David Chalmers

Here's a link to his home page

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/

David's site has lots of links to all sorts of interesting Philosophy of Mind stuff.

here's a link to his book:

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/book/tcm.html

The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory

I've been reading stuff on philosophy of mind, starting with Consciousness and its Place in Nature by DavidChalmers. I've also read a "response" to Chalmers' arguments by Paul Raymore. Now, I think I'm a bright enough guy who can understand any concept that's even minimally explained, yet I find myself completely baffled by the talk of "metaphysical supervenience", "metaphysical identity", and "primary versus secondary intensions".

They're just terms that have been developed by the people who speak of these things day after day. They're more concise and precise than their more everyday counterparts, and sometimes just dead weight. In other words, jargon. I wouldn't accuse people of using jargon unless they do so to confuse people on purpose.

Based on this cursory examination, I get the unshakable impression that it's all meaningless bullshit. The classic "example" of "water is H2O" that's supposed to somehow explain it all is complete nonsense to me. Not only does the example not illustrate what it's supposed to show but, to me at least, it serves as a potent counter-example of all those bizarre claims. If water has a definition logically independent of H2O (for example as a universal solvent which expands when frozen) then it's pretty clear to me that water is realizable in a computer simulation and so it obviously need not be H2O (even in our world!). OTOH, if one defines water as liquid H2O then water's definition is not logically independent of H2O and so one can a priori rule out a universe without H2O but with water. It seems to me that if the mysterious "water is H2O" example is to show anything, it's only by confusing different definitions of water (first the watery substance then the liquid H2O), and that's cheating. What are other people's impressions on the subject?

Not confusing, they're mostly driving at the same point as you.

This isn't the first time that experts babble on meaninglessly while claiming to be saying something meaningful, never mind relevant. I just saw Richard (Gottfried?) from Princeton on TV explaining how one of the solutions to time travel paradoxes is that the time traveler "was always in the past." He reports this unbelievably idiotic claim with a straight face as if it actually explained anything. Yeah, if I go into the past and kill myself, that's all right because "I was already in the past" whatever the heck that's supposed to mean. More concretely, if I go into the past and try to shoot myself, this mysterious magical force will make the bullets vanish before they reach their target. Or maybe, for some incomprehensible magical reason, anyone who goes into the past will not want to kill themselves. Never mind principles like conservation of information, "I'm a physicist, don't get scientific with me."

The "killing yourself in the past" loop.

I believe that the situation is self contradictory. If it were POSSIBLE to travel back in time and CHANGE events at all, then in follows that there must exist different time-lines in which different possibilities are played out.

This is demonstrated in the situation itself, if you want to CHANGE a period of time, it must have existed in its ORIGINAL state (as the time travellers point of reference) and its ALTERED state (presumambly the time travellers desired outcome!)

I do not presume this is in fact correct, but this is what the possibility of time travel would imply. Thusly, time would not behave in the way the situation describes, and there would be no loop of time "ad nauseum", but the time line would split in to two. In the case of murdering ones younger-self, in to one line where you grew up became a time travelling psychopathic murderer, and another when you were murdered.

Weird, because what he said seems to make immediately sense to me. In his model, your killing yourself in the past is exactly the same as your killing yourself without any kind of time travel - you don't see a "copy" of yourself, because what you become when travelling into the past is the you in the past. So it does not make any difference whether you came there from the future or not. To me it seems more like you're trying to find fault at others when you don't understand what they say. I do agree that most of the philosophy of mind could be explained in easier terms, but that does not mean the philosophers are not talking about sensible matters.

Now, I've emailed DavidChalmers asking him to clarify all that gobbledygook and he pointed me to a couple of books on the subject. Upon reflection, I take this to be compelling evidence against the entire idea. The ideas involved look like they should be simple. There is nothing in them that appears too subtle or complicated to think about in any way. I've met my fair share of abstract, subtle and complicated ideas and none of them took a book to convince me they were meaningful (correct is a different matter). If no examples can be constructed to show that "metaphysical inference" is different from logical inference and physical inference, then the distinction proposed is worthless. And I require clear examples, not gobbledygook. -- RichardKulisz

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