wasn't really seen in the history of philosophy before the 19th century?
His answer is that before then, people simply have taken dualist views for granted, and therefore the problem didn't even arise.
But I think it might go deeper than that. We know that the OP is also an authoritarian follower. So in times past, when the authorities said "there is a soul" or that "there is the body, but there is also the mind", they simply obeyed and came up with childish and primitive ideas about these things for themselves. However, once the wind changed and materialist views became somewhat acceptable in certain circles in the 19th century (the 1860ies in particular), some OPs felt "free" to express their impoverished worldview; others were appalled, but often bullied into accepting materialism, but of course they needed to bring that together with their experience - and so the "hard problem of consciousness" came to be.
However, we also know that psychopaths and some other pathologicals might be a special sort of OP that lack the "authoritarian follower" feature. They might have a similar internal make-up as the authoritarian OPs, but they are anti-social and do whatever they feel like. So it's interesting that some philosophers in the past apparently did argue for something like die-hard materialism. Chalmers names Democritus, Hobbes, and perhaps Epicurus and La Mettrie. At least for Hobbes this is no surprise - this guy delivered the mother of all schizoidal declarations!
Well, just some speculation here.
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