Monday, August 30, 2021

State terrorism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_terrorism

Definition

There is neither an academic nor an international legal consensus regarding the proper definition of the word "terrorism". Some scholars believe the actions of governments can be labelled "terrorism". Using the term 'terrorism' to mean violent action used with the predominant intention of causing terror, Paul James and Jonathan Friedman distinguish between state terrorism against non-combatants and state terrorism against combatants, including 'shock and awe' tactics:

Shock and Awe" as a subcategory of "rapid dominance" is the name given to massive intervention designed to strike terror into the minds of the enemy. It is a form of state-terrorism. The concept was however developed long before the Second Gulf War by Harlan Ullman as chair of a forum of retired military personnel.

However, others, including governments, international organisations, private institutions and scholars, believe the term "terrorism" is applicable only to the actions of violent non-state actors. Historically, the term terrorism was used to refer to actions taken by governments against their own citizens whereas now it is more often perceived as targeting of non-combatants as part of a strategy directed against governments.

Historian Henry Commager wrote that "Even when definitions of terrorism allow for state terrorism, state actions in this area tend to be seen through the prism of war or national self-defense, not terror." While states may accuse other states of state-sponsored terrorism when they support insurgencies, individuals who accuse their governments of terrorism are seen as radicals, because actions by legitimate governments are not generally seen as illegitimate. Academic writing tends to follow the definitions accepted by states. Most states use the term "terrorism" for non-state actors only.

The Encyclopædia Britannica Online defines terrorism generally as "the systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective", and states that "terrorism is not legally defined in all jurisdictions." The encyclopedia adds that "[e]stablishment terrorism, often called state or state-sponsored terrorism, is employed by governments—or more often by factions within governments—against that government's citizens, against factions within the government, or against foreign governments or groups."

While the most common modern usage of the word terrorism refers to civilian-victimising political violence by insurgents or conspirators, several scholars make a broader interpretation of the nature of terrorism that encompasses the concepts of state terrorism and state-sponsored terrorism. Michael Stohl argues, "The use of terror tactics is common in international relations and the state has been and remains a more likely employer of terrorism within the international system than insurgents. Stohl clarifies, however, that "[n]ot all acts of state violence are terrorism. It is important to understand that in terrorism the violence threatened or perpetrated, has purposes broader than simple physical harm to a victim. The audience of the act or threat of violence is more important than the immediate victim."

Scholar Gus Martin describes state terrorism as terrorism "committed by governments and quasi-governmental agencies and personnel against perceived threats", which can be directed against both domestic and foreign targets. Noam Chomsky defines state terrorism as "terrorism practised by states (or governments) and their agents and allies".

Stohl and George A. Lopez have designated three categories of state terrorism, based on the openness/secrecy with which the alleged terrorist acts are performed, and whether states directly perform the acts, support them, or acquiesce in them.

History

The Drownings at Nantes were a series of mass executions by drowning during the Reign of Terror in France

Aristotle wrote critically of terror employed by tyrants against their subjects. The earliest use of the word terrorism identified by the Oxford English Dictionary is a 1795 reference to tyrannical state behavior, the "reign of terrorism" in France. In that same year, Edmund Burke decried the "thousands of those hell-hounds called terrorists" who he believed threatened Europe. During the Reign of Terror, the Jacobin government and other factions of the French Revolution used the apparatus of the state to kill and intimidate political opponents, and the Oxford English Dictionary includes as one definition of terrorism "Government by intimidation carried out by the party in power in France between 1789–1794". The original general meaning of terrorism was of terrorism by the state, as reflected in the 1798 supplement of the Dictionnaire of the Académie française, which described terrorism as systeme, regime de la terreur. Myra Williamson wrote:

The meaning of "terrorism" has undergone a transformation. During the Reign of Terror, a regime or system of terrorism was used as an instrument of governance, wielded by a recently established revolutionary state against the enemies of the people. Now the term "terrorism" is commonly used to describe terrorist acts committed by non-state or sub-national entities against a state. (italics in original)

Later examples of state terrorism include the police state measures employed by the Soviet Union beginning in the 1930s, and by Germany's Nazi regime in the 1930s and 1940s. According to Igor Primoratz, "Both [the Nazis and the Soviets] sought to impose total political control on society. Such a radical aim could be pursued only by a similarly radical method: by terrorism directed by an extremely powerful political police at an atomized and defenseless population. Its success was due largely to its arbitrary character—to the unpredictability of its choice of victims. In both countries, the regime first suppressed all opposition; when it no longer had any opposition to speak of, political police took to persecuting 'potential' and 'objective opponents'. In the Soviet Union, it was eventually unleashed on victims chosen at random."

The terror of tsarism was directed against the proletariat. Our Extraordinary Commissions shoot landlords, capitalists, and generals who are striving to restore the capitalist order. Do you grasp this ... distinction? Yes? For us communists it is quite sufficient.

Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, 1920.

Military actions primarily directed against non-combatant targets have also been referred to as state terrorism. For example, the bombing of Guernica has been called an act of terrorism. Other examples of state terrorism may include the World War II bombings of Pearl Harbor, London, Dresden, Chongqing, and Hiroshima.

An act of sabotage, sometimes regarded as an act of terrorism, was the peacetime sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, a ship owned by Greenpeace, which occurred while in port at Auckland, New Zealand on July 10, 1985. The bomb detonation killed Fernando Pereira, a Dutch photographer. The organisation who committed the attack, the DGSE, is a branch of France's intelligence services. The agents responsible pleaded guilty to manslaughter as part of a plea deal and were sentenced to ten years in prison, but were secretly released early to France under an agreement between the two countries' governments.

Rooms of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum contain thousands of photos taken by the Khmer Rouge of their victims

Another example is the British Military Reaction Force in Northern Ireland during the 1970s, which murdered innocent civilians from the Catholic community in order to stir up ethnic hatred and "take the heat off the army".

In November 2013, a BBC Panorama documentary was aired about the MRF. It drew on information from seven former members, as well as a number of other sources. Soldier H said: "We operated initially with them thinking that we were the UVF." Soldier F added: "We wanted to cause confusion." In June 1972, he was succeeded as commander by Captain James 'Hamish' McGregor.

In June 2014, in the wake of the Panorama programme, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) opened an investigation into the matter. In an earlier review of the programme, the position of the PSNI was that none of the statements by soldiers in the programme could be taken as an admission of criminality.

By country

China

The Uyghur American Association has claimed that Beijing's military approach to terrorism in Xinjiang is state terrorism. The Chinese state has also been accused of state terrorism in Tibet.

France

The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior took place in New Zealand's Auckland Harbour on July 10, 1985. It was an attack carried out by French DGSE agents Captain Dominique Prieur and Commander Alain Mafart aimed at sinking the flagship craft of the Greenpeace Organisation in order to stop her from interfering in French nuclear testing in the South Pacific. The attack resulted in the death of Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira and led to a huge uproar over the first ever attack on New Zealand's sovereignty. France initially denied any involvement in the attack, and it even joined in condemning the attack as a terrorist act. In July 1986, a United Nations-sponsored mediation effort between New Zealand and France resulted in the transfer of the two prisoners to the French Polynesian island of Hao, so they could serve three years there, as well as an apology and a NZD 13 million payment from France to New Zealand.

India

Iran

Israel

Italy

Libya

In the 1980s, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi was accused of state terrorism following attacks abroad such as the Lockerbie bombing. Between 9 July and 15 August 1984 seventeen merchant vessels were damaged in the Gulf of Suez and Bab al-Mandeb straits by underwater explosions. Terrorist group Al Jihad (thought to be a pro-Iranian Shiite group connected to the Palestine Liberation Organisation) issued a claim of responsibility for the mining, but circumstantial evidence indicated that Libya was responsible.

Myanmar

Myanmar has been accused of state terrorism in the internal conflict.

North Korea

North Korea has been accused of state terrorism on several occasions, such as in 1983 in the Rangoon bombing, the Gimpo International Airport bombing, and in 1987 when North Korean agents detonated a bomb on Korean Air Flight 858, killing everybody aboard.

Pakistan

Russia/Soviet Union

"Wall of sorrow" at the first exhibition of the victims of Stalinism in Moscow, 19 November 1988

South Africa

Spain

Sri Lanka

Syria

United Kingdom

The British state has been accused of involvement in state terrorism in the Northern Ireland conflict from the 1960s to 1990s by covertly assisting the loyalist paramilitaries.

United States

Argentines commemorate the victims of the U.S.-backed military junta on 24 March 2019

Ruth J Blakeley, Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield, accuses the United States of sponsoring and deploying state terrorism, which she defines as "the illegal targeting of individuals that the state has a duty to protect in order to instill fear in a target audience beyond the direct victim", on an "enormous scale" during the Cold War. The United States government justified this policy by saying it needed to contain the spread of Communism, but Blakeley says the United States government also used it as a means to buttress and promote the interests of U.S. elites and multinational corporations. The U.S. supported governments who employed death squads throughout Latin America and counterinsurgency training of right-wing military forces included advocating the interrogation and torture of suspected insurgents. J. Patrice McSherry, a professor of political science at Long Island University, says "hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans were tortured, abducted or killed by right-wing military regimes as part of the U.S.-led anti-communist crusade," which included U.S. support for Operation Condor and the Guatemalan military during the Guatemalan Civil War. More people were repressed and killed throughout Latin America in the last three decades of the Cold War than in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, according to historian John Henry Coatsworth.

Declassified documents from the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta in 2017 confirm that the U.S. directly facilitated and encouraged the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of suspected Communists in Indonesia during the mid-1960s. Bradley Simpson, Director of the Indonesia/East Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, says "Washington did everything in its power to encourage and facilitate the army-led massacre of alleged PKI members, and U.S. officials worried only that the killing of the party's unarmed supporters might not go far enough, permitting Sukarno to return to power and frustrate the [Johnson] Administration's emerging plans for a post-Sukarno Indonesia." According to Simpson, the terror in Indonesia was an "essential building block of the quasi neo-liberal policies the West would attempt to impose on Indonesia in the years to come". Historian John Roosa, who commented on documents which were released by the U.S. embassy in Jakarta in 2017, said they confirmed that "the U.S. was part and parcel of the operation, strategizing with the Indonesian army and encouraging them to go after the PKI." Geoffrey B. Robinson, a historian at UCLA, argues that without the support of the U.S. and other powerful Western states, the Indonesian Army's program of mass killings would not have happened.

Uzbekistan

Criticism of the concept

The chairman of the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee has said the twelve previous international conventions on terrorism had never referred to state terrorism, which was not an international legal concept, and when states abuse their powers they should be judged against international conventions which deal with war crimes, international human rights law, and international humanitarian law, rather than international anti-terrorism statutes. In a similar vein, Kofi Annan, at the time the United Nations Secretary-General, said it is "time to set aside debates on so-called 'state terrorism'. The use of force by states is already regulated under international law". Annan added, "... regardless of the differences between governments on the question of the definition of terrorism, what is clear and what we can all agree on is any deliberate attack on innocent civilians [or non-combatants], regardless of one's cause, is unacceptable and fits into the definition of terrorism."

Dr. Bruce Hoffman has argued that failing to differentiate between state and non-state violence ignores the fact that there is a "fundamental qualitative difference between the two types of violence." Hoffman argues that even in war, there are rules and accepted norms of behaviour that prohibit certain types of weapons and tactics and outlaw attacks on specific categories of targets. For instance, rules which are codified in the Geneva and Hague Conventions on warfare prohibit taking civilians as hostages, outlaw reprisals against either civilians or POWs, recognise neutral territory, etc. Hoffman says "even the most cursory review of terrorist tactics and targets over the past quarter century reveals that terrorists have violated all these rules." Hoffman also says that when states transgress these rules of war "the term "war crime" is used to describe such acts."

Walter Laqueur has said those who argue that state terrorism should be included in studies of terrorism ignore the fact that "The very existence of a state is based on its monopoly of power. If it were different, states would not have the right, nor would they be in a position, to maintain that minimum of order on which all civilized life rests." Calling the concept a "red herring" he stated: "This argument has been used by the terrorists themselves, arguing that there is no difference between their activities and those by governments and states. It has also been employed by some sympathizers, and it rests on the deliberate obfuscation between all kinds of violence ..."

Physicalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism

In philosophy, physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that "everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the physical, or that everything supervenes on the physical. Physicalism is a form of ontological monism—a "one substance" view of the nature of reality as opposed to a "two-substance" (dualism) or "many-substance" (pluralism) view. Both the definition of "physical" and the meaning of physicalism have been debated.

Physicalism is closely related to materialism. Physicalism grew out of materialism with advancements of the physical sciences in explaining observed phenomena. The terms are often used interchangeably, although they are sometimes distinguished, for example on the basis of physics describing more than just matter (including energy and physical law).

According to a 2009 survey, physicalism is the majority view among philosophers, but there remains significant opposition to physicalism. Neuroplasticity is one such evidence that is used in support of a non-physicalist view. The philosophical zombie argument is another attempt to challenge physicalism.

Definition of physicalism

The word "physicalism" was introduced into philosophy in the 1930s by Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap.

The use of "physical" in physicalism is a philosophical concept and can be distinguished from alternative definitions found in the literature (e.g. Karl Popper defined a physical proposition to be one which can at least in theory be denied by observation). A "physical property", in this context, may be a metaphysical or logical combination of properties which are physical in the ordinary sense. It is common to express the notion of "metaphysical or logical combination of properties" using the notion of supervenience: A property A is said to supervene on a property B if any change in A necessarily implies a change in B. Since any change in a combination of properties must consist of a change in at least one component property, we see that the combination does indeed supervene on the individual properties. The point of this extension is that physicalists usually suppose the existence of various abstract concepts which are non-physical in the ordinary sense of the word; so physicalism cannot be defined in a way that denies the existence of these abstractions. Also, physicalism defined in terms of supervenience does not entail that all properties in the actual world are type identical to physical properties. It is, therefore, compatible with multiple realizability.

From the notion of supervenience, we see that, assuming that mental, social, and biological properties supervene on physical properties, it follows that two hypothetical worlds cannot be identical in their physical properties but differ in their mental, social or biological properties.

Two common approaches to defining "physicalism" are the theory-based and object-based approaches. The theory-based conception of physicalism proposes that "a property is physical if and only if it either is the sort of property that physical theory tells us about or else is a property which metaphysically (or logically) supervenes on the sort of property that physical theory tells us about". Likewise, the object-based conception claims that "a property is physical if and only if: it either is the sort of property required by a complete account of the intrinsic nature of paradigmatic physical objects and their constituents or else is a property which metaphysically (or logically) supervenes on the sort of property required by a complete account of the intrinsic nature of paradigmatic physical objects and their constituents".

Physicalists have traditionally opted for a "theory-based" characterization of the physical either in terms of current physics, or a future (ideal) physics. These two theory-based conceptions of the physical represent both horns of Hempel's dilemma (named after the late philosopher of science and logical empiricist Carl Gustav Hempel): an argument against theory-based understandings of the physical. Very roughly, Hempel's dilemma is that if we define the physical by reference to current physics, then physicalism is very likely to be false, as it is very likely (by pessimistic meta-induction) that much of current physics is false. But if we instead define the physical in terms of a future (ideal) or completed physics, then physicalism is hopelessly vague or indeterminate.

While the force of Hempel's dilemma against theory-based conceptions of the physical remains contested, alternative "non-theory-based" conceptions of the physical have also been proposed. Frank Jackson (1998) for example, has argued in favour of the aforementioned "object-based" conception of the physical. An objection to this proposal, which Jackson himself noted in 1998, is that if it turns out that panpsychism or panprotopsychism is true, then such a non-materialist understanding of the physical gives the counterintuitive result that physicalism is, nevertheless, also true since such properties will figure in a complete account of paradigmatic examples of the physical.

David Papineau and Barbara Montero have advanced and subsequently defended a "via negativa" characterization of the physical. The gist of the via negativa strategy is to understand the physical in terms of what it is not: the mental. In other words, the via negativa strategy understands the physical as "the non-mental". An objection to the via negativa conception of the physical is that (like the object-based conception) it doesn't have the resources to distinguish neutral monism (or panprotopsychism) from physicalism. Further, Restrepo (2012) argues that this conception of the physical makes core non-physical entities of non-´physicalist metaphysics, like God, Cartesian souls and abstract numbers, physical and thus either false or trivially true: "God is non-mentally-and-non-biologically identifiable as the thing that created the universe. Sup- posing emergentism is true, non-physical emergent properties are non-mentally-and-non-biologically identifiable as non-linear effects of certain arrangements of matter. The immaterial Cartesian soul is non-mentally-and-non-biologically identifiable as one of the things that interact causally with certain particles (coincident with the pineal gland). The Platonic number eight is non-mentally-and-non-biologically identifiable as the number of planets orbiting the Sun".

Supervenience-based definitions of physicalism

Adopting a supervenience-based account of the physical, the definition of physicalism as "all properties are physical" can be unraveled to:

1) Physicalism is true at a possible world w if and only if any world that is a physical duplicate of w is also a duplicate of w simpliciter.

Applied to the actual world (our world), statement 1 above is the claim that physicalism is true at the actual world if and only if at every possible world in which the physical properties and laws of the actual world are instantiated, the non-physical (in the ordinary sense of the word) properties of the actual world are instantiated as well. To borrow a metaphor from Saul Kripke (1972), the truth of physicalism at the actual world entails that once God has instantiated or "fixed" the physical properties and laws of our world, then God's work is done; the rest comes "automatically".

Unfortunately, statement 1 fails to capture even a necessary condition for physicalism to be true at a world w. To see this, imagine a world in which there are only physical properties—if physicalism is true at any world it is true at this one. But one can conceive physical duplicates of such a world that are not also duplicates simpliciter of it: worlds that have the same physical properties as our imagined one, but with some additional property or properties. A world might contain "epiphenomenal ectoplasm", some additional pure experience that does not interact with the physical components of the world and is not necessitated by them (does not supervene on them). To handle the epiphenomenal ectoplasm problem, statement 1 can be modified to include a "that's-all" or "totality" clause or be restricted to "positive" properties. Adopting the former suggestion here, we can reformulate statement 1 as follows:

2) Physicalism is true at a possible world w if and only if any world that is a minimal physical duplicate of w is a duplicate of w simpliciter.

Applied in the same way, statement 2 is the claim that physicalism is true at a possible world w if and only if any world that is a physical duplicate of w (without any further changes), is duplicate of w without qualification. This allows a world in which there are only physical properties to be counted as one at which physicalism is true, since worlds in which there is some extra stuff are not "minimal" physical duplicates of such a world, nor are they minimal physical duplicates of worlds that contain some non-physical properties that are metaphysically necessitated by the physical.

But while statement 2 overcomes the problem of worlds at which there is some extra stuff (sometimes referred to as the "epiphenomenal ectoplasm problem") it faces a different challenge: the so-called "blockers problem". Imagine a world where the relation between the physical and non-physical properties at this world (call the world w₁) is slightly weaker than metaphysical necessitation, such that a certain kind of non-physical intervener—"a blocker"—could, were it to exist at w₁, prevent the non-physical properties in w₁ from being instantiated by the instantiation of the physical properties at w₁. Since statement 2 rules out worlds which are physical duplicates of w₁ that also contain non-physical interveners by virtue of the minimality, or that's-all clause, statement 2 gives the (allegedly) incorrect result that physicalism is true at w₁. One response to this problem is to abandon statement 2 in favour of the alternative possibility mentioned earlier in which supervenience-based formulations of physicalism are restricted to what David Chalmers (1996) calls "positive properties". A positive property is one that "...if instantiated in a world W, is also instantiated by the corresponding individual in all worlds that contain W as a proper part." Following this suggestion, we can then formulate physicalism as follows:

3) Physicalism is true at a possible world w if and only if any world that is a physical duplicate of w is a positive duplicate of w.

On the face of it, statement 3 seems able to handle both the epiphenomenal ectoplasm problem and the blockers problem. With regard to the former, statement 3 gives the correct result that a purely physical world is one at which physicalism is true, since worlds in which there is some extra stuff are positive duplicates of a purely physical world. With regard to the latter, statement 3 appears to have the consequence that worlds in which there are blockers are worlds where positive non-physical properties of w₁ will be absent, hence w₁ will not be counted as a world at which physicalism is true. Daniel Stoljar (2010) objects to this response to the blockers problem on the basis that since the non-physical properties of w₁ aren't instantiated at a world in which there is a blocker, they are not positive properties in Chalmers' (1996) sense, and so statement 3 will count w₁ as a world at which physicalism is true after all.

A further problem for supervenience-based formulations of physicalism is the so-called "necessary beings problem". A necessary being in this context is a non-physical being that exists in all possible worlds (for example what theists refer to as God). A necessary being is compatible with all the definitions provided, because it is supervenient on everything; yet it is usually taken to contradict the notion that everything is physical. So any supervenience-based formulation of physicalism will at best state a necessary but not sufficient condition for the truth of physicalism.

Additional objections have been raised to the above definitions provided for supervenience physicalism: one could imagine an alternate world that differs only by the presence of a single ammonium molecule (or physical property), and yet based on statement 1, such a world might be completely different in terms of its distribution of mental properties. Furthermore, there are differences expressed concerning the modal status of physicalism; whether it is a necessary truth, or is only true in a world which conforms to certain conditions (i.e. those of physicalism).

Realisation physicalism

Closely related to supervenience physicalism, is realisation physicalism, the thesis that every instantiated property is either physical or realised by a physical property.

Token physicalism

Token physicalism is the proposition that "for every actual particular (object, event or process) x, there is some physical particular y such that x = y". It is intended to capture the idea of "physical mechanisms". Token physicalism is compatible with property dualism, in which all substances are "physical", but physical objects may have mental properties as well as physical properties. Token physicalism is not however equivalent to supervenience physicalism. Firstly, token physicalism does not imply supervenience physicalism because the former does not rule out the possibility of non-supervenient properties (provided that they are associated only with physical particulars). Secondarily, supervenience physicalism does not imply token physicalism, for the former allows supervenient objects (such as a "nation", or "soul") that are not equal to any physical object.

Reductionism and emergentism

Reductionism

There are multiple versions of reductionism. In the context of physicalism, the reductions referred to are of a "linguistic" nature, allowing discussions of, say, mental phenomena to be translated into discussions of physics. In one formulation, every concept is analysed in terms of a physical concept. One counter-argument to this supposes there may be an additional class of expressions which is non-physical but which increases the expressive power of a theory. Another version of reductionism is based on the requirement that one theory (mental or physical) be logically derivable from a second.

The combination of reductionism and physicalism is usually called reductive physicalism in the philosophy of mind. The opposite view is non-reductive physicalism. Reductive physicalism is the view that mental states are both nothing over and above physical states and reducible to physical states. One version of reductive physicalism is type physicalism or mind-body identity theory. Type physicalism asserts that "for every actually instantiated property F, there is some physical property G such that F=G". Unlike token physicalism, type physicalism entails supervenience physicalism.

Reductive versions of physicalism are increasingly unpopular as they do not account for mental lives. The brain on this position as a physical substance has only physical attributes such as a particular volume, a particular mass, a particular density, a particular location, a particular shape, and so on. However, the brain on this position does not have any mental attributes. The brain is not overjoyed or unhappy. The brain is not in pain. When a person's back aches and he or she is in pain, it is not the brain that is suffering even though the brain is associated with the neural circuitry that provides the experience of pain. Reductive physicalism therefore cannot explain mental lives. In the event of fear, for example, doubtlessly there is neural activity that is corresponding with the experience of fear. However, the brain itself is not fearful. Fear cannot be reduced to a physical brain state even though it is corresponding with neural activity in the brain. For this reason, reductive physicalism is argued to be indefensible as it cannot be reconciled with mental experience.

Another common argument against type physicalism is multiple realizability, the possibility that a psychological process (say) could be instantiated by many different neurological processes (even non-neurological processes, in the case of machine or alien intelligence). For in this case, the neurological terms translating a psychological term must be disjunctions over the possible instantiations, and it is argued that no physical law can use these disjunctions as terms. Type physicalism was the original target of the multiple realizability argument, and it is not clear that token physicalism is susceptible to objections from multiple realizability.

Emergentism

There are two versions of emergentism, the strong version and the weak version. Supervenience physicalism has been seen as a strong version of emergentism, in which the subject's psychological experience is considered genuinely novel. Non-reductive physicalism, on the other side, is a weak version of emergentism because it does not need that the subject's psychological experience be novel. The strong version of emergentism is incompatible with physicalism. Since there are novel mental states, mental states are not nothing over and above physical states. However, the weak version of emergentism is compatible with physicalism.

We can see that emergentism is actually a very broad view. Some forms of emergentism appear either incompatible with physicalism or equivalent to it (e.g. posteriori physicalism), others appear to merge both dualism and supervenience. Emergentism compatible with dualism claims that mental states and physical states are metaphysically distinct while maintaining the supervenience of mental states on physical states. This proposition however contradicts supervenience physicalism, which asserts a denial of dualism.

A priori versus a posteriori physicalism

Physicalists hold that physicalism is true. A natural question for physicalists, then, is whether the truth of physicalism is deducible a priori from the nature of the physical world (i.e., the inference is justified independently of experience, even though the nature of the physical world can itself only be determined through experience) or can only be deduced a posteriori (i.e., the justification of the inference itself is dependent upon experience). So-called "a priori physicalists" hold that from knowledge of the conjunction of all physical truths, a totality or that's-all truth (to rule out non-physical epiphenomena, and enforce the closure of the physical world), and some primitive indexical truths such as "I am A" and "now is B", the truth of physicalism is knowable a priori. Let "P" stand for the conjunction of all physical truths and laws, "T" for a that's-all truth, "I" for the indexical "centering" truths, and "N" for any [presumably non-physical] truth at the actual world. We can then, using the material conditional "→", represent a priori physicalism as the thesis that PTI → N is knowable a priori. An important wrinkle here is that the concepts in N must be possessed non-deferentially in order for PTI → N to be knowable a priori. The suggestion, then, is that possession of the concepts in the consequent, plus the empirical information in the antecedent is sufficient for the consequent to be knowable a priori.

An "a posteriori physicalist", on the other hand, will reject the claim that PTI → N is knowable a priori. Rather, they would hold that the inference from PTI to N is justified by metaphysical considerations that in turn can be derived from experience. So the claim then is that "PTI and not N" is metaphysically impossible.

One commonly issued challenge to a priori physicalism and to physicalism in general is the "conceivability argument", or zombie argument. 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" to be a person x] ) is conceivable (i.e., it is not knowable a priori that PTI and not Q is false).

P2) If PTI and not Q is conceivable, then PTI and not Q is metaphysically possible.

P3) If PTI and not Q is metaphysically possible then physicalism is false.

C) Physicalism is false.

Here proposition P3 is a direct application of the supervenience of consciousness, and hence of any supervenience-based version of physicalism: If PTI and not Q is possible, there is some possible world where it is true. This world differs from [the relevant indexing on] our world, where PTIQ is true. But the other world is a minimal physical duplicate of our world, because PT is true there. So there is a possible world which is a minimal physical duplicate of our world, but not a full duplicate; this contradicts the definition of physicalism that we saw above.

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.

A posteriori physicalists, on the other hand, generally accept P1) but deny P2)--the move from "conceivability to metaphysical possibility". Some a posteriori physicalists think that unlike the possession of most, if not all other empirical concepts, the possession of consciousness has the special property that the presence of PTI and the absence of consciousness will be conceivable—even though, according to them, it is knowable a posteriori that PTI and not Q is not metaphysically possible. These a posteriori physicalists endorse some version of what Daniel Stoljar (2005) has called "the phenomenal concept strategy". Roughly speaking, the phenomenal concept strategy is a label for those a posteriori physicalists who attempt to show that it is only the concept of consciousness—not the property—that is in some way "special" or sui generis. Other a posteriori physicalists eschew the phenomenal concept strategy, and argue that even ordinary macroscopic truths such as "water covers 60% of the earth's surface" are not knowable a priori from PTI and a non-deferential grasp of the concepts "water" and "earth" et cetera. If this is correct, then we should (arguably) conclude that conceivability does not entail metaphysical possibility, and P2) of the conceivability argument against physicalism is false.

Other views

Realistic physicalism

Galen Strawson's realistic physicalism or realistic monism entails panpsychism – or at least micropsychism. Galen Strawson doesn't take into account procedurality, cause and effect relationship and the fact that ontological states (how things are) are not affected by human knowledge or interpretation (except in human interactions when knowledge plays an active role). Strawson doesn't take into account the fact that the soul theory is unprocedural and ontologically nondefinable; because if it were definable but unknown to humans it could have been described scientifically but humans failed to complete the task successfully (not being able to access physically the soul doesn't exclude the creation of a formal theory about it; but that theory would have to be logical in order to be scientific). Strawson argues that "many—perhaps most—of those who call themselves physicalists or materialists [are mistakenly] committed to the thesis that physical stuff is, in itself, in its fundamental nature, something wholly and utterly non-experiential... even when they are prepared to admit with Eddington that physical stuff has, in itself, 'a nature capable of manifesting itself as mental activity', i.e. as experience or consciousness". Because experiential phenomena allegedly cannot be emergent from wholly non-experiential phenomena, philosophers are driven to substance dualism, property dualism, eliminative materialism and "all other crazy attempts at wholesale mental-to-non-mental reduction".

Real physicalists must accept that at least some ultimates are intrinsically experience-involving. They must at least embrace micropsychism. Given that everything concrete is physical, and that everything physical is constituted out of physical ultimates, and that experience is part of concrete reality, it seems the only reasonable position, more than just an 'inference to the best explanation'... Micropsychism is not yet panpsychism, for as things stand realistic physicalists can conjecture that only some types of ultimates are intrinsically experiential. But they must allow that panpsychism may be true, and the big step has already been taken with micropsychism, the admission that at least some ultimates must be experiential. 'And were the inmost essence of things laid open to us' I think that the idea that some but not all physical ultimates are experiential would look like the idea that some but not all physical ultimates are spatio-temporal (on the assumption that spacetime is indeed a fundamental feature of reality). I would bet a lot against there being such radical heterogeneity at the very bottom of things. In fact (to disagree with my earlier self) it is hard to see why this view would not count as a form of dualism... So now I can say that physicalism, i.e. real physicalism, entails panexperientialism or panpsychism. All physical stuff is energy, in one form or another, and all energy, I trow, is an experience-involving phenomenon. This sounded crazy to me for a long time, but I am quite used to it, now that I know that there is no alternative short of 'substance dualism'... Real physicalism, realistic physicalism, entails panpsychism, and whatever problems are raised by this fact are problems a real physicalist must face.
— Galen Strawson, Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?

Philosophical zombie

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A philosophical zombie or p-zombie argument is a thought experiment in philosophy of mind that imagines a hypothetical being that is physically identical to and indistinguishable from a normal person but does not have conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object it would not inwardly feel any pain, yet it would outwardly behave exactly as if it did feel pain, including verbally expressing pain. Relatedly, a zombie world is a hypothetical world indistinguishable from our world but in which all beings lack conscious experience.

Philosophical zombie arguments are used in support of mind-body dualism against forms of physicalism such as materialism, behaviorism and functionalism. These arguments aim to refute the possibility of any physicalist solution to the "hard problem of consciousness" (the problem of accounting for subjective, intrinsic, first-person, what-it's-like-ness). Proponents of philosophical zombie arguments, such as the philosopher David Chalmers, argue that since a philosophical zombie is by definition physically identical to a conscious person, even its logical possibility would refute physicalism, because it would establish the existence of conscious experience as a further fact. Such arguments have been criticized by many philosophers. Some physicalists like Daniel Dennett argue that philosophical zombies are logically incoherent and thus impossible; other physicalists like Christopher Hill argue that philosophical zombies are coherent but not metaphysically possible.

History

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.

There has been a lively debate about what the zombie argument shows. Critics who primarily argue that zombies are not conceivable include Daniel Dennett, Nigil J. T. Thomas, David Braddon-Mitchell, and Robert Kirk; critics who assert mostly that conceivability does not entail possibility include Katalin Balog, Keith Frankish, Christopher Hill, and Stephen Yablo; and critics who question the logical validity of the argument include George Bealer.

In his 2019 update to the article on philosophical zombies in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Kirk summed up the current state of the debate:

In spite of the fact that the arguments on both sides have become increasingly sophisticated — or perhaps because of it — they have not become more persuasive. The pull in each direction remains strong.

A 2013 survey of professional philosophers conducted by Bourget and Chalmers produced the following results:

35.6% said P Zombies were conceivable but not metaphysically possible; 23.3% said they were metaphysically possible; 16.0% said they were inconceivable; and 25.1% responded "other."

Types of zombies

Though philosophical zombies are widely used in thought experiments, the detailed articulation of the concept is not always the same. P-zombies were introduced primarily to argue against specific types of physicalism such as behaviorism, according to which mental states exist solely as behavior. Belief, desire, thought, consciousness, and so on, are only behavior (whether external behavior or internal behavior) or tendencies towards behaviors. A p-zombie that is behaviorally indistinguishable from a normal human being but lacks conscious experiences is therefore not logically possible according to the behaviorist, so an appeal to the logical possibility of a p-zombie furnishes an argument that behaviorism is false. Proponents of zombie arguments generally accept that p-zombies are not physically possible, while opponents necessarily deny that they are metaphysically or, in some cases, even logically possible.

The unifying idea of the zombie is that of a human completely lacking conscious experience. It is possible to distinguish various zombie sub-types used in different thought experiments as follows:

A behavioral zombie that is behaviorally indistinguishable from a human.
A neurological zombie that has a human brain and is generally physiologically indistinguishable from a human.
A soulless zombie that lacks a soul.
A zombie universe that is identical to our world in all physical ways, except no being in that world has qualia.

Zombie arguments

Zombie arguments often support lines of reasoning that aim to show that zombies are metaphysically possible in order to support some form of dualism – in this case the view that the world includes two kinds of substance (or perhaps two kinds of property): the mental and the physical.

In contrast to dualism, in physicalism, material facts determine all other facts. Since any fact other than that of consciousness may be held to be the same for a p-zombie and for a normal conscious human, it follows that physicalism must hold that p-zombies are either not possible or are the same as normal humans.

The zombie argument is a version of general modal arguments against physicalism such as that of Saul Kripke. Further such arguments were notably advanced in the 1970s by Thomas Nagel (1970; 1974) and Robert Kirk (1974) but the general argument was most famously developed in detail by David Chalmers in The Conscious Mind (1996).

According to Chalmers one can coherently conceive of an entire zombie world, a world physically indistinguishable from this world but entirely lacking conscious experience. The counterpart of every conscious being in our world would be a p-zombie. Since such a world is conceivable, Chalmers claims, it is metaphysically possible, which is all the argument requires. Chalmers states: "Zombies are probably not naturally possible: they probably cannot exist in our world, with its laws of nature." The outline structure of Chalmers' version of the zombie argument is as follows;

According to physicalism, all that exists in our world (including consciousness) is physical.
Thus, if physicalism is true, a metaphysically possible world in which all physical facts are the same as those of the actual world must contain everything that exists in our actual world. In particular, conscious experience must exist in such a possible world.
In fact we can conceive of a world physically indistinguishable from our world but in which there is no consciousness (a zombie world). From this (so Chalmers argues) it follows that such a world is metaphysically possible.
Therefore, physicalism is false. (The conclusion follows from 2. and 3. by modus tollens.)

The above is a strong formulation of the zombie argument. There are other formulations of the zombies-type argument which follow the same general form. The premises of the general zombies argument are implied by the premises of all the specific zombie arguments.

A general zombies argument is in part motivated by potential disagreements between various anti-physicalist views. For example, an anti-physicalist view can consistently assert that p-zombies are metaphysically impossible but that inverted qualia (such as inverted spectra) or absent qualia (partial zombiehood) are metaphysically possible. Premises regarding inverted qualia or partial zombiehood can substitute premises regarding p-zombies to produce variations of the zombie argument.

The metaphysical possibility of a physically indistinguishable world with either inverted qualia or partial zombiehood would imply that physical truths don't metaphysically necessitate phenomenal truths.

To formulate the general form of the zombies argument, take the sentence 'P' to be true if and only if the conjunct of all microphysical truths of our world obtain, take the sentence 'Q' to be true if some phenomenal truth, that obtains in the actual world, obtains. The general argument goes as follows.

It is conceivable that P is true and Q is not true.
If it is conceivable that P is true and Q is not true then it is metaphysically possible that P is true and Q not true.
If it is metaphysically possible that P is true and Q is not true then physicalism is false.
Therefore, physicalism is false.

Q can be false in a possible world if any of the following obtains: (1) there exists at least one invert relative to the actual world (2) there is at least one absent quale relative to the actual world (3) all actually conscious beings are p-zombies (all actual qualia are absent qualia).

Another way to construe the zombie hypothesis is epistemically – as a problem of causal explanation, rather than as a problem of logical or metaphysical possibility. The "explanatory gap" – also called the "hard problem of consciousness" – is the claim that (to date) no one has provided a convincing causal explanation of how and why we are conscious. It is a manifestation of the very same gap that (to date) no one has provided a convincing causal explanation of how and why we are not zombies.

Responses

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.

Chalmers has argued that zombies are conceivable, saying "it certainly seems that a coherent situation is described; I can discern no contradiction in the description."

Many physicalist philosophers have argued that this scenario eliminates itself by its description; the basis of a physicalist argument is that the world is defined entirely by physicality; thus, a world that was physically identical would necessarily contain consciousness, as consciousness would necessarily be generated from any set of physical circumstances identical to our own.

The zombie argument claims that one can tell by the power of reason that such a "zombie scenario" is metaphysically possible. Chalmers states; "From the conceivability of zombies, proponents of the argument infer their metaphysical possibility" and argues that this inference, while not generally legitimate, is legitimate for phenomenal concepts such as consciousness since we must adhere to "Kripke's insight that for phenomenal concepts, there is no gap between reference-fixers and reference (or between primary and secondary intentions)."

That is, for phenomenal concepts, conceivability implies possibility. According to Chalmers, whatever is logically possible is also, in the sense relevant here, metaphysically possible.

Another response is the denial of the idea that qualia and related phenomenal notions of the mind are in the first place coherent concepts. Daniel Dennett and others argue that while consciousness and subjective experience exist in some sense, they are not as the zombie argument proponent claims. The experience of pain, for example, is not something that can be stripped off a person's mental life without bringing about any behavioral or physiological differences. Dennett believes that consciousness is a complex series of functions and ideas. If we all can have these experiences the idea of the p-zombie is meaningless.

Dennett argues that "when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably underestimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition". He coined the term "zimboes" – p-zombies that have second-order beliefs – to argue that the idea of a p-zombie is incoherent; "Zimboes think^Z they are conscious, think^Z they have qualia, think^Z they suffer pains – they are just 'wrong' (according to this lamentable tradition), in ways that neither they nor we could ever discover!".

Michael Lynch agrees with Dennett, arguing that the zombie conceivability argument forces us to either question whether or not we actually have consciousness or accept that zombies are not possible. If zombies falsely believe they are conscious, how can we be sure we are not zombies? We may believe we are experiencing conscious mental states when, in fact, we merely hold a false belief. Lynch thinks denying the possibility of zombies is more reasonable than questioning our own consciousness.

Furthermore, when concept of self is deemed to correspond to physical reality alone (reductive physicalism), philosophical zombies are denied by definition. When a distinction is made in one's mind between a hypothetical zombie and oneself (assumed not to be a zombie), the hypothetical zombie, being a subset of the concept of oneself, must entail a deficit in observables (cognitive systems), a "seductive error" contradicting the original definition of a zombie.

Thomas Metzinger dismisses the argument as no longer relevant to the consciousness community, calling it a weak argument that covertly relies on the difficulty in defining "consciousness", calling it an "ill-defined folk psychological umbrella term".

Verificationism states that, for words to have meaning, their use must be open to public verification. Since it is assumed that we can talk about our qualia, the existence of zombies is impossible.

Artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky saw the argument as circular. The proposition of the possibility of something physically identical to a human but without subjective experience assumes that the physical characteristics of humans are not what produces those experiences, which is exactly what the argument was claiming to prove.

Richard Brown agrees that the zombie argument is circular. To show this, he proposes "zoombies", which are creatures nonphysically identical to people in every way and lacking phenomenal consciousness. If zoombies existed, they would refute dualism because they would show that consciousness is not nonphysical, i.e., is physical. Paralleling the argument from Chalmers: It's conceivable that zoombies exist, so it's possible they exist, so dualism is false. Given the symmetry between the zombie and zoombie arguments, we can't arbitrate the physicalism/dualism question a priori.

Similarly, Gualtiero Piccinini argues that the zombie conceivability argument is circular. Piccinini’s argument questions whether the possible worlds where zombies exist are accessible from our world. If physicalism is true in our world, then physicalism is one of the relevant facts about our world for determining whether a possible zombie world is accessible from our world. Therefore, asking whether zombies are metaphysically possible in our world is equivalent to asking whether physicalism is true in our world.

Stephen Yablo's (1998) response is to provide an error theory to account for the intuition that zombies are possible. Notions of what counts as physical and as physically possible change over time so conceptual analysis is not reliable here. Yablo says he is "braced for the information that is going to make zombies inconceivable, even though I have no real idea what form the information is going to take."

The zombie argument is difficult to assess because it brings to light fundamental disagreements about the method and scope of philosophy itself and the nature and abilities of conceptual analysis. Proponents of the zombie argument may think that conceptual analysis is a central part of (if not the only part of) philosophy and that it certainly can do a great deal of philosophical work. However others, such as Dennett, Paul Churchland and W.V.O. Quine, have fundamentally different views. For this reason, discussion of the zombie argument remains vigorous in philosophy.

Some accept modal reasoning in general but deny it in the zombie case. Christopher S. Hill and Brian P. Mclaughlin suggest that the zombie thought experiment combines imagination of a "sympathetic" nature (putting oneself in a phenomenal state) and a "perceptual" nature (imagining becoming aware of something in the outside world). Each type of imagination may work on its own, but they're not guaranteed to work when both used at the same time. 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.

Related thought-experiments

Frank Jackson's Mary's room argument is based around a hypothetical scientist, Mary, who is forced to view the world through a black-and-white television screen in a black and white room. Mary is a brilliant scientist who knows everything about the neurobiology of vision. Even though Mary knows everything about color and its perception (e.g. what combination of wavelengths makes the sky seem blue), she has never seen color. If Mary were released from this room and were to experience color for the first time, would she learn anything new? Jackson initially believed this supported epiphenomenalism (mental phenomena are the effects, but not the causes, of physical phenomena) but later changed his views to physicalism, suggesting that Mary is simply discovering a new way for her brain to represent qualities that exist in the world.

Swampman is an imaginary character introduced by Donald Davidson. If Davidson goes hiking in a swamp and is struck and killed by a lightning bolt while nearby another lightning bolt spontaneously rearranges a bunch of molecules so that, entirely by coincidence, they take on exactly the same form that Davidson's body had at the moment of his untimely death then this being, 'Swampman', has a brain structurally identical to that which Davidson had and will thus presumably behave exactly like Davidson. He will return to Davidson's office and write the same essays he would have written, recognize all of his friends and family and so forth.

John Searle's Chinese room argument deals with the nature of artificial intelligence: it imagines a room in which a conversation is held by means of written Chinese characters that the subject cannot actually read, but is able to manipulate meaningfully using a set of algorithms. Searle holds that a program cannot give a computer a "mind" or "understanding", regardless of how intelligently it may make it behave. Stevan Harnad argues that Searle's critique is really meant to target functionalism and computationalism, and to establish neuroscience as the only correct way to understand the mind.

Physicist Adam Brown has suggested constructing a type of philosophical zombie using Counterfactual quantum computation, a technique in which a computer is placed into a superposition of running and not running. If the program being executed is a brain simulation, and if one makes the further assumption that brain simulations are conscious, then the simulation can have the same output as a conscious system, yet not be conscious.

Knowledge argument

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument

The knowledge argument (also known as Mary's room or Mary the super-scientist) is a philosophical thought experiment proposed by Frank Jackson in his article "Epiphenomenal Qualia" (1982) and extended in "What Mary Didn't Know" (1986). The experiment describes Mary, a scientist who exists in a black and white world where she has extensive access to physical descriptions of color, but no actual human perceptual experience of color. The central question of the thought experiment is whether Mary will gain new knowledge when she goes outside the black and white world and experiences seeing in color.

The experiment is intended to argue against physicalism—the view that the universe, including all that is mental, is entirely physical. The debate that emerged following its publication became the subject of an edited volume—There's Something About Mary (2004)—which includes replies from such philosophers as Daniel Dennett, David Lewis, and Paul Churchland.

Thought experiment

The thought experiment was originally proposed by Frank Jackson as follows:

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like "red", "blue", and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence "The sky is blue". ... What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?

In other words, Jackson's Mary is a scientist who knows everything there is to know about the science of color, but has never experienced color. The question that Jackson raises is: once she experiences color, does she learn anything new? Jackson claims that she does.

There is disagreement about how to summarize the premises and conclusion of the argument Jackson makes in this thought experiment. Paul Churchland did so as follows:

Mary knows everything there is to know about brain states and their properties.
It is not the case that Mary knows everything there is to know about sensations and their properties.
Therefore, sensations and their properties are not the same (≠) as the brain states and their properties.

However, Jackson objects that Churchland's formulation is not his intended argument. He especially objects to the first premise of Churchland's formulation: "The whole thrust of the knowledge argument is that Mary (before her release) does not know everything there is to know about brain states and their properties, because she does not know about certain qualia associated with them. What is complete, according to the argument, is her knowledge of matters physical." He suggests his preferred interpretation:

Mary (before her release) knows everything physical there is to know about other people.
Mary (before her release) does not know everything there is to know about other people (because she learns something about them on her release).
Therefore, there are truths about other people (and herself) which escape the physicalist story.

Most authors who discuss the knowledge argument cite the case of Mary, but Frank Jackson used a further example in his seminal article: the case of a person, Fred, who sees a color unknown to normal human perceivers.

Background

Mary's Room is a thought experiment that attempts to establish that there are non-physical properties and attainable knowledge that can be discovered only through conscious experience. It attempts to refute the theory that all knowledge is physical knowledge. C. D. Broad, Herbert Feigl, and Thomas Nagel, over a fifty-year span, presented insight to the subject, which led to Jackson's proposed thought experiment. Broad makes the following remarks, describing a thought experiment where an archangel has unlimited mathematical competences:

He would know exactly what the microscopic structure of ammonia must be; but he would be totally unable to predict that a substance with this structure must smell as ammonia does when it gets into the human nose. The utmost that he could predict on this subject would be that certain changes would take place in the mucous membrane, the olfactory nerves and so on. But he could not possibly know that these changes would be accompanied by the appearance of a smell in general or of the peculiar smell of ammonia in particular, unless someone told him so or he had smelled it for himself.

Roughly thirty years later, Feigl expresses a similar notion. He concerns himself with a Martian, studying human behavior, but lacking human sentiments. Feigl says:

...the Martian would be lacking completely in the sort of imagery and empathy which depends on familiarity (direct acquaintance) with the kinds of qualia to be imaged or empathized.

Nagel takes a slightly different approach. In an effort to make his argument more adaptable and relatable, he takes the stand of humans attempting to understand the sonar capabilities of bats. Even with the entire physical database at one's fingertips, humans would not be able to fully perceive or understand a bat's sonar system, namely what it is like to perceive something with a bat's sonar.

Implications

Whether Mary learns something new upon experiencing color has two major implications: the existence of qualia and the knowledge argument against physicalism.

Qualia

First, if Mary does learn something new, it shows that qualia (the subjective, qualitative properties of experiences, conceived as wholly independent of behavior and disposition) exist. If Mary gains something after she leaves the room—if she acquires knowledge of a particular thing that she did not possess before—then that knowledge, Jackson argues, is knowledge of the quale of seeing red. Therefore, it must be conceded that qualia are real properties, since there is a difference between a person who has access to a particular quale and one who does not.

Refutation of physicalism

Jackson argues that if Mary does learn something new upon experiencing color, then physicalism is false. Specifically, the knowledge argument is an attack on the physicalist claim about the completeness of physical explanations of mental states. Mary may know everything about the science of color perception, but can she know what the experience of red is like if she has never seen red? Jackson contends that, yes, she has learned something new, via experience, and hence, physicalism is false. Jackson states:

It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.

Epiphenomenalism

Jackson believed in the explanatory completeness of physiology, that all behaviour is caused by physical forces of some kind. And the thought experiment seems to prove the existence of qualia, a non-physical part of the mind. Jackson argued that if both of these theses are true, then epiphenomenalism is true—the view that mental states are caused by physical states, but have no causal effects on the physical world.

Explanatory completeness
of physiology

qualia
(Mary's room)

epiphenomenalism

Thus, at the conception of the thought experiment, Jackson was an epiphenomenalist.

Responses

Objections have been raised that have required the argument to be refined. Doubters cite various holes in the thought experiment that have arisen through critical examination.

Nemirow and Lewis present the "ability hypothesis", and Conee argues for the "acquaintance hypothesis". Both approaches attempt to demonstrate that Mary gains no new knowledge, but instead gains something else. If she in fact gains no new propositional knowledge, they contend, then what she does gain may be accounted for within the physicalist framework. These are the two most notable objections to Jackson's thought experiment, and the claim it sets out to make.

Design of the thought experiment

Some have objected to Jackson's argument on the grounds that the scenario described in the thought experiment itself is not possible. For example, Evan Thompson questioned the premise that Mary, simply by being confined to a monochromatic environment, would not have any color experiences, since she may be able to see color when dreaming, after rubbing her eyes, or in afterimages from light perception. However, Graham and Horgan suggest that the thought experiment can be refined to account for this: rather than situating Mary in a black and white room, one might stipulate that she was unable to experience color from birth, but was given this ability via medical procedure later in life. Nida-Rümelin recognizes that one might question whether this scenario would be possible given the science of color vision (although Graham and Horgan suggest it is), but argues it is not clear that this matters to the efficacy of the thought experiment, provided we can at least conceive of the scenario taking place.

Objections have also been raised that, even if Mary's environment were constructed as described in the thought experiment, she would not, in fact, learn something new if she stepped out of her black and white room to see the color red. Daniel Dennett asserts that if she already truly knew "everything about color", that knowledge would necessarily include a deep understanding of why and how human neurology causes us to sense the "qualia" of color. Moreover, that knowledge would include the ability to functionally differentiate between red and other colors. Mary would therefore already know exactly what to expect of seeing red, before ever leaving the room. Dennett argues that functional knowledge is identical to the experience, with no ineffable 'qualia' left over. J. Christopher Maloney argues similarly:

If, as the argument allows, Mary does understand all that there is to know regarding the physical nature of colour vision, she would be in a position to imagine what colour vision would be like. It would be like being in physical state S_k, and Mary knows all about such physical states. Of course, she herself has not been in S_k, but that is no bar to her knowing what it would be like to be in S_k. For she, unlike us, can describe the nomic relations between S_k and other states of chromatic vision...Give her a precise description in the notation of neurophysiology of a colour vision state, and she will very likely be able to imagine what such a state would be like.

Surveying the literature on Jackson's argument, Nida-Rümelin identifies, however, that many simply doubt the claim that Mary would not gain new knowledge upon leaving the room, including physicalists who do not agree with Jackson's conclusions. Most cannot help but admit that "new information or knowledge comes her way after confinement," enough that this view "deserves to be described as the received physicalist view of the Knowledge Argument." Some philosophers have also objected to Jackson's first premise by arguing that Mary could not know all the physical facts about color vision prior to leaving the room. Owen Flanagan argues that Jackson's thought experiment "is easy to defeat". He grants that "Mary knows everything about color vision that can be expressed in the vocabularies of a complete physics, chemistry, and neuroscience," and then distinguishes between "metaphysical physicalism" and "linguistic physicalism":

Metaphysical physicalism simply asserts that what there is, and all there is, is physical stuff and its relations. Linguistic physicalism is the thesis that everything physical can be expressed or captured in the languages of the basic sciences…Linguistic physicalism is stronger than metaphysical physicalism and less plausible.

Flanagan argues that, while Mary has all the facts that are expressible in "explicitly physical language", she can only be said to have all the facts if one accepts linguistic physicalism. A metaphysical physicalist can simply deny linguistic physicalism and hold that Mary's learning what seeing red is like, though it cannot be expressed in language, is nevertheless a fact about the physical world, since the physical is all that exists. Similarly to Flanagan, Torin Alter contends that Jackson conflates physical facts with "discursively learnable" facts, without justification:

...some facts about conscious experiences of various kinds cannot be learned through purely discursive means. This, however, does not yet license any further conclusions about the nature of the experiences that these discursively unlearnable facts are about. In particular, it does not entitle us to infer that these experiences are not physical events.

Nida-Rümelin argues in response to such views that it is "hard to understand what it is for a property or a fact to be physical once we drop the assumption that physical properties and physical facts are just those properties and facts that can be expressed in physical terminology."

Ability hypothesis

Several objections to Jackson have been raised on the grounds that Mary does not gain new factual knowledge when she leaves the room, but rather a new ability. Nemirow claims that "knowing what an experience is like is the same as knowing how to imagine having the experience". He argues that Mary only obtained the ability to do something, not the knowledge of something new. Lewis put forth a similar argument, claiming that Mary gained an ability to "remember, imagine and recognize." In the response to Jackson's knowledge argument, they both agree that Mary makes a genuine discovery when she sees red for the first time, but deny her discovery involves coming to know some facts of which she was not already cognizant before her release. Therefore, what she obtained is a discovery of new abilities rather than new facts; her discovery of what it is like to experience color consists merely in her gaining new ability of how to do certain things, but not gaining new factual knowledge. In light of such considerations, Churchland distinguishes between two senses of knowing, "knowing how" and "knowing that", where knowing how refers to abilities and knowing that refers to knowledge of facts. She aims to reinforce this line of objection by appealing to the different locations in which each type of knowledge is represented in the brain, arguing that there is a true, demonstratively physical distinction between them.By distinguishing that Mary does not learn new facts, simply abilities, it helps to negate the problem posed by the thought experiment to the physicalist standpoint.

In response, Levin argues that a novel color experience does in fact yield new factual knowledge, such as "information about the color's similarities and compatibilities with other colors, and its effect on other of our mental states." Tye counters that Mary could have (and would have, given the stipulations of the thought experiment) learned all such facts prior to leaving the room, without needing to experience the color firsthand. For example, Mary could know the fact "red is more like orange than green" without ever experiencing the colors in question.

Earl Conee objects that having an ability to imagine seeing a color is neither necessary nor sufficient for knowing what it is like to see that color, meaning the ability hypothesis does not capture the nature of the new knowledge Mary acquires upon leaving the room. To show that ability is not necessary, Conee cites the example of someone who is able to see colors when she is looking at them, but who lacks the capacity to imagine colors when she is not. He argues that while staring at something that looks red to her, she would have knowledge of what it is like to see red, even though she lacks the ability to imagine what it is like. In order to show precisely that imaginative abilities are not sufficient for knowing what it is like, Conee introduces the following example: Martha, "who is highly skilled at visualizing an intermediate shade that she has not experienced between pairs of shades that she has experienced ... happens not to have any familiarity with the shade known as cherry red". Martha has been told that cherry red is exactly midway between burgundy red and fire red (she has experienced these two shades of red, but not cherry). With this, Martha has the ability to imagine cherry red if she so chooses, but as long as she does not exercise this ability, to imagine cherry red, she does not know what it is like to see cherry red.

One might accept Conee's arguments that imaginative ability is neither necessary nor sufficient for knowing what it is like to see a color, but preserve a version of the ability hypothesis that employs an ability other than imagination. For example, Gertler discusses the option that what Mary gains is not an ability to imagine colors, but an ability to recognize colors by their phenomenal quality.

Acquaintance hypothesis

Due to his dissatisfaction with the ability hypothesis, Earl Conee presents another variant. Conee's acquaintance hypothesis identifies a third category of knowledge, "knowledge by acquaintance of an experience," that is not reducible to factual knowledge nor to knowing-how. He argues that the knowledge Mary actually acquires post-release is acquaintance knowledge. Knowing an experience by acquaintance "requires the person to be familiar with the known entity in the most direct way that it is possible for a person to be aware of that thing". Since "experiencing a quality is the most direct way to apprehend a quality," Mary gains acquaintance with color qualia after release. Conee thus defends himself against the knowledge argument like this:

Qualia are physical properties of experiences (and experiences are physical processes). Let Q be such a property.
Mary can know all about Q and she can know that a given experience has Q before release, although—before release—she is not acquainted with Q.
After release Mary gets acquainted with Q, but she does not acquire any new item of propositional knowledge by getting acquainted with Q (in particular she already knew under what conditions normal perceivers have experiences with the property Q).

Tye also defends a version of the acquaintance hypothesis that he compares to Conee's, though he clarifies that acquaintance with a color should not be equated to applying a concept to one's color experience.

In Conee's account, one can come to know (be acquainted with) a phenomenal quality only by experiencing it, but not by knowing facts about it as Mary did. This is different from other physical objects of knowledge: one comes to know a city, for example, simply by knowing facts about it. Gertler uses this disparity to oppose Conee's account: a dualist who posits the existence of qualia has a way of explaining it, with reference to qualia as different entities than physical objects; while Conee describes the disparity, Gertler argues that his physicalist account does nothing to explain it.

The neural basis of qualia

V.S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard of the Center for Brain and Cognition at UCSD argue that Mary might do one of three things upon seeing a red apple for the first time:

Mary says she sees nothing but gray.
She has the "Wow!" response from subjectively experiencing the color for the first time.
She experiences a form of blindsight for color, in which she reports seeing no difference between a red apple and an apple painted gray, but when asked to point to the red apple, she correctly does.

They explain further: "Which of these three possible outcomes will actually occur? We believe we've learned the answer from a colorblind synesthete subject. Much like the theoretical Mary, our colorblind synesthete volunteer cannot see certain hues, because of deficient color receptors. However, when he looks at numbers, his synesthesia enables him to experience colors in his mind that he has never seen in the real world. He calls these "Martian colors." The fact that color cells (and corresponding colors) can activate in his brain helps us answer the philosophical question: we suggest that the same thing will happen to Mary."

Ramachandran and Hubbard's contribution is in terms of exploring "the neural basis of qualia" by "using pre-existing, stable differences in the conscious experiences of people who experience synaesthesia compared with those who do not" but, they note that "this still doesn't explain why these particular events are qualia laden and others are not (Chalmers' 'hard problem') but at least it narrows the scope of the problem" (p. 25).

Dualist responses

Jackson's argument is meant to support dualism, the view that at least some aspects of the mind are non-physical. Nida-Rümelin contends that, because dualism is relatively unpopular among contemporary philosophers, there are not many examples of dualist responses to the knowledge argument; nevertheless, she points out that there are some prominent examples of dualists responding to the Knowledge Argument worth noting.

Jackson himself went on to reject epiphenomenalism, and dualism altogether. He argues that, because when Mary first sees red, she says "wow", it must be Mary's qualia that causes her to say "wow". This contradicts epiphenomenalism because it involves a conscious state causing an overt speech behavior. Since the Mary's room thought experiment seems to create this contradiction, there must be something wrong with it. Jackson now believes that the physicalist approach (from a perspective of indirect realism) provides the better explanation. In contrast to epiphenomenalism, Jackson says that the experience of red is entirely contained in the brain, and the experience immediately causes further changes in the brain (e.g. creating memories). This is more consilient with neuroscience's understanding of color vision. Jackson suggests that Mary is simply discovering a new way for her brain to represent qualities that exist in the world. In a similar argument, philosopher Philip Pettit likens the case of Mary to patients suffering from akinetopsia, the inability to perceive the motion of objects. If someone were raised in a stroboscopic room and subsequently 'cured' of the akinetopsia, they would not be surprised to discover any new facts about the world (they do, in fact, know that objects move). Instead, their surprise would come from their brain now allowing them to see this motion.

Despite a lack of dualist responses overall and Jackson's own change of view, there are more recent instances of prominent dualists defending the Knowledge Argument. David Chalmers, one of the most prominent contemporary dualists, considers Jackson's thought experiment to successfully show that materialism is false. Chalmers considers responses along the lines of the "ability hypothesis" objection (described above) to be the most promising objections, but unsuccessful: even if Mary does gain a new ability to imagine or recognize colors, she would also necessarily gain factual knowledge about the colors she now sees, such as the fact of how the experience of seeing red relates to the physical brain states underlying it. He also considers arguments that knowledge of what it is like to see red and of the underlying physical mechanisms are actually knowledge of the same fact, just under a different "mode of presentation", meaning Mary did not truly gain new factual knowledge. Chalmers rejects these, arguing that Mary still necessarily gains new factual knowledge about how the experience and the physical processes relate to one another, i.e. a fact about exactly what kind of experience is caused by those processes. Nida-Rümelin defends a complex, though similar, view, involving properties of experience she calls "phenomenal properties".

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Monday, August 30, 2021

State terrorism

Definition

History

By country

China

France

India

Iran

Israel

Italy

Libya

Myanmar

North Korea

Pakistan

Russia/Soviet Union

South Africa

Spain

Sri Lanka

Syria

United Kingdom

United States

Uzbekistan

Criticism of the concept

Physicalism

Definition of physicalism

Supervenience-based definitions of physicalism

Realisation physicalism

Token physicalism

Reductionism and emergentism

Reductionism

Emergentism

A priori versus a posteriori physicalism

Other views

Realistic physicalism

Philosophical zombie

History

Types of zombies

Zombie arguments

Responses

Related thought-experiments

Knowledge argument

Thought experiment

Background

Implications

Qualia

Refutation of physicalism

Epiphenomenalism

Responses

Design of the thought experiment

Ability hypothesis

Acquaintance hypothesis

The neural basis of qualia

Dualist responses

Butane