Nonfiction CONCEIVABILITY What I Learned Exploring the Frontiers of Fertility By Elizabeth Katkin 298 pp.
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In her recent "Conceivability: What I Learned Exploring the Frontiers of Fertility," Elizabeth Katkin describes spending nearly $200,0003 in pursuit of a baby.
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Hold these two books up against each other and, certainly, "Conceivability" is primarily a story about technology as a means to beat infertility.
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This helps explain the second reason alarmism is useful: By defining the boundaries of conceivability more accurately, catastrophic thinking makes it easier to see the threat of climate change clearly.
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All of this is recounted in her memoir-slash-manual, "Conceivability: What I Learned Exploring the Frontiers of Fertility," which is highly instructive on things like the difference between fresh and frozen I.V.F. cycles, the need to ask pointed questions at fertility clinics and the value of taking risks on less conventional treatments.
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Joseph Levine's paper Conceivability, Identity, and the Explanatory Gap takes up where the criticisms of conceivability arguments, such as the inverted spectrum argument and the zombie argument, leave off. Levine agrees that conceivability is flawed as a means of establishing metaphysical realities, but points out that even if we come to the metaphysical conclusion that qualia are physical, there is still an explanatory problem. However, such an epistemological or explanatory problem might indicate an underlying metaphysical issue—the non- physicality of qualia, even if not proven by conceivability arguments is far from ruled out.
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Even if conceivability > considerations do not establish that the mind is in fact distinct from the > body, or that mental properties are metaphysically irreducible to physical > properties, still they do demonstrate that we lack an explanation of the > mental in terms of the physical.J. Levine, "Conceivability, Identity, and > the Explanatory Gap" in Stuart R. Hameroff, Alfred W. Kaszniak and David > Chalmers (eds.), Towards a Science of Consciousness III: The Third Tucson > Discussions and Debates, The MIT Press, 1999,. pp 3-12. However, such an epistemological or explanatory problem might indicate an underlying metaphysical issue—the non-physicality of qualia, even if not proven by conceivability arguments is far from ruled out.
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The hard problem is hard, by Chalmers account, because conscious experience is irreducible to lower order physical facts. He supports this conclusion with three main lines of argument, which are summarised below. Inverted qualia #Appeals to Conceivability: Chalmers argues that conscious experience can always be "abstracted away" from reductive explanations. This is evidenced by the conceivability and, by extension, logical possibility of philosophical zombies (exact replicas of a person that lack conscious experience).
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One commonly issued challenge to a priori physicalism and to physicalism in general is the "conceivability argument", or zombie argument.See Chalmers, 2009. At a rough approximation, the conceivability argument runs as follows: P1) PTI and not Q (where "Q" stands for the conjunction of all truths about consciousness, or some "generic" truth about someone being "phenomenally" conscious [i.e., there is "something it is like"See Nagel, 1974 to be a person x] ) is conceivable (i.e.
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Critics of the argument have variously disputed either the first or second premise. Many philosophers have offered objections to the conceivability argument.Perry J. 2001. Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness, Cambridge, Mass.
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Since a priori physicalists hold that PTI → N is a priori, they are committed to denying P1) of the conceivability argument. The a priori physicalist, then, must argue that PTI and not Q, on ideal rational reflection, is incoherent or contradictory.For a survey of the different arguments for this conclusion (as well as responses to each), see Chalmers, 2009. A posteriori physicalists, on the other hand, generally accept P1) but deny P2)--the move from "conceivability to metaphysical possibility".
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Two-dimensional semantics has been used by David Chalmers to counter objections to the various arguments against materialism in the philosophy of mind. Specifically, Chalmers deploys two- dimensional semantics to "bridge the (gap between) epistemic and modal domains" in arguing from knowability or epistemic conceivability to what is necessary or possible (modalities). The reason Chalmers employs two- dimensional semantics is to avoid objections to conceivability implying possibility. For instance, it's claimed that we can conceive of water not having been , but it's not possible that water isn't .
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This is the strategy endorsed by Cameron (2007) and Miller (2010). Alternatively, one could deny 2) and say that gunk is metaphysically impossible. Most strategies that take this route deny 2) in virtue of denying another relatively common intuition: that conceivability entails metaphysical possibility. Although this metaphysical principle dates back to at least the works of Descartes, recent work by philosophers such as Marcus (2004) and Roca-Royes (2010) have shed some doubt on the reliability of conceivability as a guide to metaphysical possibility.
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Nolan, L. (2001, June 18). Descartes' Ontological Argument. Spinoza’s argument differs in that he does not move straight from the conceivability of the greatest being to the existence of God, but rather uses a deductive argument from the idea of God. Spinoza says that man’s ideas do not come from himself, but from some sort of external cause.
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Nolan, L. (2001, June 18). Descartes' Ontological Argument. Spinoza's argument differs in that he does not move straight from the conceivability of the greatest being to the existence of God, but rather uses a deductive argument from the idea of God. Spinoza says that man's ideas do not come from himself, but from some sort of external cause.
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Levine does not believe this gap necessitates a metaphysical conclusion; that is, he does not believe his argument refutes materialism. However, he believes it poses a unique epistemic problem: > While I think this materialist response is right in the end, it does not > suffice to put the mind-body problem to rest. Even if conceivability > considerations do not establish that the mind is in fact distinct from the > body, or that mental properties are metaphysically irreducible to physical > properties, still they do demonstrate that we lack an explanation of the > mental in terms of the physical.J. Levine, "Conceivability, Identity, and > the Explanatory Gap" in Stuart R. Hameroff, Alfred W. Kaszniak and David > Chalmers (eds.), Towards a Science of Consciousness III: The Third Tucson > Discussions and Debates, The MIT Press, 1999,.
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Chalmers calls panpsychism an alternative to both materialism and dualism. Similarly, Goff calls it an alternative to both physicalism and substance dualism. Chalmers says panpsychism respects the conclusions of both the causal argument against dualism and the conceivability argument for dualism. Goff has argued that panpsychism avoids the disunity of dualism, under which mind and matter are ontologically separate, as well as dualism's problems explaining how mind and matter interact.
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David Chalmers says that we can imagine that there are zombies, or persons who are physically identical to us in every way but who lack consciousness. This is supposed to show that physicalism is false. However, some argue that zombies are inconceivable: we can no more imagine a zombie than we can imagine that 1+1=3. Others have claimed that the conceivability of a scenario may not entail its possibility.
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Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64: 354-361. He agrees that conceivability (as used in the Zombie and inverted spectrum arguments) is flawed as a means of establishing metaphysical realities; but he points out that even if we come to the metaphysical conclusion that qualia are physical, they still present an explanatory problem. > While I think this materialist response is right in the end, it does not > suffice to put the mind-body problem to rest.
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Hence Chalmers's argument needn't go through. Moreover, while Chalmers defuses criticisms of the view that conceivability can tell us about possibility, he provides no positive defense of the principle. As an analogy, the generalized continuum hypothesis has no known counterexamples, but this doesn't mean we must accept it. And indeed, the fact that Chalmers concludes we have epiphenomenal mental states that don't cause our physical behavior seems one reason to reject his principle.
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Chalmers replies that it is 1-possible that water wasn't because we can imagine another substance XYZ with watery properties, but it's not 2-possible. Hence, objections to conceivability implying possibility are unfounded when these words are used more carefully. Chalmers then advances the following "two-dimensional argument against materialism". Define P as all physical truths about the universe and Q as a truth about phenomenal experience, such as that someone is conscious.
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The book contains accessible popular expositions on the mathematical theory of infinity, and a number of related topics. These include Gödel's incompleteness theorems and their relationship to concepts of artificial intelligence and the human mind, as well as the conceivability of some unconventional cosmological models. The material is approached from a variety of viewpoints, some more conventionally mathematical and others being nearly mystical. There is a brief account of the author's personal contact with Kurt Gödel.
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A zombie "is correct when he says that he is conscious, because he isn't saying that he has phenomenal states as we understand them. He is correct because he means that he has schmenomenal states, and he has them." So people and zombies can both have true beliefs justified in similar ways (same epistemic situation), even if those beliefs are about different things. Chalmers’s “Master Argument” relies on the assumption that his Zombie argument (also known as the conceivability argument) is true.
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Philosophical zombies are associated with David Chalmers, but it was philosopher Robert Kirk who first used the term "zombie" in this context in 1974. Prior to that, Keith Campbell made a similar argument in his 1970 book Body and Mind, using the term "Imitation Man." Chalmers further developed and popularized the idea in his work. Galen Strawson argues that it is not possible to establish the conceivability of zombies, so that the argument, lacking its first premise, can never get going.
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Simply put, the test is that one must universalize the maxim (imagine that all people acted in this way) and then see if it would still be possible to perform the maxim in the world without contradiction. In Groundwork, Kant gives the example of a person who seeks to borrow money without intending to pay it back. This is a contradiction because if it were a universal action, no person would lend money anymore as he knows that he will never be paid back. The maxim of this action, says Kant, results in a contradiction in conceivability (and thus contradicts perfect duty).
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The physicalist position Pereboom proposes in philosophy of mind develops two responses to the hard problem of consciousness, which is explicated by Frank Cameron Jackson's knowledge argument and David Chalmers' conceivability argument against physicalism. The first response invokes the possibility that introspective representations fail to represent mental properties as they are in themselves; specifically, that introspection represents phenomenally conscious properties as having certain characteristic qualitative natures which these properties actually lack. This position is related to the more general illusionism about consciousness advanced by Daniel Dennett and to an illusionist view set out by neuroscientist Michael Graziano. The second response draws on the Russellian monist proposal that currently unknown fundamental intrinsic properties provide categorical bases for known physical properties and also yield an account of consciousness.
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Because it is conceivable that a person, suspended in air while cut off from sense experience, would still be capable of determining his own existence, the thought experiment points to the conclusions that the soul is a perfection, independent of the body, and an immaterial substance.See a discussion of this in connection with an analytic take on the philosophy of mind in: Nader El-Bizri, 'Avicenna and the Problem of Consciousness', in Consciousness and the Great Philosophers, eds. S. Leach and J. Tartaglia (London: Routledge, 2016), 45–53 The conceivability of this "Floating Man" indicates that the soul is perceived intellectually, which entails the soul's separateness from the body. Avicenna referred to the living human intelligence, particularly the active intellect, which he believed to be the hypostasis by which God communicates truth to the human mind and imparts order and intelligibility to nature.
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