The following passage is the Australian philosopher David Chalmers (1966-) offering a four-part argument (in his book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory) against materialism:
“ 1. In our world, there are conscious experiences.
2. There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not hold.
3. Therefore, facts about consciousness are further facts about our world, over and above the physical facts.
4. So materialism is false.”
So let’s take each premise one at a time:
“1. In our world, there are conscious experiences.”
That is surely true. That said and as with many terms in philosophy, it may well depend on how the words “conscious experiences” are defined. In addition, there’s the old philosophical question as to how David Chalmers knows that “there are consciousness experiences”. Has he (simply) extrapolated from the single case of his own experiences? And if he has, then how, exactly, has he done so?…
But let’s simply take 1. as true because this premise isn’t central to this piece anyway.
2. “There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not hold.”
How does David Chalmers know that there’s a “world [which is] physically identical to ours”? (Perhaps Chalmers believes that he doesn’t need to literally — or epistemically — know this.) Does Chalmers’ use of the modal qualifier “logically possible” make my question any less cogent? Is this claim an implicit — or even explicit — commitment to modal realism? After all, Chalmers uses the words “[t]here is”. He doesn’t state that there may be — or could be — such a world. So surely this is a realism (or concretism) about possible worlds.
Again, even if there is such a world, how does Chalmers know that there is? What’s more, how does he know that the “positive facts about consciousness about our word [] do not hold” in this world?
All this means that not only does Chalmers believe that this possible word is real (though not actual — if he accepts David Lewis’s position) — he also knows stuff about it. Now how can that possibly be the case?
The answer to that question is simple… or perhaps not so simple.
Chalmers knows (at least if we use this word loosely) all this stuff about this possible world because he can conceive of it. That’s literally all it takes. Thus it can be rhetorically said that Chalmers’ possible world springs into existence during the act (or his act) of conceiving of it. Or, more charitably, because Chalmers — and perhaps others — can conceive of this word, then that means that it must exist (or have some kind of being) somewhere (perhaps only in an abstract space).
David Chalmers also seems to assume that there’s a determinate and precise meaning of the words “conceiving of x” and “conceivably true”. Yet conceivability-to-possibility arguments may not get off the ground (at least in some cases) in the first place. And that’s because nothing at all is really conceived of in the first place. (Alternatively, that which is conceived is literally unbelievable; or, as Saul Kripke once put it, it is “misconceived”.)
So it can be argued that the least a philosopher can argue is that conceivability is a (rough) guide to possibility. This lesser claim would be an alternative to outrightly stating that because subject S has conceived of any given x, then that means that x is possible. Of course we’ll now need to know what the words “guide to possibility” mean and how, exactly, conceiving of x is a guide to x’s possibility. (Mountains of stuff in analytic philosophy has been written on this subject — but I’ll leave it there.)
"3. Therefore, facts about consciousness are further facts about our world, over and above the physical facts."
On the basis of conceiving of a possible world, then, Chalmers has concluded that the “facts about consciousness are further facts about our world”. So we’d need to know what the phrase “over and above” (as in “over and above the physical facts”) means. After all, in a — perhaps loose — sense we can argue that the facts of chemistry are over and above the facts of physics. Similarly, the facts of biology are over and above the facts of chemistry. Indeed sociological and economic facts are over and above the facts of physics, chemistry and biology. Of course the over-and-aboveness of consciousness — at least in Chalmers’ scheme — is far stronger than any over-and-aboveness we will find in chemistry, biology, sociology or economics. And Chalmers is explicit that this is the case.
"4. So materialism is false.”
Shouldn’t Chalmers have written the following? -
When it comes to consciousness, materialism is false.
That said, if materialism is false when it comes to consciousness, then perhaps it is false — full stop. (Or, as the analytic philosophers who like Latin put it, materialism is false simpliciter.) That is, if consciousness doesn’t hold when it comes to consciousness, then it doesn’t hold at all. Yet perhaps that doesn’t actually follow. That is, could materialism hold in every domain except the domain that is consciousness? There doesn’t seem to be a contradiction here. Indeed this seems to be Chalmers’ own position of naturalistic dualism.
In Chalmers’ own words, the following explains why he takes his position to be naturalistic:
“I call it naturalistic dualism. It is naturalistic because it posits that everything is a consequence of a network of basic properties and laws, and because it is compatible with all the results of contemporary science. And as with naturalistic theories in other domains, this view allows that we can explain consciousness in terms of basic natural laws. There need ne nothing especially transcendental about consciousness; it is just another natural phenomenon. All that has happened is that our picture of nature has expanded.”
So why is Chalmers’ position also a type of dualism? (Some philosophers don’t see his position as a type of dualism… and one can see why.) Chalmers writes:
“[T]he fact that consciousness accompanies a given physical process is a further fact, not explainable simply by telling the story about the physical facts.”
What’s more,
“we also have new fundamental laws… psychophysical laws… they will be supervenience laws… the dependency of experience on the physical cannot be derived from physical laws…”
The problem with saying (as Chalmers does) that naturalistic dualism is “compatible with all the results of contemporary science” is that this is exactly what idealists have said (from Bishop Berkeley to Donald Hoffman) about idealism and panpsychists have said about panpsychism. Indeed theists and many others — and even some of those who make specific religious claims (which are clearly not naturalistic) say that their positions/claims don’t (to use another phrase) “contradict science”. (Of course not all these examples are in the same logical space.) Moreover, religious or spiritual people can say that their views are examples in which (to use Chalmers’ words) “our picture of nature has [simply been] expanded” — i.e., not contradicted. (Deepak Chopra makes these kinds of claim all the time— see here.)
Talk of the “further facts” of consciousness is open to debate too.
This isn’t because Chalmers is misusing the word “fact”, but simply because he’s using it in his own very specific way — which he’s free to do. (There’s a long history of philosophers saying that other philosophers — or laypersons - “misuse” terms. In addition, such philosophers themselves use old terms in their own very specific and new ways. And all this tends to have amounted to is that such philosophers didn’t accept a very specific stance on particular uses or they redefined an old word to mean something technical and very new. The logical positivists’ use of the word “meaningless” is a good example of this.)
It can also be argued that most scientists already accept various kinds of supervenience without also feeling the need to embrace some kind of dualism — naturalistic or otherwise. (This can’t be gone into here.)
Finally, it must be said that it seems a little grandiose to conclude that materialism can be declared false after only three premises and a conclusion (i.e., in a four-part argument). Of course it must also be said that Chalmers has indeed done all the hard (technical) work elsewhere.
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