Who Are The Epistemic Zombies Chasing Searle? - Part II

Welcome back! We are continuing directly from Part I (click here!), so please read that first! This article will explain the basic idea of "philosophical zombies", and why it is interesting to introduce them into the world of Searle's ideas and his Chinese Room thought-experiment. Let's get into it!

The decades of work that followed Searle involved discussions about everything, from solipsism and Boltzmann brains to symbolic logic and existentialism, when it came to the effort of quantifying intelligence. Meanwhile, well-established theories in the philosophy of science made strides in attempts to solve fundamental questions such as the mind-body problem. That problem and the surrounding debate between physicalism and dualism was reinstated in the concept of “philosophical zombies”, a hypothetical creation whose conceivability itself poses a threat to the idea of physicalism (aptly named the Conceivability Argument) and confirms the existence of nonphysical “qualia” – black-box, intangible properties of the human experience [5].

1. Searle's Relation to Qualia:

Why does the Conceivability Argument matter to us? While it does not discuss external intelligence, it seems to address a question that Searle seems to be interested in on a deeper level – the Chinese Room is not simply about machines having the ability to understand “identically” to human minds, it is about whether machines can ever truly “become” minds [3]. Searle seeks to show that the concept of understanding and intentionality [6] is inherently non-quantifiable, akin to how dualists seek to show that the concept of consciousness is non-physical. Non-quantifiability holds the same degree of un-solvability to a computer algorithm that non-physicality holds to a physicalist – thus, both understanding and consciousness are qualia. We can equate syntax to tangible, concrete matter of the physical world, and semantics to the emerging, non-materializable properties of qualia. In this way, we can see that Searle’s position on the Chinese Room entails dualism (even though he famously denies being one! [7]). We can also see a similarity between the logical functionalism of computationalists and physical functionalism of physicalists.

2. From Qualia to Zombies (&Their Problematic Conception):

The next question then becomes obvious – what is so non-achievable about qualia that prevents it from fitting in the physicalist’s (or computationalist’s) picture? The answer is simple – qualia needs to be physical for the physicalist and quantifiable for the computationalist, but defending such claims is difficult. The claim that consciousness is a physically explicable property must imply that if we were to make an exact physical copy of humans and construct another world that is a perfect replica in all ways to ours, it would be impossible to imagine that world to be lacking in consciousness, since we possess nothing more than them in a strictly physical manner. However, we are able to accept the metaphysical existence of creatures that have the same physical microstructure and partake in the same physiological processes as us, but who lack consciousness. We call these “philosophical zombies” [8], and the fact that we can conceive of them must mean that there is something apart from pure physicality to explain consciousness. Chalmers puts it much better than I could (emphasis added): 

“…he will be awake, able to report the contents of his internal states, able to focus attention in various places, and so on. It is just that none of this functioning will be accompanied by any real conscious experience. There will be no phenomenal feel. There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.” [9] 

If there is truly nothing it is like to be a zombie, we as conscious beings must not have been able to conceive of p-zombies. Chalmers extends to say that “there will be no phenomenal feel”; the zombie does not have access to feel what it is like to undergo mental states, something that he feels is necessary to be conscious.

3. Exploring Unbridgeable Gaps:

To Joseph Levine, the effort to jump from the physical to the phenomenal is futile, and he calls this problem the “explanatory gap” [10]. The explanatory gap lies in our failure to wholly explain that a zombie is conscious given the fact that they are a perfect physical copy of a human. This leads to an “epistemic gap” [11] – there is definitely a difference between our knowledge of physical truths and ‘phenomenal’ truths (such as “there is something it is to be that person”), but we do not yet know how to deduce phenomenal truths from physical truths. Finally, this leads to an “ontological gap” [11] where we realize that consciousness cannot purely be a physical process, since it is metaphysically possible to have worlds where phenomenal truths are false, yet physical truths are true. Physicalists respond to these gaps in several ways – either they deny the existence of these gaps, reason that the ability to conceive zombies has no implication on metaphysical possibility, or they partially accept gaps and insist that physically can be true despite of them. 

Let us now take a step back and look at what these inferences and gaps may mean to Searle’s Chinese Room. All of our considerations in the discussion above come back to Searle’s dualist position that the qualia of understanding lies across an unbridgeable epistemic gap – Searle implies that we do not know how to deduce the phenomenal truth that an algorithm possesses intentionality and understanding from the physical truth of its syntactical operations. The explanatory gap lies in the fact that we fail to wholly explain that the man gains understanding given that he outputs perfect answers to all the questions he is asked. A transitive inference emerges here – if the conceivability of p-zombies can pose a threat to physicalism, then it can pose a threat to those who believe that the man in the Chinese Room gains true understanding as well.

Now, we have properly set the grounds for the connection I am trying to make - what happens when we take all that we know about p-zombies, and put one inside the Chinese Room? That is what we will discuss next time. Stay tuned!

REFERENCES:

[5] Nida-Rümelin, Martine, and Donnchadh O Conaill. “Qualia: The Knowledge Argument.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 23 Sept. 2019, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/. 

[6] Searle, John. “Why Dualism (and Materialism) Fail to Account for Consciousness.” Richard E. Lee (ed.), Questioning Nineteenth Century Assumptions About Knowledge, Iii: Dualism. 2010 Suny Press. pp. 5-48. 

[7] Searle, John R. “Dualism Revisited.” Journal of Physiology Paris pp. 169-178, 2007, https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~dh25/seminarofthesoul/Searle%20- %20Dualism%20Revisited.pdf. 

[8] Kirk, Robert. “Zombies.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 19 Mar. 2019, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/#ConcArguForPossZomb. 

[9] Chalmers, D., The Conscious Mind, 1996 Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

[10] Levine, J., Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness, 2001 Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 

[11] Chalmers, David. “Phenomenal concepts and the explanatory gap.” Torin Alter & Sven Walter (eds.), Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge: New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism. 2001 Oxford University Press.