We’re familiar with it, or should be if we consider ourselves learned philosophers: the zombie argument. We can imagine zombies whose brains and their processes mimic to a tee those of living, feeling, thinking, and in all relevant ways conscious human beings yet aren’t conscious. Therefore, consciousness/mind can’t just be those brains and their processes. The idea of consciousness/mind must refer to something different, or at least more.
I’m reading Dennett’s Consciousness Explained and his objection to the zombie argument is: well, can you imagine it?
The notion behind this rather succinct reply is that if one were to really imagine zombies in all their elaborate and complex physicality - right down to every minute detail that makes possible and fortifies the link between the brain and consciousness/mind - one would find, emerging before their very (mind’s) eye, consciousness itself. Since the paitron argument in defense of materialism is a reductive one (i.e. consciousness/mind reduces to brain processes), the idea is that brain processes just are consciousness/mind - constituting the latter - much as the atomic structures inside a rock just are the rock, and if one could imagine - in all its elaborate and complex physicality - such a structure of atoms, one would at the same time be imagine the very rock that they constitute (it would emerge before their mind’s eye so to speak). The argument goes on to say that any difficulty we may presently grapple with in understanding how consciousness/mind can be reduced to the brain and its processes is simply that we can’t - not yet at least - image the brain and its processes in all its elaborate and complex physicality. The gap, in other words, is one of a missing ability to image or understand, and that all that would be needed to fill the gap, if it were possible (and may yet be), are physical concepts given by scientific knowledge.
My bone with this is that the problem goes deeper - much deeper - than a mere lack of scientific knowledge of the physics of the brain. It has to do centrally with the inability to understand how consciousness/mind could be accounted for by anything physical. Consciousness/mind is not experienced as something physical - whether and object, a property, a process, a state, or whatever - not in our most intimate acquaintance with it - and it is this most intimate acquaintance that is the most in need of explaination (for without this, the mind/brain problem wouldn’t exist). The suggestion that this explanation is forthcoming so long as science persist down the path of uncovering more elaborate and complex details about the brain’s physicality simply will not do, for in that latter case, the only destination one can imagine this path bringing us to is merely more elaborate and complex physical understandings. This misses the whole point - the whole reason why there is a mind/brain problem - namely, that we want to arrive at something non-physical, something that bridges the cap between the physics of the brain and our non-physical mode of being intimately acquainted with consciousness/mind. Science must definitively reveal something non-physical. Is such a feat within science’s purview? It seems to me that science functions only to uncover the physical - physical facts, physical objects, physical processes, etc. - and so the answer is no. You don’t bridge such a gap - between the physical and non-physical - by adding more physical.
The reason I can imagine zombies is not because I lack enough physical information about the brain, but because such information - even if I had it - would still be physical. I need to bridge the chasm, not stroll further along one of its banks. The problem, as I said, is not that we haven’t had the opportunity to allow science to take us far enough, but that it is taking us in the wrong direction. That we can imagine zombies is a valid strike against physicalism, for what it tells us - what it really tells us - is that, not only do we not yet understand how physicality accounts for consciousness/mind, but that, given the (mis)direction in which it takes us, it never will.
Other objections to the zombie argument, along similar lines to Dennett’s, have been brought forth. Analogies come to mind; for example, that just because one may not understand the physical processes that account for, say, photosynthesis, it doesn’t follow that photosynthesis is somehow non-physical. The point is quite valid, but it too misses the point of the zombie argument and the basis on which the whole mind/matter problem exists: we at least can imagine how a process like photosynthesis may be account for by physical processes and laws. Knowing what these processes are is not required for such a feat of imagination. We begin with a physical process (sunlight incident on plants) and end with another physical processes (plants growing) - our lack of understanding the details constitutes a gap in a continuum surrounded at both ends by physical processes - why wouldn’t the continuum’s gap be filled in by yet additional physical processes. But the key distinction between photosynthesis - or any physical phenomena that impresses us as reserving certain manageable mysteries within a homogenously physical continuum - and the mind/matter link is that the latter is characterized by a gap on a continuum that is not so homogenously physical: on one side of the gap, we have something physical (the brain), and on the other, something non-physical (consciousness/mind). Thus, the only way to imagine such a gap being filled is with something not purely physical, something that is at least quasi-physical (in order to preserve the desired continuity) or perhaps emcompassing both the physical and non-physical (or something queer like that).
Another objection that comes to mind is this: it begs the question to assert from the get go that consciousness/mind must be non-physical. I say it is not. I say it is the physicalists who question beg if they are to assert consciousness/mind is physical anyway (and so what’s the problem?). The whole point is to convince the world of the latter. My insistence that consciousness/mind is something non-physical is not question begging, for it is based on precisely that which the whole mind/matter problem is itself based: that we understand consciousness/mind based primarily on our most intimate acquaintance with it, which is self-evidently non-physical (if this were not true, the problem of mind and matter would, as I said, not exist). If the materialist’s retort is that this is nothing more than how consciousness/mind feels (as opposed to what it is), I say what else could consciousness/mind be than what it feels like. What consciousness/mind feels like is all we have of it (the intimate acquaintance we are familiar with). It is how we know of it to begin with, and why we ponder over its mysteries (among which includes the mind/matter problem). If the materialist still insists that consciousness/mind doesn’t (or even ought not) refer to this ‘feel’, but rather something physical, then I say he has abandoned the real problem for another (which he has contrived for himself), the reason being of course that he has flung his hands up in the air and (perhaps unconsciously) conceded defeat. The ‘real’ problem, as I’m calling it, just is why consciousness/mind would feel so non-physical (or, more importantly, why there is any ‘feeling’ going on at all). You can go ahead and define consciousness/mind in physical terms if you want, and thereafter explain the physics of it, but you can’t live in ignorance of the non-physical feel of consciousness/mind (or anything for that matter) as though it didn’t stand in need of explanation itself.
Yet another objection arises: if you don’t embrace physicalism, you must be a dualist. Nothing could be further from the truth. Physicalism is not the only monist game in town. There’s idealism, for one, there’s certain brands of mystecism (i.e. the real substance of reality is neither mind nor matter, but a third ‘mysterious’ substance that manifests as both), there’s all out skeptical theories (like nihilism or anti-realism - what we might call nonisms or zero-isms), there might even be poly-isms (three or more substances). Now, admittedly, most of these have problems of their own, worse problems at times (the last choice in the list - poly-ism - is, I’ll be the first to admit, deplorable). But the point is: don’t be too quick to judge. We’re not all dualists. But this isn’t much of a defense unless we can account for what we are. For my part, I’m an idealist/subjectivist, but here too the physicalist must withhold judgment. Particularly, don’t assume too hastely that I’m nothing more than a follower of Berkeley. I have developed, very carefully and over a good period of time, intricate arguments and support for my version of idealism/subjectivism - it really is a version, a unique one - and where you may see flaws and gaps in traditional forms of idealism/subjectivism (or any brand of monism other than physicalism), you ought to hear out those who claim to have something new to say. Though I will not spell out my philosophy in all its gory detail (you can relish in the gore by visiting my website: mm-theory.com), I will say that the key difference between physicalism and my brand of idealism/subjectivism is not in the number of substances I posit (I should hope not), not in the kind, not even in the eliminativism of matter that is traditional idealism, but in the direction of the reduction. That is to say, whereas traditional physicalism reduces consciousness/mind to matter, I reduce matter to consciousness/mind (and it is not solipsism; it is not a reduction to one’s own consciousness/mind per se but to consciousness/mind in general. If this is cryptic, I apologize but I must defer the meaning of this bizarre notion to my website). This key difference is important, I would say, chiefly because in order for any brand of monism to be rightfully called ‘physicalism’, physicality must be the root of all reduction. If not, it just isn’t physicalism.
There are many other objections, I’m sure, but what I want to challenge physicalists with today is my defense of the zombie argument. To rehash, it is this: show me how the zombie argument is countered by a mere appeal to scientific (i.e. physicalistic) ignorance - that if only we were to understand the physics of the brain better, we would see emerging before our mind’s eye consciousness and mind themselves. The challenge to you is to show how the bridging of the gap is oriented in just the direction that science and physicalism leads us.