Consciousness Live! S3 Ep 27 -Discussion with Daniel Stoljar

okay all right we are live uh so joining me today is a very very special guest that's daniel stoljar uh daniel uh thanks very much for joining me and i wonder if you would just say a little bit about who you are and what you do for those who might not know you yeah i'd be glad to thanks for having me richard this is really a fantastic series you're putting together here so uh thanks a lot for all your work for the philosophy of consciousness community so thanks my name's my name's daniel stolger i'm a professor of philosophy at the australian national university in canberra which is where i am right now and um i guess i i tend to say i work in two brad broad areas philosophy of mind broadly construed and at the moment metaphors would be broadly conspirate so in philosophy of mind i've been interested in lots of things about kind of mind body issues um formulations of physicalism uh questions about introspection and our access to conscious states um i've been doing some stuff on the language of consciousness trying to figure out how various of these key phrases and and uh constructions work like conscious of and what it is like and things like that um and then on the metaphilosophy stuff i've been interested in well it sort of blends into it because some of the positions i like in the philosophy of mine tend to get uh i think misinterpreted partly because of metaphilosophical issues but i've been interested in questions about i'm generally interested in things about you know what kinds of questions are philosophical how they how they're distinct from other kinds of questions where the same kinds of epistemological ideas apply in philosophy and supply in other areas and issues of that sort so that's roughly what i do very cool yeah a lot a lot of really running the gamut of stuff uh but but as there's as you say there's some contact because when you're discussing issues about physicalism versus dualism or idealism then the questions about progress tend to to come up because this this discussion that we've been having for quite some time anyone might wonder whether we can make some progress and so and i know that um you defend the idea that we do make progress on these questions yeah that's right so one of the ideas i mean this is a kind of a connection because in the topic of physicalism people often say oh there's or at least they seem to assume i don't exactly say it but they sort of assume it would he seem to assume that there's a there's a thing called the thesis of physicalism that you know right hobbs held or smart held or louis held or something democrat is held you know and uh and we can talk about whether it is true or not um and then there are people who deny it like cd broad or descartes or somebody or dave chalmers uh at least in some parts of his some parts of his work anyway but i tend to think that's actually a mistake and the the thesis changes over time and what what it really amounts to changes over time and that's actually important on the progress issue because once again people assume that there's a single thing right called you know the mind body problem or something and it's sort of wholly present in each moment that people discuss it even though maybe the outer clothes are different the words are different or something right the basic underlying problem is the same and if you think that then it's very easy to get yourself in a kind of pessimistic mood about progress because you think well uh you know we're talking about some problem it's presumably open otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it right if it's literally the same as the problem that was discussed 500 years ago then uh that problem has to be open too so therefore the whole thing is a history of an open problem yeah and it just looks terrible yeah that's right we're but if if you think oh that's that's a that's not quite true they're not really identical they're kind of they're actually a range of questions that are related to each other different from each other uh then that sort of image isn't right it's not the case that there's a single problem uh the different people have had in mind and have formulated slightly differently in fact there are different problems i think that's true in the case of physicalism as well so so one way you could think about this maybe is that like take democritus who i think of as like the arch physicalist and i know in your book you you you give him the honor of sort of formulating something which we could call physicalism and it's very clear it just turns out to be false um that the kind of atomism that he defended but that's that's an example of of progress as well uh on your view isn't it because we falsified that view so uh we we know or think we can be reasonably sure that physicalism like the kind that democrats had isn't something that's uh true of our world and that's a kind of progress yeah that's certainly a kind of progress i mean it's not that controversial that philosophy makes progress in that sense a lot of people say yeah okay we've made progress in the sense that we've established things that things are false um maybe we've established that the version of materialism that democratus advanced is false and so that's progress because that's a kind of progress and i obviously don't disagree with that i think that's true um though people who are usually present themselves as kind of pessimistic about progress and philosophy often accept that point they say ah there's progress in a sense on negative things but there's nothing positive or some other sort of thing there's something else that is supposed to happen and uh i um i'm more optimistic than that but for one thing i think the issue about negative progress is a bit misleading um while it's true of course that we've established that things like democracy's version of materialism is false that's not the only thing that happens i mean a lot of philosophical problems have uh have uh they sort of come in they sort of have a kind of form of a paradox roughly speaking so we've got a bunch of claims which independently are plausible but together form a contradiction right and if you say well we need to solve this problem but we're not allowed to say anything negative or if we say something negative that isn't real progress or something then what you've said is don't solve the problem because you've obviously got to say something negative if you've got a contradiction like that right so while i think while that's while you're absolutely right that is a kind of progress that's not a kind of progress that's kind of that controversial but what is controversial is people often remark that that's a kind of progress but then say ah but that isn't the real thing right that's always a bit puzzling to me yeah you got to start somewhere by clearing space at least at the beginning oh sure yes they can often be extremely important i don't obviously deny that yeah so on the sort of stepping back from the question of progress though so the thesis i think that you defend in your book is that basically any version of physicalism that's uh worth the name is false and then there's these other things but they're not quite they don't give you exactly what you want um the different you go through different ways of formulating physicalism so it actually turns out quite difficult to say what the thesis of physicalism is uh in a way that's you can't um rig up a possible world where intuitively physicalism is true but the thesis says that it isn't um but at the same time you also characterize yourself as a physicist of some sort in in other work of yours so i wonder like what's your considered view about the status of physicalism is it something that can that we can hold even if we can't define or i'm just curious like how these attitudes fit together yeah it's a good question i mean um um i guess i think this kind of uh you know loose and popular physicalism and then there's like strict and philosophical physicalism uh so sometimes when you say you're a physicalist you mean it in a kind of loose and popular sense and what you really mean is you don't you don't really think that like consciousness is a fundamental element of the world and that's i mean uh traditional kinds of dualists obviously enti think fundamentally they may not put it this way but that's a way of characterizing right what they believe that consciousness is a sort of fundamental element of the world and you know non-standard duelists like pansys or something they also think that consciousness is a sort of fundamental element of the world and if you deny that that's sort of usually kind of thought of as sufficient to be a physicalist and in that sense yeah i'm a physicist because i don't think there's any good reason to think that consciousness is a fundamental element of the world and that the arguments that people give for that conclusion uh go wrong in distinctive kind of ways um so that's in that sense yeah i'm i'm a physicalist but you could also mean physicalism in a sort of slightly different sense where you're really trying to pick up on a historical tradition where you have some picture about what the world like what the world is like you know you have some overall picture about what what what the world is like in its fundamental elements and you know like democritus that we were talking about before does does give you a picture like that he says look there are these fundamental things called atoms they have these properties they combine together and create all of the other things that we observe and um that's a kind of a that's that's a different commitment to the one about saying that consciousness isn't fundamental it's a kind of positive view about the nature of the world and contemporary physicalists obviously don't believe what democritus believe but they often do say that they they hold a position which is some sort of you know natural extension of that or or the natural heir to what he was trying to get at or something along those lines right and they give some positive account of the world and in that sense i i very much doubt that any version of that could any kind of positive proposal like that i think will be subject to the kind of critique i give in my i guess you're referring to my book about physicalism not that yeah sorry i was right that's all right but the um that yeah so there the idea is that any kind of propos any product proposal about the nature of the world which physicalism or materialism traditionally was is going to be subject to this problem that if you if you understand it one way it'll turn out to be false in possible situations when where materialism really should not be false and if you understand it in another way then it'll turn out to be true in situations in which materialism should definitely not be true and there's really just no way of getting around this but that doesn't stop me saying yeah as a matter that's true but if you ask me you know ordinarily if you're talking in philosophy of mind about whether you're a physical or a jewish that's normally code for do you think consciousness is fundamental and i don't so that's why i'm not and so you you don't think that um that sort of popular way of characterizing physicalism because i agree with you i think that's basically that would be enough to satisfy me as far as physicalism and about the mind goes yeah but you you don't think that's subject to the the kind of worries that you present in the book that you're gonna there'll be places no i don't actually i mean i don't think it's a terribly i mean it's not physicalism if by physicalism you mean a kind of positive theory of the world of the kind that democritus was giving it just says oh this particular feature namely consciousness isn't fundamental it's derivative not fundamental right and you don't think that but that doesn't give you a kind of there's not in the background overarching picture like nothing there's nothing um that consciousness is like on a par with other things that we find on around here isn't an overarching kind of in the background isn't there a picture uh there might be i mean of course you can hold something like that well i'm a little worried about naturalism just like i'm worried about physicalism and i'll tend to duck and weave if you ask me about it if you ask me about naturalism too um partly because it faces formulation questions of a somewhat similar sort right that materialism faces and once again there's sort of loose and popular naturalism where do you mean you know do you more or less think that you know your approach to the world has to be more or less evidence-based yes yeah that's very very but if you mean some much more specific thing then i'm liable to get a little bit you know much more worried about that so i mean but you might be right that if you if you what you're saying is that you know when people who say oh i think that consciousness isn't a fundamental thing do they have some picture in their heads as to what physic what the world is like i mean you're probably right as a from a psychological point of view they probably do have some picture of mark prabson in coat one or something i'm just pointing out that uh these these are two quite different issues yeah and uh i personally am pretty confident i'm actually pretty confident that physicalism isn't fundamental but i actually have no particular view about you know i don't have any positive characterization particularly about what the world is like how am i how am i supposed to do that yeah i guess what i was thinking was that the positive characterization is that it's non-mental oh i see well there are people like there there's the so-called via negative right exactly who doesn't say yes so that's right there are people uh jessica wilson is one and i guess barbara montero is another maybe david papado who hold views like this maybe you too i don't know actually um um and there's something definitely right about the via negativa i mean as i said often when people say their materialists what they fundamentally mean is that consciousness isn't fundamental and that sounds like saying there's no that sounds rather like in fact what jessica wilson says about uh about materialism but you can also wonder whether you can also take the via negative as a proposal about what phys what physical properties are namely their non-mental and that i think isn't very good if you're looking for an account of the an account which captures sort of traditional historically important materialist world views and the ways in which contemporary world views of the kind articulated you know that became dominant in the 20th century like smarts and lewis and so on right and what they have in common i mean they don't they don't just say that everything is non-mental because they want to rule out other things like say vitalism let's say right which isn't mental but it's not physical so that's a bit of a problem um so i mean when i cuz i yeah so one question i had when i was reading through all this and thinking about this was early on in your discussion you say look i'm going to set aside this uh distinction of materialism versus physicalism sort of and and some people will say well we'll use materialism for the historical view and the physicalism for the kind of contemporary view and you say well you know i don't that's kind of uh a rhetorical move you could make but i don't really see much reason for distinguishing between these two and part i i was picking up a little bit on that just now and what you were saying that basically you're saying there's this thesis and if you want to identify with the historical lineage here then we want to be using the words in the way that they were using it and so we want to find something a common between the two that is continuous but uh why not think that there's these two separate views like the current for you physicalism which uh appeals to has a different set of considerations and worries and um so forth and the historical materialism yeah and then and then you wouldn't have that kind of worry that you just were talking about that's true you can define a view and you can say it's called physicalism and it's distinct from materialism um sure you can define that view i mean actually the history of those two those two notions is quite interesting i mean physicalism comes was introduced by the logical positivists right who [Music] well or something close to it anyway it was something where the physical language is your base language fundamentally now of course it wasn't clear at least it's not clear to me when i read noirath and can't happen so on what the physical language is is it is it physics or is it ordinary languages about rocks and washing machines and things it's a completely unclear to me and in fact there's i think there's some disagreements among them on that sort of view and maybe there's disagreements over time as well but in any case um they meant by physicalism the idea that you would take something called a physical language as a base language and then they would do their positive thing uh and they didn't like the word materialism because that's connected with metaphysics and stuff right um which is bad so so that's that's like the original reason actually for distinguishing those labels and of course that that isn't a good reason now to distinguish them partly because none of us well no i mean none of us in in this in the generic sense you know maybe there are a few of us but you know nobody uh thinks that those distinctions are sort of in place now that materialism should be rejected because it's a kind of metaphysics or that right or that we should develop physicalism in this linguistic kind of context um but you're right that you could you could say i mean other people say yeah i'm going to use the word physicalism because materialism is associated with this old notion of matter right which [Music] which is present presumably in in um um democritus and other classical formulations um and we want to we want to extract away from that and that's that's true so you could talk about physicalism in that sense um and contemporary physicalists do do talk that way uh i mean i think there's some i mean i i don't disagree that you can formulate the views in that way i think it's not quite true to the at least to the rhetoric of some of the ways in which these things get discussed i mean somebody like say smart and lewis certainly first of all they were very keen on using the word materialism not right um and secondly the connection to mata is a bit odd i mean if you go back to descartes and you think okay he's supposed to be the archdualist okay well what was he denying was he denying materialism well maybe but he that whatever he was denying he didn't think of mata in the way that democritus thought of mata because for him mata was just extension so he didn't have that he precisely didn't have that traditional conception of matter that you find in democritus or lock or somebody so uh so so it becomes a bit hard actually if you if you try to if you try to say look materialism is the thing that uses a particular notion of matter and i'm going to say i'm going to use the word physicalism for this thing that's some sort of generalization of it i mean that that's fine but um if you say that they're completely separate then yeah then then you're not first you're not true to the way in which some of these people have talked which may or may not be a problem i suppose and secondly some of the historical cases are a bit hard to classify yeah yeah i guess i was thinking it wouldn't be such a big deal if it came out that you know locke wasn't a physicalist but you could call him a materialist or some other some other uh some other label and then um because it does seem like they're like well i don't know but this gets into the questions about like you know theory change do we want to keep the same terms or not so i understand the point that you're making um which is that some of these historical cases become hard to adjudicate here but um it just so well let me get so let me get off of this and ask you let me circle back around and ask about the thing because the kind of physicalism that you want to defend this idea that the fundamental property or nature of reality is not mental so already it seems to me like so you the way you present the the dialectic here is like you already take it for granted i think or not for granted but you're convinced let's put it that way you're convinced by this sort of standard conceivability arguments against traditional versions of physicalism so you think we need to to sort of expand out uh into things like resilient monism and things of that nature um so i i do wonder why you think because why you're convinced by the conceivability arguments so i wonder if you could say a little bit about what you're thinking about that is well yeah of course i mean there's various issues here i think um there's a kind of toxic mix of philosophical methodology and philosophy of mind and epistemology and various other things uh and dave calls it an unholy stew right unholy stew exactly um uh i'm sort of convinced i tell you why i i tell you why i'm partly i'm convinced by consider the conceivability argument against what i tend to think of is kind of standard or traditional materialism first because i do think that there are conceivability arguments that are sound in general so therefore i'm not inclined to reject an argument simply because it's a conceivability argument right and the the example i always give is the conceivability argument against behaviorism which is putnam's perfect actor argument right you take to be it's not often presented as a conceivability argument but i do think it is basically a conceivability argument it says it's conceivable that there's some behavioral duplicate of me that's psychologically different if that's conceivable and it's possible and if that's possible then behaviorism even in its weakest form not just its behaviorism historically was sometimes presented as a kind of translation semantic doctrine or something but even if you think of it in its weakest form that people sometimes call superveniant behaviorism that argument i think is a good argument against it and so if and i actually think that you know if you ask yourself how do you teach a philosophy of mind class you do often give arguments like that when you're explaining why behaviorism is wrong it's not that that's the only arguments you can give against behaviorism of course but that's um that's an argument that uh i i personally accept that argument and so so since that's a conceivability argument that means i accept at least one conceivability argument and so therefore if somebody so for example there are people who are kind of skeptical about conceivability reasoning in general they say oh it's ridiculous it's like you know you imagine stuff and then you kind of conclude something about the metaphysical natures of these things that's completely ridiculous um it's like as i it's like you know mathematics on the basis of toothache or something it's just ridiculous but i don't think that's right because that's what i just gave you is a conceivability argument which i take to be sound and so therefore there's at least one which is a good one now having said that i do think there's loads and loads of open questions about what the nature of conceivability reasoning is you know so you know chalmers has got one particular view about what that is other people like steve diablo have got completely different views about what that sort of reasoning amounts to and how best to give an account of it and i don't have a particular view about that uh i the crucial point for me is that that however whatever the story is it's got to have the result that this argument against the ben's behaviorism is a good argument and so far as i can tell it's a it's a conceivability argument so there you go now can i just stop for i know before you go on can i just ask one quick question so would you feel that way if it was the only argument against behaviorism because i mean i mentioned there are other ones and like i'm thinking like the chomsky style arguments and these other ones that uh just appeal to you know kind of competence and and what's intuitively how much data we get exposed to so if those weren't there and there were no other arguments against behaviorism you think this conceivability argument would be enough to convince us that it's false well i mean that of course depends on the other on other sorts of issues i mean if if god appears and told us that behaviorism is true i would say no that means that there's got to be something wrong with this argument so it's true there's a kind of one can kind of describe an epistemic situation in which if that were the only argument that uh that you know that may not be sufficient though i could also imagine a situation in which um that would be sufficient usually arguments come in packs so that uh if you've got a good argument about something other you can usually find some other sort of argument as well that's problematic um i guess the reason i'm thinking of this though is because in the physicalism case it seems like the the only kind of arguments that you have are conceivability arguments so it seems somewhat different than the behaviorism case um well i don't think that's true in i mean let's take let's take uh the let's take the cartesian version of materialism i mentioned before where he thinks that matter is just extension okay so if you you can formulate a version of materialism in terms of that notion it would be everything is a function of extension everything is grounded in extension or something right everything supervenes on extension that would be the kind of materialism i mean he of course didn't put it that way but that's roughly the kind of materialism that he was rejecting now you you could give a conceivability argument against that i can imagine somebody that's identical to me in respect of all properties that's that just have to do with extension in space and yet who has some different psychological feature from me um that looks like a pretty good argument and it looks in fact it looks about as good as the argument against behaviorism it seems to me okay so that's a good argument is it the only argument against that kind of materialism no we also have empirical arguments uh to the effect that and we have intuit we have empirical arguments that the physics that makes it plausible that uh that matter is extension isn't a terribly good physical theory right so that's a good argument against that kind of uh materialism um the the you know another argument is just the intuitive argument that it's got to do with physics it's just don't we have a notion of matter according to which it's more than just extension in space um that that's an or that's also an argument against that kind of view and uh that those are all it's not like we only so that's a version of that's a that's a historically important version of materialism it's not the one that you know people these days discuss of course right but just as descartes is a historically important version of dualism well then presumably the kind of materialism he was opposing has to be historically important too right and that that version looks as if we've got arguments against it which are of a materialist kind and we've got sorry of a conceivability kind and we've got other arguments too and i think that's roughly the case i actually think the same is true in um in the contemporary setting as well so if you you think take but i think people don't in the case of somebody like dave dave chalmers who defends obviously the conceivability argument people don't focus enough i think on what he means by the physical exactly yeah um and it turns out that when you look at that question in detail and you go through his work on sort of structuralism and so forth which is extremely closely connected to this right he means something remarkably abstinent by the physical he means something that can be definable in just using two buckets of vocabulary the logical and mathematical bucket and the causal and nomic bucket and by the way in the causal and nomic bucket all you have are expressions like causes it is a law that maybe disposes things like that and so then physicalism is is something that um supervenes on ev everything supervenes on a bunch of truths which are formulable in in that limited vocabulary right and that that seems to me to be uh a rather implausible view independently of conceivability reasoning about consciousness um the idea that absolutely everything is a is a function of truth formulable in that that limited vocabulary um the the wonder isn't so much that you can't extract consciousness from that the wonder is that you could extract anything at all from that apart from because it's all structural uh it's structurally the specific sense of structure is very specific sense so is this because you think it leaves out the intrinsic properties or do you think that even if you don't go into the debate about intrinsic properties there's still something implausible about this formulation well just just take an ordinary physical statement like uh you know that i'm that uh that there's a desk in the room well that's got to be made true by some fact that has the form there is an a and there is there is an x and there is a y and x has logical property blah blah and stands in logical relation to y and causes y and there's a law that covers x and y that's all you've got right and those things have to add up have to somehow ground the fact that there's a desk in the room uh that and you find that that applies because that doesn't seem that fun well you don't think so i mean how do you get the how do you get just the ordinary physical nature of the world i mean this is yeah go ahead no you go ahead well yeah i mean one could have a debate about that i can see that i suppose but i i'm just i guess from my own point of view yeah i find that really quite implausible and as i said it wouldn't be surprising that you couldn't get consciousness out of that because you don't think i mean by the way bears out of that yeah i mean in in the i'm not sure actually that dave himself thinks he can get tables and chairs out of that because remember he he thinks that phenomenal expressions are also in the base so and you need them to to get other things apart from these merely topic neutral accounts so uh yeah i mean i read your paper on the chalmers v chalmers um i think that's connected to some of the things we're talking about right now it is here so because the way he defines structuralism about space is in terms of the kinds of experiences that a certain thing will will cause you think that there are some that this is a way of diffusing part of the argument in a way that makes it problematic for him to hold the conceivability arguments because here seems to be an example of some structural truths that entail a phenomenal truth namely the kind of experience of space or left or right or something like that is that basically the way of putting the problem yeah the problem in that paper is roughly that if you if you build experiences into your definition of of the physical via your definition of space time then yeah then then it becomes rather difficult to see how you can advance a conceivability argument right because the conceivability argument is supposed to be that you can imagine a world that's physically the same as this one but lacks experiences but it experiences a build into the definition of what the physical is it becomes harder to to make that point now there are ways of making that point but just uh so by itself that what i just said doesn't put that much pressure on his position but uh what i tried to do is to argue that the obvious ways of blocking that don't work um but the yeah so that so that's that's the issue there but in the background is this issue about what how how how a kind of dualist position of the kind that dave is interested in developing pr what it presupposes about the notion of the physical right what did you make of his response to that which was i mean i've got just a little bit of a sidetrack from our original i'll come back to that in a second but i am curious about uh his hit what you what your response to his response was which basically was to kind of take a move from your playbook and and use it against you i think because he was like well i could you distinguish two notions of a physical uh predicate here or property so one is this kind of ordinary one and one is this kind of theoretical one and then the ordinary one there's a gap for and the theoretical one there isn't uh which i basically is what i think his response to this argument to be is have you seen it or do you what do you what do you have seen it yes i'm i'm a bit yeah i'm not quite sure i i have sort of formulated a view about how to respond to it i mean it sounds to me as if what he wants to say is that there's some sort of technical notion of the physical according to which it really is just equivalent to these topic neutral notions right and then okay so but that that fundamentally means since he's formulating his physicalism the kind of thing he's rejecting in terms of that notion uh then he is uh that's then he's saying well what what what i have what i have proved with my conceivability argument is that a picture of the world according to which everything is a function of logic and mathematics on the one hand and just just enriched with it is a law that and causes on the other that that's all it is right that's false and you've got to add consciousness okay i i just i quite i kind of agree with him that it's false but uh consciousness not simply for the consciousness part yeah so because i think this is kind of gets to something i wanted to ask you about as well about the nature of the conceivability arguments because you know like for for someone like me who i i consider myself uh friendly to physicalism i i don't know if i think it's true but i said certainly i guess my considered opinion is i don't think it's been refuted by conceivability arguments um and and the reason why i think that is because i think there are conceivability arguments on the other side um for for physicalism or against property realism and these things and so one of these are what i call zombies and and keith frankish has a related notion sort of scott sturgeon so you see this pen so does cardi by like a bailout actually so you see this idea pop up every now and again but basically the idea um is that so it seems to me at least that you could take the base that physical that that chalmers talks about that dave talks about say okay if that's what you mean by the physical can is it conceivable that there's a possible world where just that is instantiated and yet there's also consciousness um it seems that seems conceivable to me i don't see a contradiction in it i i don't think if there were one i think someone would have um pointed out at least the general area where it might be and no one's done that yet so it seems perfectly conceivable to me that there be this kind of chalmers world that's totally just physical as a totality clause whatever you like but yet also has consciousness so you think that's inconceivable well i think those arguments yeah those arguments are super interesting um i don't have a kind of worked out view about exactly what's going on with those arguments but i think here's a test for a position like the one you just described take take a conceiva take a conceivability argument that kind of isn't controversial like the one i mentioned about behaviorism or the one i mentioned about materialism formulated with descartes physics right uh they're sort of helpful kind of laboratories because we're sort of unencumbered by this issue about oh my god what happens if physicalism is false or something yeah because we already know we already think these things are false and moreover as i mentioned we think they're false because of conceivability reasoning uh okay so now we could ask well does the kind of move that you just mentioned work there too so suppose i said to you look it's conceivable that there's someone the same as me in respect of all matters of cartesian extension and yet uh doesn't feel as i do now okay so so then you go through it and then you refute materialism formulated in that way uh using a conceivability reasoning well the kind of line that you're imagining would be ah but i can also conceive positively that just this extension just this fact about extension uh is identical to some fact about consciousness and then you proceed and then you say aha now i have this kind of meta problem that i've got one one line of argument going for one conclusion and i have another kind of line of argument going for the other conclusion and you get the feeling that there must be something wrong with conceivability reasoning because it can get us into this pickle right um but i guess in that but it's not that's not exactly well that's perfectly true that you can no no maybe not but i guess i'm trying to make the point that if you take an argument like that which is a conceivability argument which we accept and then you construct this uh alternative shadow argument which uh doesn't say i can imagine extension in the absence of consciousness but says i can imagine extension being identical with consciousness if you say that and then you go on but i guess i i i'm not so sure that you can i could you can certainly formulate it in words but whether you mean that first premise is true isn't very plausible i guess that's the point i'm looking up to yeah i mean isn't that exactly what locke did though in a way i mean lock is very i mean if you just look at the historical record i think that's one way of of looking at what locke's point was was that look we have no it's conceivable that consciousness and matter go together it's conceivable that they don't go together god could have super added it he might not have um so that the the even given their notions of what material or physicalism was it was still an open question and certainly you know someone like hobbs i think yeah hobbs was that's exactly what he was imag what he thought was the case was that it was just extension motions in the in the brain or whatever that's what the mind or consciousness was i i think he thought it was conceivable that that was true and he didn't think there's a contradiction there so so i guess my because my point is not that conceivability arguments are bad my point is that they only you only know which one is the good one after the fact and that's why in this case i think our we already know which one is the good one um so we can say yeah well this thought conceivability arguments against descartes is pretty convincing because we sort of have antecedent knowledge that it worked out a certain way um and but if we were in locke's position we would know or hobbs position we wouldn't know which one i mean i think hobbs would be perfectly within his rights to sort of respond in this way given the way descartes argues and at that point in time they wouldn't have known which conceivability argument was really the good one because guys sort of accept the idea that yeah i like conceivability arguments generally but so if you if you think zombies are conceivable then dualism uh then physicalism of a certain sort's falsified but if you think the things i call zombies are the physical duplicates are conceivable then dualism is the falsified thing so at this point can conceivability arguments by themselves tell us which is which that's what i'm kind of questioning not that they're bad but but that they don't point in a direction until after you already know for other reasons what one view is suspicious or yeah i see i see so it's not just that they're they're should be rejected entirely but they're sort of bad in a sense though because they don't tell us in advance they don't tell us they can't sort of settle some question that's the kind of point that i'm yeah yeah i see i mean on the hobbs um day cut thing i mean one thing that's a bit puzzling is of course they had different views about the physical because hobbs was an atomist right descartes wasn't so the so once you are kind of super critical about the you know what uh leopold stubenburg calls the south pole of the mind body problem the body bit once you become you know hypocritical about that you begin to worry that the hobbs descartes thing issue isn't really joined anyway um um and it could be that that's what's going on when if you don't know what if you don't know what the physical is then then there's a sense in which you could perhaps imagine that consciousness was just the physical that god could super add it but in the case of descartes notion of extension he there's nothing to learn about the physical he knows exactly what it is right and so if you just if you fix the notion of the physical in that sense and you understand it in the way that deca had in mind that it looks as if you can't construct this these pairs of conceivability arguments uh about that and i actually think something is true similarly in in in the chalmers set up because in the chamber's setup the notion of the physical is almost cartesian in the sense that it's it's so thin that we know perfectly well what it is right uh and so it's harder to then construct these i hadn't thought really about this that's an interesting question but it's i think it'd be harder to construct the zombie uh what was it schmomby's or shambi zombies yeah right uh anyway these two the these sort of uh arguments which um kind of shadow each other and so then you get the conclusion which you're aiming at which is that not so much as you said not so much that considerability arguments are bad but certainly that there's some pretty big limitation on how they can be used right yeah so i guess i just don't see the because if i i mean just taking the kind of chalmers base for granted if it gives a complete account if you can get from there via something that's the necessitation or scrutability thesis or whatever however you know you want to flesh the picture out if you can get from those limited base facts to claims about tables and chairs um then i think you can also get the claims about brains and if you can do that then you can get the consciousness so i i guess the the main issue is whether you can get the tables and chairs because that's where you're already skeptical um but it's i mean i don't know it seems conceivable to me that you could do that in principle um so i mean there's also an issue there's an issue here about what the word conceivable means yeah i mean negative conceivability right yeah so i tend to actually think that negative conceivability isn't a terribly good guide to possibility anyway okay and it's it's really imaginability that matters so that in the case of in the putnam case for example it's not simply that you can't see a contradiction in that or that uh or that you can't a priori deduce that somebody's in pain from information about their behavior it's that you can imagine a case in which someone behaves just as you do and yet doesn't feel as you do right that's the that seems to me the strongest version of these arguments um and that's the one which uh yeah that's the one which seems to me to have most force yeah i mean so when when dave talks about this stuff he says all he needs is negative conceivability for the yes he does yeah so so that's why i was focusing on that but of course he he means by negative conceivably he means you can't you can't rule it out on ideal rational reflection right and yeah so uh so after the fact like a lot of people i tend to get worried about what ideal how many how many facts are you know it's a bit like the creepy thing about you know stuffing your your brain full of facts how many facts do you have to stuff your brain full to go to get to this amazing ideal state yeah exactly i mean that's that's obviously a problem um but uh whereas imaginability isn't like that it just okay you can imagine a case that's it yeah so i mean i still think it's imaginable i mean maybe we can we can get off this uh at this point but i mean i still think that i can imagine you know that we have a brain that functions in the way that i do and then there's consciousness with no non-physical properties i mean that seems imaginable to me um but so i i've never found the the idea that it's so hard to con i mean it's hard to understand like i get that like if you just sort of stipulate why is how could it be i get those kind of worries like how could it be the case that you know this experience is the brain state but that doesn't so that seems to me a request for explanation but um you know maybe we can't explain it but it doesn't seem to me that that means we can't conceive of it or imagine it uh we just imagine something that we don't know how it got to be that way seems to be something we can do we can imagine you know are there unanswerable questions yeah i think i could i can picture that even if i can't picture what the question is but you don't think you don't think i mean so that's why i was asking at the beginning about sort of classical materialism and the conceivability arguments because it seems like you already you say yes i accept that these arguments are good enough to set aside sort of traditional physicalism and we should expand our notions here um and so i would that's why i brought all this up because to me i want to balk at that step already i don't want to say conceivability arguments are badass i just i wonder why given that we have this that no one has shown what's wrong with the other side of the picture and given that all there are conceivability arguments why we should why we should sort of be pushed in one direction as opposed to sort of well as i say i don't it depends what version of physicalism you're discussing but mostly i think it isn't true actually that i mean there are the there's two issues here i think one is this what to say about the zombie zombie issue and i agree that's a difficult that's a difficult one there's another issue though about whether conceivability reasoning is the only kind of reasoning we have available to us to kind of attack materialism and i think that does depend a lot on what materialism really amounts to right um and so i mean as i mentioned the the cartesian version of materialism that isn't true the kind of version of materialism that dave is trying to formulate i don't think that's true either i think there are other arguments against that take the version that take the version of materialism that people like lewis and smart adopted which is different again from the other two that i mentioned right because they basically said oh what we're going to do is take contemporary physics as as lewis says at one point perhaps somewhat improved yeah and and uh treat that as a kind of uh you know a full story about nature and i guess i that seems like a completely remarkable thing for anybody to believe regardless of consciousness yeah so i i don't believe i don't think it i don't i think once you you see once you once you kind of really focus on what materialism is the idea that conceivability arguments based on consciousness could refute it isn't that striking right they think it's refutable by other things they're less ambitious well they just seem yeah i mean unless you really idealize and you say okay i really mean the full physics of the world whatever that is okay but then then we know that there are problems with that too not not so much because um i don't think it's that plausible you've got a conceivability argument against that because you conceivability arguments have these epistemic requirements you have to kind of really understand what what you're talking about when you're talking about worlds that are physically the same and if you just mean if you have a kind of whatever it takes account then you can't you can't formulate such an argument so exactly so i tend to think that if you actually formulate what physicalism is in the way that people like dave have done or descartes did or that smart or lewis did then each of those positions i tend to think they can be i think that conceivability arguments involving consciousness refute them or at least put them under a lot of pressure i agree there's lots of questions like the ones you've phrased but so you could refute them with conceivability arguments about tables and chairs right could you or is that something you couldn't do so on the way you're setting it up it's like okay so we could imagine a chalmers world that has all the physical base there that he specifies but no tables well you could certainly i mean it depends on the kind of argument i mean yeah if all you know about the world uh i tend to put this not so much in terms of conceivability reasoning but in terms of knowledge arguments style reasoning maybe that's a bit maybe that's a question about that i see a connection because both of our priority i mean if you sort of say okay you tell me about a possible world and you describe it completely to me and the sentences that you use the only non-logical vocabulary in those sentences are causes and it is a law that and everything else is logic okay just to make it explicit yeah you tell me so basically you're saying there is an x and there is a y and x causes y oh and there's a there's a z and z does something else and that's all you got okay and that's what you told me about the world now so now i have okay now is there a is there a desk in that world you ask me but what am i supposed to say [Laughter] the only answer is i don't know yeah okay now that's a that's a knowledge argument that i just gave you because it says okay i i i i have in this certain description of if if materialism were true in the form that he that he has in mind there then yeah you should be able to work out our priori whether or not there's a tape in that in there so you don't buy the cosmoscope kind of argument because that's i mean so you need a computer in there obviously because it'd be too much for a person but if you had a giant computer that could read that sentence and then render like a virtual environment for you you don't that doesn't seem conceived i mean that seems conceivable well you need to be careful i mean the the i mean i think the the the exact the the exact vocabulary of the bass language in in dave's book on this and his discussion he goes through different proposals as to what the base language can be i'm now talking about an extremely abstinent uh version of the base language now it could be that there's some much less abstinence version of the base language according to which a cosmos scope might do it and the only basically the only problems with we just don't have enough memory power or computing power to do this but we could either fill out the base yeah but but i what i'm trying to i guess what i'm convinced of is i don't care i don't care whether you're laplace's demon if if you if all you know about the world the possible world that we're describing is exactly what is the is you give me a description of that world in that limited vocabulary and then you ask me you know is there a table or chair in that world i mean it's i can't see what you're saying yes i'm sort of that bit that what i just that sort of little sound yeah it's not the incredulous stairs uh the [Laughter] um the you know bewildered grunt it's like what do you do with all of this information right yeah i mean i think it's i mean maybe he doesn't really mean it that in that abstemious way and that's fine maybe he doesn't and as i said he certainly discusses other possibilities right um and so of course you know even dave by the way agrees that if you just restricted it to logic and mathematics what i'm saying is absolutely true right because that's like the newman problem basically right human problem is it's not the same exactly but it's it's a very closely related point to the newman point which is that if you just limit yourself to logical and mathematical notions then you just haven't said anything about the world any world at all that's big enough fundamentally will make what you're saying true right um and so you need like facts at least yeah you may be needing dexical facts but here what we're talking about is enriching it to uh include phenomenal well if you include phenomenal that's different what i'm talking about at the moment is just taking something like logical and beginning with the kind of resilient picture where you've just got logic and mathematics right then you add a few expressions like causes and it is the law of it by the way they as far as i know they were already included in russell's base because he thought of them as kind of logical because he thought of i think he thought of causes i don't know i'm not actually a good enough scholar of russell to know this but what i suspect is that he thought of them as something basically because they're connected to conditionals and generalizations and so forth the notion of cause isn't uh isn't sort of an extra thing anyway right so so of course we don't think of causing that we think of it as an extra thing but um i mean i guess if if you so there's a kind of i mean i don't want to belabor this point because i understand what you're saying and i and i like the healthy dose of skepticism as healthy dose of skepticism um but i guess the kind of you know hand wavy ideas well look you know we have a picture in physics right now like the standard model where if you sort of model it as like a giant quantum field theory and maybe some string theory thrown in there behind um well then you can sort of wave your hands and say oh yeah and then there's you know um decoherance will sort of de-fuzzy the picture for us and so you can kind of see a path from the completely abstract physical model we have to answering a question about whether there's a table or a chair um it would be you know boiled down to the question whether a certain mathematical question about t coherence and a bunch of superpositions and blah blah blah that'd be very complicated um but granted that's hand wavy but i mean conceivable path where that comes out to be or that could be done well yeah i mean there's a conceivable path meaning there's a series of inferences that one might make yeah but but it isn't the issue isn't so much whether it would be if you told me that the world has this structural description in other words a description just in this limited vocabulary it would be a good inference to assume that it has a table that there's a table in the world well maybe i mean maybe but the the that that's a separate matter because the the kind of positions we're talking about mean that it would it's not just that it's a good inference it's something that you can work out up to resuscitated yeah right yeah yeah no i see so all you need to all you need to get be skeptical about it is to just get feel that it wouldn't be so clear that you can it would still be an open question even for a you know laplace's demon or a kind of mary or in other words an idealized rational agent who was acquainted with this thing whether they could then figure out that there was a table so so what on your view then do we have to add to the to the this kind of austere base in order to make a picture plausible well i mean i think you've got to add no i mean there's got to be loads of non-logical vocabulary what exactly it is i don't know it might be it might be lots of things in physics you might need sort of mass and charge and so on and maybe you need uh you know maybe you need things like wood and maybe you need things like legs and things like that legs of a table i mean yeah you know so uh yeah it's sort of like i i don't know i don't know what you have to add i just think that that isn't enough that's all and then ultimately also it's got to be whatever you add is not mental and then that preserves physicalism so if you add things like legs and tabletop that's okay as long as well if you're worried at the moment i'm not like if if we're thinking about i at the moment notice that what we're doing is formulating a kind of physicalism and asking whether the existence of tables refutes it right [Laughter] so we haven't even got to consciousness or anything right exactly but you should change that you should change the the name of the show to type tables live yeah exactly [Laughter] yes well well well noted tables live coming soon [Laughter] yeah but i mean ultimately though if you to keep that bigger picture in mind though that's what you're saying is that so you may need to expand it um to give it a fighting chance of being realistic but as long as you don't include things in that or that are mental so as long as the base doesn't include phenomenal truths or facts or properties then you can still preserve uh something that we would call physicalism and that you would want to defend yes and also you you're going to include i mean if you mean what i would think is you've got to include the fundamental facts of the world whatever they are tables i'm i'm pretty sure they're not fun tables are not not fundamental okay tables are derivative objects now that means that there's some arrangement there's some arrangement of the fundamental elements of the world whatever they are that kind of add up to tables so you've got to add that whatever that is now i don't know what that is if you ask me what is that you've in effect asked me to tell you what according to me are the fundamental elements of the world yeah and i'm and i'm here to tell you that i am not here to tell you that how could i possibly tell you that i mean it's kind of amazing that the people in philosophy of mind think that somehow their professional business to say what the fundamental elements of the world are that's the kind of extraordinary thing it is it's true and i personally am not gonna do it you're standing up like taking the hard the hard stance here but you know actually that brings me because there is one um answer that people typically give to that and that's the idea of revelation um which is i know that you've you've this isn't something i read in a paper of yours but i saw your lecture on this for the moscow thing i was telling you about but anyway so this is something like philip gough defends that uh we can know the sort of intrinsic nature or something like that close to it uh based on introspection and you you think that doesn't work so while you want to defend the traditional conceivability arguments you don't think they really are going to succeed in terms of uh when recast in terms of revelation and that's part of why yeah somebody like yeah somebody like philip i mean he's not alone actually but he's a kind of forceful on this point and he he thinks that first of all that revelation is true so what is revelation it's something like if you have an experience then you're at least you're in a position to know its essence or something he also thinks that that's somehow presupposed in the inconceivability reasoning um and so i yeah i think that that isn't true that uh that i don't think that revelation is true and i don't think it's presupposed in conceivability reasoning um someone like david lewis actually held a view that's kind of interestingly related to that he didn't think it was true but he did think it was as he says built into folk psychology which means somehow if you do the sort of psychology of human beings properly it'll turn out that we all agree to revelation i mean he gave the most amazing reason for that too which is that philosophers think it's obvious which is well only one kripke thinks it's obvious yeah right only one philosopher exactly was obviously a very very good philosopher but yes yeah so you would you would think you need a little bit more of an evidence base for that yeah exactly yeah yeah those are those those are the days yeah right exactly it was a simpler time back then oh my gosh marvelous um uh yeah so uh he and um i guess i yeah i try to argue against that um by saying i mean there's a lot of technical issues about what counts as knowing the essence of a thing right but i tend to understand it as there's something called there's something which is like the totality of the essential properties of the thing and then there's and so that if you had an experience then you would know at least you'd be in a position to know the totality of its essential properties so that's what revelation entails as i understand it right and then to argue against that you all you really need to do is to point out that you know there can be an essential property of an experience which is such that if you uh you had the experience you'd still be in the in the dark as to whether the experience had that property and one way to do that is to just think about theories you know there are different theories about what um what what we what what experiences are but you know one of them might be right in the in those lectures that you're referring to i sort of took just took as an illustration you know the sense statement theory not that the sensitive theory is true but it's just like well known as a theory so you sort of say well suppose it were true that when you had an experience of a red thing you were in fact acquainted with a red sense datum okay i suppose that was true that's clearly got to be an a essential feature of the experience right if it's true uh be pretty weird for a sense that in theorists to say oh no that's just a contingent a company the whole point is that that what they're trying to do is to say what the is it where the structure of the experience is what it is in its inner nature that's what they're trying to do right and of course many of us disagree with that but anyway it's it's it's just worth having it as a kind of cartoonish theory okay suppose that just and now suppose just for the sake of argument that was true but when i when i did have an experience of a blue thing i was acquainted with a blue sense datum right well what revelation says is that you could know the sense that in theory because you could know that your experience had that structure simply by having the experience and i would have thought that even the sense that i'm theorist doesn't agree with that yeah exactly instead of theorist thinks you've got to you know work your way through ge moore's lectures on perception or something or work your way through the you know the argument from hallucination or whatever it is or or i don't know frank jackson's book from the 1970s about about the structure of perceptual reports and how you can't account for that structure unless you believe this in state and theory you've got to have some big argument in other words exactly for the sense of theory you can't just see a blue thing or have an experience of a blue thing and so that but so that's why the that's why it just seemed doesn't seem plausible to me at all uh the idea of revelation because basically the idea is that if revelation were true then we would be able to tell by introspection that sense datum theory was or was not true but that's something like you know absurd or something but not absurd but i mean highly not intuitively the case at all uh so we should reject revelation yeah so i i mean yeah one question i have is wonder whether you can give a restricted definition and still keep something of it um so i i imagine yeah so i imagine someone like philip kind of responding by saying look well revelation is a thesis about um the the experiential character of the the state in question so that what gets revealed to you is like the what it's like part um yeah exactly now he does it does say that right and so maybe not these other features but that's a that's enough to ground an argument against materialism i guess yeah that's what he says i mean for example um as i said let's suppose that the essence of a thing is the totality of its essential properties right well you can see immediately that you've got the notion of the partial essence which is just some of the essential properties not the totality of the essential properties right and maybe what's true is that when you have an experience you know some of the essential properties of the experience but not all and so for example when you have the experience suppose again that the sense that in theory is true and when you have it when you perceive a blue thing you're actually related to some blue sense data okay so maybe when you have the experience you don't know that essential property but you may know some other essential property and that might be sufficient the problem is that that by itself doesn't put any pressure on materialism because the materialists can say yeah it's exactly like the materialist says actually the inner structure of this thing isn't isn't as the sense that him theorist says it's it's you know having some brain state or something right and that's the essential nature that would be a thing that a certain kind of materialist might say and they might say yeah that that's an essential that's the essential feature of it you can't know but you can know this other thing that is that it feels a certain way materialists don't deny that experiences feel a certain way right so they uh or if they did then we wouldn't need to be having the discussion we've just been having right exactly it would be obvious that the views are wrong so uh so they don't deny that so that the thing is that partial so in other words there's this notion of partial revelation which is not defined in terms of all of the essential properties but simply some of them right uh that there is a notion like that and philip discusses it uh the thing about partial rev the first thing to say about partial revelation is that it just doesn't have any of the philosophical consequences that full revelation does right uh so it isn't actually a terribly interesting thesis it doesn't you could still discuss whether it's true of course and somebody might think it's even that isn't true i mean a skeptic about essential properties for example might even reject it but it's but regardless of whether it's true or false it doesn't on the face of it have uh the same sort of consequences what philip does is he he thinks there's a kind of a bridge from partial revelation to full revelation right about a specific sub feature yeah exactly so he seems to he seems to think that um suppose you uh suppose you suppose partial revelation was true of something so that or of an experience so when you had the experience you knew some of the essential properties of the experience but not all what philip thinks is that the properties which constitute that partial essence the ones that you know in virtue of having experience revelation has to be true of those properties right so as it were it's sort of like if partial revelation is true of something then full revelation is true of some nearby thing that's the basic move right right and uh that doesn't seem to me to be very plausible because it's sort of like saying oh if i suppose i know of human beings that they have a certain essential property like they're rational i suppose i mean actually that given given recent history you might worry that that is not in fact human beings but let's go back again to the good old days and that was an essential property of human beings right cool yeah um uh um [Music] the sort of position that that philip i think is trying to advance would have the following consequence that if you knew so that's roughly like partial revelation with respect to being human that is you know some of the essential properties you don't know other essential properties right like maybe they haven't maybe there's something about the necessity of origin or something that you don't know about but that's an essential property of human beings so you know this thing that they're rational but not other things see partial revelation is true uh in the sense that you know some of the essential properties of humans but not all okay what philip then thinks is that oh that means that something like full revelation or you have to be completely cognizant of of all of the essential properties of rationality if you know that humans are rational right that's just not true because you can know that you can know or believe that humans are rational and still think there's lots of essential properties of rationality um that we don't know that uh we don't know i mean so is that is that um because being rational is not a phenomenal i mean so if you just do it phenomenal properties do you still get that same worry uh well let's see with let's suppose i said uh okay i suppose i'm in pain and partial revelation is true of pain so therefore i know some of the essential features of pain but not all right what's what's the essential feature of pain that i know which um uh uh what's the essential feature of playing that i know well perhaps the essential feature is it's a kind of a feeling it's a kind of feeling right so i know that it's a kind of feeling so now take the notion of feeling or kind of feeling let's say what philip thinks i think is that full revelation must be true of that you must know all of the essential properties of a fear of of a feeling but that isn't the case in fact we could use the same point because we could say well if you're the sense datum theorist then you think feelings consist in you know being acquainted with the sense that and too it's just that the difference between pains and color sensations has to do with what sense that you're acquainted with right but you might yeah but i guess but see that's not limited enough because i mean i don't want to defend revelation because i don't believe that is true either but still i i wonder so isn't the thesis that what's revealed is the phenomenal nature like the experiential thing well but what it's like what it's like for you to have it that's what he thinks is re so the way i write his argument is look when i have a pain i know what it's like to have a pain and i can tell from what it's like to have the pain that it's not a physical thing that it's not like having a c-fiber firing so therefore they're distinct i mean that's roughly the way his argument works right and i'm not sure if these kind of objections really get at that or maybe they're missing it so i think the argument works by saying that when you have a experience you know the full essence of the experience but you don't suppose suppose that materialism was true uh then of course it would have some physical essence and you don't know that so therefore it can't have a physical effect essence that's the strategy but but see though but the only reason i'm balking at this is because i mean i know that that people like phillip they accept you know he's a pan psychist but and so you can have different version of it like constitutive or reduc reductive or non-productive and so forth you have all these different versions and on one version of it you have like the phenomenal property of my pain is made up by these micro phenomenal properties which are distinct from pain but somehow form pain so you don't can't know that from an introspection that's a good point that's an essential feature of the experience as well and there we go yeah and but he he so i brought this up with him and sort of and said well why doesn't rep risen revelation in tension with that part of the view right and his his answer is oh because it just tells you what it's like for you to have your pain not like what it's so you can still sort of know that it's experiential in its nature that it's intrinsically experiential even if you don't know like what the intrinsic micro qualities are um so so it seems like he has to accept that there's some essential properties that we don't have access to introspectively um while still remain while maintaining that there is some property that we do have revelation with respect to and that's just what it's like for me to have the pain yeah i mean i i i agree with you about this i think it's uh i mean revelation seems to me to be whatever else you say about pan psychism it looks as if it's inconsistent with revelation right so that can be true even if you don't like panzerkism or revelation of course so because if revelation were true you would have to know that your experience was made up of these micro experiences right if it was and you don't know that just as you don't know if materialism is true that it's made up of you know cells and things exactly so uh so that's right so that's a bit of a problem for people like philip who like both revelation and pan psychism yeah um because i've read his book and read it quite carefully actually not the recent book the one just before um consciousness and fundamental reality that way yeah right and i must say that this it's elusive to me what he what he ultimately wants to believe about this i mean i think ultimately what he wants to do is hold a kind of pan psychism which the the kind of pensarchism that seems to me to be quite interesting is one that's structurally like a kind of physicalist here right um and what i mean one can discuss whether it's true or false or whether it helps or whether it faces exactly the kinds of problems that traditional materialism already faces in which case there'd be no point being a pan cyclist because it doesn't really help you um exactly that's what i think yeah so that's me too so i'm sort of sympathetic with that but i think that the kind i i think i'm not sure but i think that the kind of uh pan psychism that he wants to defend ultimately is one which think which says that uh there's a sort of pine psychist uh it's sort of structurally speaking like a traditional dualist view it's just that in in place of the physical side of things you've got the physical side of things plus all these micro experiences right and then the macro experiences bear some sort of contingent connection only to that right and that's the sort of position and that's true that position isn't refuted by a kind of revelationist view um but so that's the that's that i mean at that point even his pan psychist friends i think would be backing away because the uh because that that that as i said the interest of pan psychism is that it it's supposed to um be a position which is structurally in fact in some versions structurally equivalent to physicalism right whereas the kind of position he is interested in is structurally equivalent to traditional dualism right exactly yeah that's a good point so switching from from philip to your view here so it would it be wrong to characterize the kind of resilient monism i know you call it negalian monism would it be wrong to say that your view is like like these views but the intrinsic nature stuff is just not mental it's some physical property which which we can't understand or grasp at this point um or are there more differences than that between the kind of pancychism so i know you don't like the word or whatever uh but um and proto-cyclism yeah that's it pam protocycle and i think that's because like on those kind of views what you get is a pan qualityism so that it's the mental qualities which are out there um and so but that already sounds kind of too mental for me so i don't know so what what what on your view is the commonality or difference between these kinds of uh view you have in the goth type view um yeah so there are i i tend to like a kind of a view that says that um what i basically like is a kind of an ignorance-based response to the considerability argument so it says look we're ignorant of some relevant kind of physical fact and if that is true then depending on how you understand conceivability reasoning either the conceivability claim isn't true or the all the step from conceivability to possibility doesn't doesn't work right okay and there are various ways of implementing that idea that we're ignorant of a certain relevant kind of physical fact resilient monism provides you with one particular implementation of that idea i actually don't i think it's an interesting implementation i don't think it's required that you implement it that way and i think that there are some [Music] issues that arise if you do implement it that way uh but i do think it's a an interesting way to implement it um and now i think yeah i think on on that on that version that kind of resilient monist version that i like what dave calls pan-proto-psychists or i tend to think of it as a kind of physicalist kind i mean barbara mantera calls it resilient physicalism which is quite a good title actually um i think one one reason to think to think of that as an of a completely genuine kind of materialism is to go back to certain kinds of people who we would whose positions we kind of very naturally think of as kind of materialist positions like lewis and armstrong and people like that and smart actually at certain points now they actually all thought in different ways that um especially armstrong thought that physics characterized things dispositionally or in terms of relations he went along with that idea but he also thought that um the the dispositions that physics talked about had certain kinds of what he thought of as categorical grounds properties so if an object has a disposition then it has some other property in virtue of which it has that disposition right okay so he went along with all of those ideas which have now been incorporated into resilient monism but of course he didn't defend them in terms of resilient monism but now you've got to ask well what what did he think was the status of those categorical properties that the physics didn't exactly tell us about well that creates a bit of a problem for him because either he thinks of them them as physical too perhaps in an extended sense or he thinks of them as non-physical now if he thinks of them as non-physical then his then he can't possibly be a physicalist right and the reason is because take take take some possible world it's like the best case scenario for materialism like all there is in this world is an atom as that's all there is no no tables and there are no spirits and there are no colors there's just this atom okay here's materialism through in this world you ask well whatever materialism is it's got to look at that world and say yes i'm true in that world yeah better yes uh okay now but if if you think ah well this atom is solid solidity is a disposition it's the disposition to resist penetration from other objects or something well that means it must be grounded in something so it must have some other property this this single object in this world that's what armstrong would say now the question is what's the nature of that other property is it physical or not well if he says it's not physical then even this paradigm case of what materialism this sort of best case scenario for materialism will turn out that materialism isn't true so uh if you think of if you sort of have that set of ideas and you think that the categorical grounds aren't physical then you can't be a physicalist in the first place right uh okay in fact i think in um there's a famous book called a history of materialism by friedrich langer written in the uh 1860s it's about you know about how materialism changed over time and so on and a lot of those people were not materialists and i think they were not materialists for the for because they were influenced by that line of argument that i just was some version of that line of argument that i just gave you anyway i think in in armstrong's case he thought ah that must mean that we have a notion of the physical that applies to the categorical base in addition to the disposition and that seems plausible because otherwise he couldn't possibly be a physicalist right okay so that means that he's got a notion of the physical that applies to the categorical base now the resilient monast position that i that i had in mind basically accepts that entire picture uh that armstrong sets out but just says oh there's this further feature which is that the categorical bases are relevant to the nature of consciousness that is the dispositions on their own don't ground consciousness you need dispositions plus the categorical base and that that's completely you can you can make that one can debate whether that point is plausible or not of course but the only point i'm making at the moment is that you can formulate that completely within the set of ideas that that armstrong was operating with right and so you haven't moved away at all from any of the physicalism any of the kind of materialist physicalist kind of ideas that he had so that's the sense in which that's a kind of physicalism in in in in as much as much of physicalism as he was it because it it says very little else than what he's already said it's just that he of course wouldn't wouldn't dream of thinking that the the categorical bases were relevant to conscious states right at least not ultimately but but that's kind of open to you to say that if you want to so so the similarities then are are very straightforward so whereas for like on the pan cyclist view you you so the way you agree is that there's got to be some categorical basis for these dispositions you both agree that those categorical bases are relevant to consciousness yeah um the disagreement is that for the pan psychists these things are fundamentally phenomenal mental whereas for for you they're not um on this on this picture at least on on this that picture which i have as it were discussed sympathetically i wouldn't quite say for me because i okay well on that picture that you you're sympathetic now you're not even sympathetic to it you've discussed it sympathetically [Laughter] one is one step back so um uh i guess no exactly no no i i like that for you so that's right so that that's uh exactly that's that's the difference yeah but then i guess i mean and you know i guess it's part of the view that we just can't say much more about what those properties are except for that they're categorical in nature they're relevant to consciousness but we can't that's right can we say they're not structural or functional right because they're categorical or uh depending on how you articulate those notions yes yeah they're there there are legitimate ways of articulating those notions according to which you could certainly say that they're not structural or functional yeah okay but are there ways of doing it where you could say that they are well i mean as sort of came up a bit in our previous discussion the notion of structure is so hard to uh keep track of right there i don't doubt that there's some notion according to which i mean for example there's one notion of structure which is completely okay and it's quite common which just means relational yeah um if you talk about the structure of a table or something you mean fundamentally the relation among the parts of a table and so that kind of structure so if the if you're saying to me could they be two-place properties in other words relations yes the answer would be yes so by that standard they would be structural are you committed to an ideal in in tail ability here is there something from these categorical properties plus dispositional features of those properties to phenomenal properties or even if we knew those things per per you know that actually the case would be still be blocked is ignorance permanent even for ideal reasoners well those are all lots of those are all slightly different questions i think yeah yeah um i mean who knows what's going to go on with an ideal reasoner so uh it's hard to it's hard to say on this kind of view i mean one of the reasons that this kind of view i think is attractive to people apart from the idea that sorry let me go back a bit if you were talking before about the contrast between this kind of view and a pan psychist view right a panzerkiss this the view that i like says yeah there are these categorical properties they're relevant to consciousness but beyond that we don't know what their natures are although of course we can say for the reasons i mentioned that they are physical in some broader sense of physical um and it's because we can't say what they are that that mean it's because we can't say what they are that we have a way of dealing with the conceivability argument right the the pan psychists uh goes on to describe what they are the panzerka says they're phenomenal properties uh of a piece with our own phenomenal properties they just happen to attach to micro things not macro things and so we know what they are and that's exactly what lands them in the combination problem right which is kind of analogous in many ways to the conceivability argument so the the the position the positions that we're talking about are sort of structurally similar but they make rather different assumptions about what those categorical properties are and as i've mentioned the version of these positions that seems to me to be most attractive are ones which say we can say a few things about those categorical properties um they're not mental we don't know what they are they're physical in a in a natural sense um and that combination permits us to deal with the conceivability argument but if we move away from any of that then we we don't say we don't have that available to us now on the question of you know whether an ideal reasoner would know about those things whether there's a priori entailment i mean sometimes the whole notion of a priori entailment is a bit puzzling because the connection between eat and conceivability reasoning is a bit puzzling as i say sometimes consider as we've talked about before sometimes conceivability is is just defined in terms of failure of our priori entailment or something right but at other times it's formulated in terms of imaginability and for that the connection to our prior entitlement is much much uh harder to articulate so you know yeah i guess the reason is well because it seems like i was wondering why you couldn't run a conceivability argument on this kind of this kind of uh russellian physicalism or negalian modernism or whatever so why isn't it conceivable that you have those properties and yeah no consciousness um well it's not conceivable in the imaginability sense you can't imagine these things because you don't know what they are you can't positively conceivable but you can do it in the negative sense right that doesn't yeah but but as i said to you before the negative sense isn't the one that's of interest for me it's the it's the positive one so isn't there a risk though that i mean it seems like there could be the risk that then what you're conceiving is basically the panzerkiss version but you just like don't know it you mean it could be the panzerkist version yeah pantsarchism could be true but we don't know well if you if you can't say anything about these properties then you don't really know as you just pointed out you don't really know what you're imagining when you imagine a world with those properties well you can't i don't think you can they might be not physical even controversial you see it's sort of like um let's see if i can give you an example i mean it's sort of like um suppose i uh suppose i hold up the whole of a book and i say uh you know it's it's possible that everything in this book is true and it's possible that you you know everything in this book and you don't know that you know charlie chaplin died in switzerland okay okay now so i hold up a book and i say it's possible for you to know everything in this book and not know that charlie chaplin died in switzerland okay that's like a piece that's like a knowledge argument it's possible for you to know all of this and not know that now is what i said true or not is that possibility claim true or not it's possible for you to know everything in this book and not know that charlie chaplin died in switzerland it depends on what this picks out you can't say because you don't know what's in there exactly suppose it was a book it was suppose it was a you know biography of charlie chaplin that focused on his death in switzerland well then presumably what i said is false right but if it was you know a japanese cookbook then presumably what i said was true so the thing is that you you can't assert a claim like that since you don't know what's in the book okay so if someone said to you it's possible to know everything in this book and not know that charlie chaplin died in switzerland you should reject that right right uh okay well i think the book of nature is kind of like the book i just held up that is we don't know what's in it exactly so therefore you can't say it's possible to know all the all of the facts or all the physical facts and not know that certain facts about consciousness or something like that right because we don't know some of these facts so why isn't that itself and basic idea and and i i yeah i get i get that that's the basic idea but why isn't that itself an argument that positive conceivability is sort of the wrong thing to focus on um so we can't do what we can't do positive conceivability for reason just gave but negative conceivability we can still do we can still check for whether there's contradictions and tails um but how would how would negative conceivability help with the with that example um i mean i think that the reason that i think imaginability is important is because it's the thing that gives you the most it's the most powerful way of uh these modal claims right and that they the thing about imaginability is that it it has all these epistemic presuppositions and if those aren't met which i don't think they're met then we can't use this kind of reasoning to establish these claims right um right so and i i agree with that but i'm wondering what's wrong with the negative conceivability stuff why isn't that so let's talk what we were talking about before why isn't that it's weaker i grant that but why isn't it good for adjudicating these kinds of cases i mean that's true as dave says all you need is negative conceivability for the conceivability arguments proper to go through you say well positive is better but given that you know we're sort of blocked off by um by your own i guess i'm a little worried yeah that's a good question it's a good question i think the i mean i'm a little worried that negative conceivability won't establish the keys contingent connections of the kind that we're looking for i mean the traditional dualist is trying to say that there's a cond there's only a contingent connection between these the physical facts and the phenomenal facts that's the whole point um whereas failures of our priory entailment for a lot for the reasons that many people point out don't seem to establish uh contingent connections of that kind yeah so [Music] so you know so so it just seems a bit weak that's why so and a lot of these uh uh a lot of the arguments that seem very powerful and the ones that i accept uh seem to evolve positive imaginability or positive conceivability or imaginability or something and so i guess that's that's the reason i mean i think that i think and as i was saying before it's not as if i think there aren't historically important versions of these arguments that attack positions which aren't like contemporary materialism exactly but they're certainly first cousins of it or related theories at any rate so it's it's that it's i think it's that that uh uh that i'm uh yeah i mean yeah okay well i mean we're running out of time here and i don't i can't keep you forever so i guess i'll have to put a pin in that and and maybe someday i'll have you if you have interest you can come back because there's still a bunch of stuff we're not even gonna get a chance to talk to talk about it um but i did want to talk about illusionism a little bit before we uh had to call it quits for today and it's related to some of these issues that we've been talking about um especially with respect to introspection and what it delivers and whether things about revelation and that nature so you have a whole section on this as well excuse me in in your series of lectures and possibly in this book that you're working on which um i'm looking forward to coming out someday uh on introspection and so yeah [Laughter] yeah i bet it's a lot of work it seems um and that's a whole maybe one that kind of is closer to coming out we can come and just talk about your positive view on introspection because the whole idea of the rationalist view i think is very interesting and um there's some things i want to ask about anyway so with respect to illusionism so you want to reject the claim that illusion is that illusionists make i think which is that there's a notion of something in this vicinity which is important which they that we learn about by introspection but which we shouldn't think is there so it seems to me like you want to reject almost every part of that package of claims that they have is that a what accurate way of putting your view about illusionism or not uh yeah let's think so uh um illusionism i guess my i mean literalism actually seems to me to be a somewhat shifting target i mean sometimes it seems to be the bold claim that if you believe in introspection that you're in pain then your belief is false and you're not in pain uh sometimes it's the much less bold claim that you know the sense that in theory of pain isn't true that is yes okay now it's so very very hard for me to keep track of what's going on mostly what seems to me is that initially it was the claim that yeah we're just not in pain it was a kind of unlimitivism about pain together with this interesting claim about introspection which is that we have this illusion that in introspective we have an introspective illusion that we're in pain but we're not in pain that was the sort of interesting position but often it under pressure it seems to be the view that we're only not in pain according to some specific theory of what it is to be in pain and that theory looks as i mentioned suspiciously like the sense statement theory yeah exactly okay um or the classic qualia that dennett wants to kwine yeah exactly yeah so some some some kind of view which many of us have already moved beyond so it's not perhaps as exciting as it seemed anyway but setting that aside uh i i guess i took it that the the the illusionist wants to say that wants to say three things really one is that there's some sort of psychological property which we believe to be instantiated in introspection uh which isn't instantiated so that we have some sort of false belief in introspection and that moreover that property it has that property has to play some very important role in mind body-ish kinds of issues right so those are sort of three conditions that that's the three claims that the illusionist wants to make so there is some property which a we believe in introspection is instantiated b is not instantiated and c is at issue in for example the knowledge argument against materialism and if those three things aren't met then we don't really have illusionism of an interesting kind because if you don't have the idea that we don't believe in introspection or somehow we don't have an introspective representation or something uh that that the thing is instantiated then we don't have the inner illusion and it has to be an illusion which means the thing doesn't is not instantiated right and it has to play the role it has to be implicated somehow in these arguments that constitute the mind body problem otherwise it's i guess what uh frankish calls weak illusionism rather than right rather than the real thing which because everybody yeah yeah everybody's a weak illusionist okay yeah exactly that's that's why you need that and so then um i mean at least one criticism of illusionism is that there isn't such a property um so we could use just the examples that we were using so take being in pain being in pain is presumably a property that does in fact play some role in a version of the knowledge argument you could run the knowledge argument with being in pain um is it the case that do we believe in introspection that we're in pain yeah we do whatever introspection amounts to presumably we believe in introspection that we're in pain at least sometimes yes and third but then the question is are we in pain or not now as i said the kind of classic illusionist as i understood it wanted to know that but often they don't want to say that they want to say no we are in pain so that's all right so that that isn't the relevant just the ordinary property of being in pain that doesn't seem to meet these conditions what about the what about a sort of highly theoretical property like you know being acquainted with a sense datum let's say well that i'm i'm willing to go as i said i don't believe the sense that in theory so i'm quite happy to think that that property isn't instantiated right i don't think it's that plausible that we represent ourselves in introspection as instantiating that property i tend to think in introspection uh you know there's an issue in introspection rather like the issue in perception which is what the what the contents of perceptions are like whether they're you know um what the admissible contents of perception is so likewise you could ask what the admissible contents of introspection is and i tend to think that at least initially at least initially there's a sort of a relatively thin range of propositions that you come to know you come to know things like i am in pain i don't think i come to know things in introspection like i instantiate a sense data or i am i i am acquainted with the sense even if that happened to be true i don't think we come to know that by introspection that was partly the point against revelation that we mentioned before right um and so that if you did come to know that you'd have to come to know it by inference from something so first you'd know that you're in pain and then you'd have some theory available to you that said ah pain's consistent acquaintance being acquainted with a sense data and then you put that theory together with the fact that you're in pain and you derive the idea that you're acquainted with a sense that that sort of makes sense to me you could say if you like that you come to know that by introspection but really what's going on is that you come to know some first thing by introspection and then you have some theory and you derive the fact that you are instantiated with that sorry that you are acquainted with the sense that that you instantiate that sense that in property and then the question is well how does that property go with respect to the three features i mentioned um well it does not instantiate it so that's good is it uh is it uh do we believe in introspection that it's instantiated well as i said i actually don't think that's true uh though i can imagine somebody arguing that even given the picture i just sketched somehow or other we you know maybe lewis is right or he doesn't say that about the sense of three but you can imagine not lewis but some position a bit like him saying the sense that in theory is kind of built into folk psychology right and um i mean francois camera i think says things a bit like that actually yeah i'm gonna be talking to him soon hopefully actually uh right cool great good call he's really good to talk to you but the uh uh you know so you might say well maybe by this extended sense of introspection i come to know by introspection that i ins that i come to know or believe let's say by introspection that i have i instantiate the sense state of property now the question is is that property crucial in you know the knowledge argument to which i think the answer is no i don't think the knowledge argument requires that you have this sort of highfalutin account of what of what being in pain consists in i think the interesting thing about the knowledge argument is that just operates with these simple notions like being in pain um so that's kind of the problem i think for illusionism that there just isn't a property that plays the relevant role for them right so and i i mean i i like this diagnosis um but i i wonder if we could if if we pushed a little bit on this what you might say to to the following kind of claim so suppose that what you thought what they thought which i go back and forth on this as well i tell you because i talked to keith a few times i've read a lot of his stuff obviously i'm interested in this debate but it's it's it's hard to pin down exactly what they're saying but ultimately i think their considered view is that um that obviously pains exist uh but that we characterize them in a strange way and we characterize them in a strange way because of the way we come about to know them via introspection that we represent them in introspection as having properties that they don't have um and so your argument is yeah everyone agrees with that it's what the real question is what kind of properties do we represent them as having and are they the ones that matter for these um traditional ways of thinking about these problems in the mind body problem ability arguments and so forth so and i like your argument the answer is no but so what if they say well look you know what we're interested in is that there's this way of thinking about phenomenal properties or whatever you want to call them which is that by definition they are not functionalizable or intentional or representational and in the 90s you know ned introduced things in this way you know what i mean by phenomenal properties ned says in the 90s that simply those parts of experience which are not representational functional or intentional um and so that there's a way of of thinking about ordinary pains as in those terms which they think is illusionary and maybe something that we learn from introspection do do you disagree with that or do do you think that in other words that introspection delivers a verdict on whether these properties are representational or do they appear non-representational or intentional or whatever so is that a separate do you see what the issue that i'm trying to raise here is and whether that can whether you think that's uh merely weak illusionism or is that a version of strong illusionism as well uh yeah um there's a lot of questions that's in there yeah i'm sorry we're running our turns i'm throwing everything out at once no that's right uh i hate to say this to you i tend to get a little bit worried about notions of functionalism just in the same way i get worried about notions of structure so when people say that they're functionalist or that things aren't functional functionally analyzable or something i always worry about what what the relevant terms are that they are referring to if they're very if they have if it's a very limited range then that's quite plausible but if you're very relaxed about the range then it's much it's very much harder to nail down what what it is to be a functional property i see on the issue of representation it's an interesting question where the representation is introspectively accessible right i mean it depends a bit on what counts as introspectively accessible like for example as i said before uh i think that we know by introspection that so i i think i know by introspection that i have a pain in my foot suppose i have a pain in my foot and i can come to another introspection pain in my foot now do i know by introspection that that is as it were essentially a representational state suppose it is i tend to think no for the similar reasons that we've gone through with the sense that in theory it could be that i had a theory about what that what my being in pain consists in according to which it's a representational state and if i have that theory available to me i could infer that it has a represent that i'm in some representational state and in that case maybe i would go along with that that it's in fact a true theory um but it's not clear to me that it's as it were in introspection in at least in what sometimes it's called unaided introspection at the beginning right the beginning sort of range of things that you come to know um and it's a bit like in perception where you say you know there's this discussion in perception about whether whether you can know that one thing causes another in perception or whether in perception your causation gets represented okay now you know people say yeah you can causation is perceptible you can perceive it but even if you believe that you wouldn't think that some sort of analysis of causation is is sort of somehow present in perception at least i don't think that's that plausible uh you can't tell in perception that you know humanism or anti-humanism is true about causation right exactly right uh you can may be able you can make you can you maybe you can maybe perception tells you that this thing causes that thing but it doesn't tell you about the nature of the causal relation and likewise i'd want to say in introspection we can perhaps know that we're in pain in fact i think one can but the exact nature of what it is to be in pain like whether it's a representational thing or not that's that's further that's a further claim so so you so you disagree there's actually quite a lot of inference going on so the the influentialist of that introspection thinks that it's inferences all over the place in fact there's nothing that isn't inferential and i don't think that's true because i think one can come to know that you're in pain in some non-inferential way but i do think that claims about the nature of pain like whether it's representational or not at least very typically are inferential right yeah because i think that what in the way i think about this is i think that what the illusionist is really trying to get at is that there's some way of characterizing our experience basically in very similar ways that revelation character raises it um that there's you know that in introspection we're sort of come to know the essence of the thing um or you know and i know that's difficult we've been through all that you know but i think that that's the notion which the inter the illusionist is trying to target and say well whatever led you to believe that there's something like that um that's a mistake characterized and so that that take that as the fundamental lesson of illusionism is that the way we characterize the the thing we're after matters for what kind of explanation we're going to give to it so to them to me it seems like a debate over like what kind of concept we want to deploy in our science or theories of consciousness and whether we want to have it lewis had a view a bit like that he thought that as we said before revelation is built into folk psychology so that the conception of pain for example that is faithful to folk psychology will include revelation but he also thought the revelation was inconsistent with materialism and materialism is true so therefore in a certain sense there are no pains but then he said oh well we've got we can there are alternative conceptions of pain that we can deploy at that point and people like um david braden mitchell and bob stallnaker and john hawthorne hold these conditional analyses of pain which actually function rather like this right so there's some notion that is that has something like revelation built into it you're right and if you build that into it then there's no such thing as pain but there's this other thing i take it actually the the point we're talking about before that uh illusionists start off by saying you know you're not in pain it just seems to you in introspection that you are and then they as far as i can see typically withdrawal i'll come back and make the claim that oh but by pain i i meant something quite loaded and uh that's the thing that you're not in okay and i think that means their position is rather like that lewis position or the yeah the conditional analysis people and and i i take that as right actually and then what they think is that um you know this is kind of widespread and and but so there's a question about whether you need that notion of um consciousness to get the mind body problem underway and i don't think that you do i think that's what we were talking about before and what the discussion about revelation and all that sort of stuff kind of brings out is i i do sort of have a question about whether revelation gets snuck in at a certain place in the conceivability argument specifically in in the in the claim that um the primary and secondary intention of words like pain and so forth kind of coincide um so there i wonder if you're if something is being snuck in but besides that technical point i i think that really all you need is that there are ordinary experiences um that's what the conceivability arguments really take off with and then of course you can theorize about them and build them up into this meteor notion but i think that's really all you need is that there there is something we're picking out when we say there's a pain and you don't need to build much more into it than that which i think is something that the illusionists want to resist they think that you know if you just have the ordinary note champagne you don't get any grip on you know that we're alternative and think that you know mary can know everything in the room i don't think that's really accurate uh as far as like folk like the the way people tend to think about these issues but i don't know i think that's a separate issue though of course they partly think that but they also have this element of their view which is that it's a kind of uh inevitable sort of stable introspective illusion um right in a way it's the most interesting aspect of the view it's sort of that plays the role for them that the notion of being built into folk psychology played for lewis right it's not as if it's not as if it's not i mean i guess dennis when he talks about this kind of thing gives the impression that it's a kind of you know philosophers have invented this bizarre notion of pain or something right you know create jobs for themselves or something yeah terribly successfully perhaps you might add but anyway given the employment crisis but anyway yeah right exactly but but that but that's one traditional idea that it's a kind of philosophical invention or philosophical confusion and the contemporary illusionists and i guess lewis too are not saying that they're saying no it's built into ordinary thought it's got nothing to do with a it's not a philosophical imposition on thought it's a it's just built in some ways into ordinary thought um and so that makes it kind of interesting from just an empirical psychological point of view as to whether that's true you know right maybe it is maybe it isn't um as we said in the case of lewis the evidence base is a bit slim yeah exactly okay well i see we're we're out of time now i i wish we could continue the discussion but i have my morning classes i got to get to and it's probably evening and your time over there um so i do have to let you go uh i i'm hoping you will come back because i didn't get to talk to you about all the stuff i've been saying about higher order theories or your own views about introspection and all that stuff so we'll have to schedule a second discussion for that stuff but uh let me take this chance so thank you for this is a great discussion i appreciate your time um and uh hang around for a second i'll say bye off the air thanks so much richard that was great thank you yeah uh okay so we are we are free uh we're off now

Channel: Richard Brown

Views: 643

Rating: 4.826087 out of 5

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Id: g4xDZW3Xd-A

Length: 123min 0sec (7380 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020