“The
facts about experience cannot be an automatic consequence of any
physical account, as it is conceptually coherent that any given
process could exist without experience. Experience may arise
from
the physical, but it is not entailed
by the physical.”
One
can be rhetorical now and state the following:
Who
cares if it is “conceptual coherent that any given process could
exist without experience”?
Surely
what matters is that whenever we have the sort of physical processes
which give rise to experience, then they always
do give
rise to experience. Still, there may not be a necessary connection
between anything physical and experience; and experience may not be a
necessary consequence of anything physical. (Of course all this
depends on how we interpret these modal terms and what work they're
doing.)
More
particularly, what work is Chalmers' notion of any x (or P) being “conceptually coherent” doing here? For one, it can be said
that Chalmers is a philosopher, not a physicist or a neuroscientist.
Thus Chalmers is interested in what
is
conceptually coherent and what
isn't. Though even if Chalmers is thinking purely philosophically (or in terms of
“logical possibility”), what philosophical mileage is he getting
out of the conceptually coherent logical possibility that no physical
process entails experience? What can we extract, philosophically,
from that?
Well,
we can extract the logical possibility that nothing
physical necessarily gives rise to experience.
So are we going around in circles here?
Not
necessarily.
The
bottom line is that Chalmers believes that experience is over and
above the physical. To put that another way (as Chalmers does),
“experience is not entailed by the physical”. This raises a
question:
What
is it for something
physical
to entail
experience?
Or
more broadly:
What
is it for something physical to entail anything?
Isn't
entailment a non-ontological notion?
In
linguistics, for example, we have the following definition
of entailment:
"Linguistic
entailments occur when one may draw necessary conclusions from a
particular use of a word, phrase or sentence. Entailment phrases are
relations between propositions, and are always worded as, 'if A
then B,'
meaning that if A
is true, then B
must
also be true. Another way of phrasing this is, 'if A
is true, then B
must
necessarily be true.'..."
It's
also the case that both semantic and pragmatic entailment are
themselves essentially linguistic. However, it's logical entailment
that primarily interests Chalmers. Yet here again we have the
following
definition:
“Logical
consequence (also entailment) is a fundamental concept in logic,
which describes the relationship between statements that hold true
when one statement logically follows from one or more statements. A
valid logical argument is one in which the conclusion is entailed by
the premises, because the conclusion is the consequence of the
premises.”
So
why is Chalmers applying entailment to the physical? The only way
around this (as far as I can see) is to say that statements
(say, premises) about
the physical may entail further statements (conclusions) about
the physical. However, will that even work? In order to make that
work, the statements which do the entailing would need to be taken as
true; and the statemental entailments would need to be taken as the
necessary consequences of true statements about the physical.
Having
said all that, even if the entailing statements were true, how could
they entail other statements if both are about the physical? The
entailment itself (that is, the relation between entailing
statements
and entailed statements) would need to be known to be true a
priori.
However, since they're about the physical, then how can the
entailment be known to be true a
priori?
What
about a
posteriori entailment?
Take this example:
Here
is a sample of water.
That
statement entails the following:
Here
is a sample of H2O molecules.
But
isn't this because there's a “hidden
premise”
or indentity
statement
in that entailment? Namely:
water = H2O
So
is Chalmers demanding an identity between any physical x
and any experience y
in order to have his physical
entailment?
That is, x
can only entail y
if x
and y
are one
and the same thing. If x
and y
aren't one and the same thing, then there can be no entailment.
Could
there be physical entailment without such identity? Is it the case that any x
can entail any y
without x
and y
being
one and the same thing? That is, if x
is the case, then (necessarily) y
must also be the case. Perhaps in the case of the physical and
experience, there is no necessity. (As argued by Kripke, etc.) But do
we need necessity here? That is, every time there is a physical x
(as in brains, etc. being in a certain states), then there will be
experience. Is it necessary
that there is experience given any physical x?
Well, yes and no. If we have a given physical x,
then there is always experience. Having said that, even if physical x
always comes with experience, it may still not be necessary that this
physical x
comes along with experience. This leads me to ask, again: What work
is the modal word “necessary” doing here?
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