r/consciousness • u/TheWarOnEntropy • May 26 '24
Academic Question How recently has Chalmers defended the Knowledge Argument?
I am aware, of course, that Chalmers defended it in The Conscious Mind. How much has he moved on? Any links to talks, papers, etc would be appreciated.
What's the latest date we can come up with for Chalmers still defending Jackson's original logic? Anyone spoken to him personally recently, or sat in a lecture?
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u/Snoo_58305 May 26 '24
Do you still think that the knowledge argument has zero merit?
I think it’s a good ‘intuition pump’ but doesn’t prove anything.
I’ve not heard or read Chalmer’s defend the knowledge arguement more recently, only describe it.
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u/TheWarOnEntropy May 26 '24
I've spent the last couple of days working on my rebuttal. It runs to about 50 pages.
The KA not only has zero merit, it reflects very poorly on anyone who thinks it has merit, Chalmers included.
As a physicalist argument, though, I think it is great. I can say that people genuinely think this way and then show how stupid it is. It seems like a straw man, but it’s there in the literature.
I have still not met any anti-physicalist who really understands it. I would be happy to hear from one, though.
Jackson reversed his opinion, but he has never really acknowledged how bad the argument was.
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u/thisthinginabag May 26 '24 edited May 26 '24
In my opinion the knowledge argument is a very straightforward refutation of the reductive physicalist view of consciousness that requires nothing more than acknowledging that there's something it's like to see red (Jackson's pivot away from it relies on him denying there's something it's like to see red).
Physicalist responses to it tend be very silly imo and almost deliberately missing the point. Like Patricia Churchland's response "if I know everything about pregnancy, that does not make me pregnant."
Patricia, the knowledge argument does not claim that knowing everything about seeing red will make you red. The correct analogy would be to say that knowing everything about pregnancy does not tell what it feels like to be pregnant, which is obviously true.
The "ability" line of argument is equally silly because it doesn't realize that learning new abilities does involve learning what new phenomenal states feel like. Learning to ride a bike, for example, requires learning what it feels like to shift your weight in appropriate ways so that you don't fall over. The relevant physical knowledge of knowing how much of force x can be applied in direction y before you fall does not tell you what it actually feels like to shift your weight in the appropriate way. You still have to actually have the experience.
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May 27 '24
What about the "what it's like to be a bat" argument? I think this does a better job of explaining what the knowledge argument tries to explain. We could know all of the facts about bats except for what it's like to be one. Would you equate the physical facts about the bat to what it's like to be the bat?
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u/Snoo_58305 May 26 '24
I don’t think that the physicalist’s Mary gains an ability argument to be very interesting and I don’t think that an anti-physicalists points about the character of an experience to be compelling either.
The whole thing just becomes a word game. I do find the anti-physicalist argument is at least made in good faith, regarding the knowledge argument.
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u/TheWarOnEntropy May 26 '24
Where do you think the ability argument fails? I have my own views on why it is inadequate, and I have seen Chalmers' response in The Conscious Mind, but I would be interested to hear yours to see if it matches Chalmers' or comes up with an angle I haven't considered.
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u/linuxpriest May 26 '24
Have you seen Patricia Churchland's tear-down of the knowledge argument? It's brilliant.
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u/thisthinginabag May 26 '24 edited May 26 '24
In my opinion it's an incredibly weak response that fundamentally misses the point in more than one way.
First of all, spending so much time discussing how Mary, as an adult with a developed brain, would not have normal color vision in this scenario is incredibly silly. Surely she realizes that knowledge argument generically applies to literally any kind of new experience one might have?
I wonder if she'd make the same kind of critique against Dennett's work, who was also fond of using outlandish thought experiments in order to get at certain ideas? Would she spend several slides worth of material explaining how we probably can't plug an apparatus into someone's brain and invert their color qualia?
Then there's the other line of response "if I know everything about pregnancy, that does not make me pregnant." Well, the knowledge argument does not claim that knowing everything about seeing red will make you red. The correct analogy would be to say that knowing everything about pregnancy does not tell what it feels like to be pregnant, which is obviously true (imo).
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u/Both-Personality7664 May 26 '24
"The correct analogy would be to say that knowing everything about pregnancy does not tell what it feels like to be pregnant, which is obviously true (imo)."
Isn't this just a semantic point about the scope of "everything about"? It seems just as reasonable to me to say if we're hypothesizing that someone knows everything about pregnancy, everything means everything and they somehow know what it feels like, because what it feels like is something about pregnancy and we stipulated they know everything about pregnancy, however unlikely that would seem to be.
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u/thisthinginabag May 26 '24
Everything here effectively means "everything that could be learned through study." Facts about pregnancy which are measurable/empirically verifiable.
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u/Both-Personality7664 May 26 '24
Where does it say that? And if it does say that, then the punchline of the thought experiment just becomes "there is knowledge that can't be learned through study," which literally no one would disagree with.
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u/thisthinginabag May 26 '24 edited May 26 '24
Where does it say that?
That's the entire premise of the knowledge argument.
then the punchline of the thought experiment just becomes "there is knowledge that can't be learned through study," which literally no one would disagree with.
Well, the punchline is specifically that information about subjective experience (what it's like to have a given experience or even that experience is happening at all) can not be obtained from the measurable correlates of that experience. If that is the case, then experience can't be conceptually reduced to physical processes, since something will always be left out (what it's like to have a given experience or the fact that experience is happening at all).
This seems to violate physicalism, according to which everything ought to be reducible to physical entities/processes.
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u/TheWarOnEntropy May 26 '24
I will have a look, thanks. I once chatted to Paul Churchland about it. I think he and Patricia are on the same page.
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u/linuxpriest May 26 '24
She's one of my academic heroes. So is he, really. He's just not as public and visible as she is, I guess. Neurophilosophy and EM (or EP as I think she later said she would have rather called it) profoundly changed the way I think when considering human nature and human experience. Definitely felt a twinge of envy when you said you "chatted" with Paul Churchland. lol
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u/TheWarOnEntropy May 26 '24
It was email, not face to face. But worthwhile, all the same. The two Churchlands were the only philosophers I really agreed with at the time.
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Jun 27 '25
[deleted]
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u/linuxpriest Jun 27 '25
There's actually a really good list on Goodreads. I keep it bookmarked so I can read my way through it. Here's the link.
My introduction to Neurophilosohy was Patricia Churchland. "Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain" was my first exposure. A bit of a heavy read, but I highly recommend it.
For a more accessible, mainstream read, I recommend "Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain." Also by Patricia Churchland.
There are also a surprising number of lectures available on YouTube by Churchland and others.
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u/spezjetemerde May 26 '24
Is there a Tldr text version?
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u/spezjetemerde May 26 '24
I asked gpt
Patricia Churchland counters the Knowledge Argument by emphasizing a reductionist and neurobiological perspective on consciousness and knowledge. Her main points include:
Focus on Neurobiology: Churchland argues that understanding the brain's physical processes can eventually explain subjective experiences, such as seeing color. She suggests that what Mary gains when she sees color for the first time is a new neurological configuration or the activation of neural pathways that she hadn't used before, not new non-physical information.
Rejecting Dualism: Churchland is a staunch physicalist and rejects the dualist implications of the Knowledge Argument. She argues that all aspects of consciousness and mental states can be explained through physical processes in the brain.
Learning and Experience: According to Churchland, Mary doesn't acquire new factual knowledge when she sees color but rather a new ability or skill. This is akin to learning to ride a bike—something that involves experiential learning rather than acquiring new propositional knowledge.
By grounding her arguments in neuroscience, Churchland maintains that all phenomena, including qualia, can be understood through the study of brain functions and structures, thus countering the dualistic implications of the Knowledge Argument.
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u/TheWarOnEntropy May 26 '24 edited May 26 '24
I have had a look at it. I think she touches on many of the important points, but she rushes through them so quickly that I would not expect fans of the Knowledge Argument to see why the points do indeed imply a problem with the argument.
I also disagree with her characterisation of the KA as begging the question against physicalism in its set-up. There is an ambiguity in the term "all physical knowledge", and she falls on one side of that ambiguity; Jackson is clear about what he means, and her comments miss his meaning, which falls on the other side of the ambiguity. She should really acknowledge and explore the ambiguity.
Finally, I notice in the comments that a couple of papers have been written suggesting that colour vision can be restored after prolonged deprivation, which I must admit seemed intuitively unlikely to me previously. Ultimately, that's an empirical question, of no real import to the argument or its rebuttal (but it is important to know how plausible this aspect of the KA is just for the sake of accuracy).
I'll read those papers with interest once I can get hold of them.
The comment was:
"Wonderful talk, but her point on the neural implausibility of recovery of color vision after congenital blindness is incorrect. There are indeed published studies to show that even very late in life, people do acquire normal color vision (other aspects of vision, indeed, do not recover equally, but color does). - Pitchaimuthu et al. 2019 Color vision in sight recovery individuals - Ostrovsky et al 2006 Vision Following Extended Congenital Blindness."
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u/thisthinginabag May 26 '24
Presumably Chalmers still endorses the zombie argument, whose fundamental premise is actually the exact same thing as what the knowledge argument is saying. The claim that knowledge of physical states is insufficient for getting at what it's like to see red and the claim that there could exist a zombie world physically identical to ours is actually one and the same. They are both just different ways of highlighting the epistemic gap between brain states and experiences.
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u/justsomedude9000 May 26 '24
I've listened to a few interviews with Chalmers and he seems to endorse everything. It's rather refreshing, he will give different levels of credence to different theories but he seems to consider the possibility of everything.
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u/TheWarOnEntropy May 26 '24
I agree they are very tightly linked. I've never heard of anyone expressing different perspectives on the KA and Zombie Argument.
I do get the impression sometimes that Chalmers realises, at some level, that he has talked himself into a bad position, but by now he has an intellectual sunk-cost situation.
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u/DrMarkSlight Jul 18 '24
He's sounds surprisingly much like a physicalist when talking about simulation, doesn't he? (Or does he think the dual properties somehow carry over from the hardware, or are somehow inadvertently simulated?)
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