Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Philosophy Club

[Steve3007]

I'll guess that when you keep talking about "medium sized dry goods", you mean phenomena that occur on human scales of distance and time and which are detected directly without the use of apparatus other than those we already have.

OK, yes, it's an expression apparently used by J. L. Austin to just mean familiar objects. Fine.

[Terrapin Station]

And the example of an algorithm capturing any property?

I have no idea what you mean by an algorithm "capturing a property." They don't "capture" anything. An algorithm is a systematic method of transforming one set of apparent properties into a another set of apparent properties, particularly shapes and other apparent spatio-temporal properties.

Let's try it this way: give an example of how an algorithm correlates with any property. Surely if an algorithm is transforming apparent properties, it has some correlation to them, right? So give an example of an algorithm or a part of one, an example of a property, and explain how the algorithm correlates with the property in your example.

[Terrapin Station]

I'll guess that when you keep talking about "medium sized dry goods", you mean phenomena that occur on human scales of distance and time and which are detected directly without the use of apparatus other than those we already have. I think the distinction between that and other phenomena is irrelevant for the purpose of defining "physical", which was what this was about.

It's not irrelevant to the colloquial sense of "tangible".

Re the other stuff, it's trying to talk about too many different things at the same time.

There's the issue of the two definitions that GE Morton brought up, where I'm criticizing those two particular definitions in the context of what is commonly being referred to by "physicalism" in philosophy.

Then there's the issue of how I'd define the term "physicalism" in counterdistinction to the two definitions that GE Morton brought up. That comment isn't meant to define the term for someone who is possibly going to have a problem with all sorts of terms. It's simply meant to be in counterdistinction to the two definitions provided, so that one would know what I'm referring to, as opposed to the other suggested definitions.

Then there was the issue whether any definitions can be noncircular, and the issue of whether we can do ostensive definitions online, and so on.

We can't talk about all of those things at the same time, and at this point, I'm not sure why we're still talking about any of them (especially where we'd be talking about any of them in the vein of not even having started a discussion about any of them, so we'd need to rehash stuff already said.)

Which one do you want to focus on first, and why?

[Steve3007]

Which one do you want to focus on first...

The one that ended here:
viewtopic.php?p=367823#p367823

As I've said, your definition of "physical" as "relations of materials and processes (dynamic relations) of materials" doesn't advance the cause of providing a useful definition of "physical". It just makes it a task of providing a useful definition of "material". When I pointed that out, your response was essentially "everyone knows what 'physical' and 'material' mean!". Yet you refused to go further by talking about the obvious reason why everyone knows that.

...and why?

Because I find it odd that you won't simply acknowledge the obvious truth that the reason why everyone knows what those words mean is because their definitions are learnt from a lifetime of sensory experiences and analysis of the patterns in those experiences. Even more odd that you seem to see that proposition as to the way that those words are understood as amounting to "everything is about epistemology" or "everything is about us".

[Terrapin Station]

Which one do you want to focus on first...

The one that ended here:
viewtopic.php?p=367823#p367823

As I've said, your definition of "physical" as "relations of materials and processes (dynamic relations) of materials" doesn't advance the cause of providing a useful definition of "physical". It just makes it a task of providing a useful definition of "material". When I pointed that out, your response was essentially "everyone knows what 'physical' and 'material' mean!". Yet you refused to go further by talking about the obvious reason why everyone knows that.

...and why?

Because I find it odd that you won't simply acknowledge the obvious truth that the reason why everyone knows what those words mean is because their definitions are learnt from a lifetime of sensory experiences and analysis of the patterns in those experiences. Even more odd that you seem to see that proposition as to the way that those words are understood as amounting to "everything is about epistemology" or "everything is about us".

Re the last part, I wasn't disagreeing with that. My issue was that when I gave my definition (which again was just to exemplify the different way I was using the term compared to the definitions GE Moore gave), I had an objection that it was circular, but ALL definitions are circular, otherwise they're not definitions. I wasn't disagreeing that a major way we pick up words is via ostension. Nevertheless if an ostension is providing a definition, it's circular, or it's not actually a definition.

Re the definition in general, we're defining the term for what audience? What are they familiar with?

I'm asking because I'm not about to start playing the game where you say, "X is defined as y z." And then someone goes, "What is y?" And you go, "Y is a b," and they go, "What is b?" ad infinitum. I'm not interested in that game. So if we're defining something where part of the definition refers to material, I want to know the background of an audience who isn't familiar with what "material" refers to. That would make those people very unusual or deficient in some way. So I need to know what sort of audience it is--aliens? People with learning disabilities? What?

[Terrapin Station]

Note again that I was not saying that the other definitions weren't useful, or that they weren't clear or anything like that.

What I said was that (a) they're not the conventional way to use the term "physical(ism)" in philosophy, and (b) they're not the definition that I personally use.

Note that I also wasn't saying the definition I personally use is the conventional way to use the term "physical(ism)" in philosophy.

Responses arguing about whether my definition is "useful" and/or arguing that someone doesn't know what it's referring to suggest problems with the complainant. So to address that, I need to figure out just what the problems are with the complainant that would make them have issues understanding something so simple.

[Terrapin Station]

(Same thing for responses that suggest that the complainant is unaware that all definitions are circular, otherwise they're not definitions, by the way.)

[GE Morton]

I have no idea what you mean by an algorithm "capturing a property." They don't "capture" anything. An algorithm is a systematic method of transforming one set of apparent properties into a another set of apparent properties, particularly shapes and other apparent spatio-temporal properties.

Let's try it this way: give an example of how an algorithm correlates with any property.

Do you know what an algorithm is? No, it does not correlate with any properties, any more than it "captures" any properties.

Surely if an algorithm is transforming apparent properties, it has some correlation to them, right?

No. It is a transformation of a reference frame, or of some 3D object within that frame (which operations are equivalent). The apparent properties of the thing --- what is visible from a given viewpoint --- will change accordingly. But the properties of the thing(s) viewed don't change.

The apparent properties of a cat viewed from the front will differ from those viewed from the back. But the cat's properties don't change with that change in viewpoint. We can transform the former view into the latter by rotating the cat 180 degrees. The apparent properties of a mouse viewed from the front will also differ from those of a cat viewed from the front. But we can't transform the latter into the former by rotating either the cat or the mouse 180 degrees, or by any other amount. The former is a difference in perspective; the latter is not.

[Steve3007]

Re the definition in general, we're defining the term for what audience? What are they familiar with?

They're a regular human being who has lived for several decades, speaks English and has no learning difficulties, but happens not to know exactly what you mean by the word "material" (perhaps they're a Madonna fan). They ask you "What do you mean by physical?". You say "I mean materials, relations of materials and processes (dynamic relations) of materials".

How do you explain what you mean by "material"?

I'd say something that would amount to: "All the stuff that you can see around you and that any number of others you ask can also see, if they look."

Would you say something radically different than that?

[Faustus5]

Faustus

You say phenomenal experience/mental states are real, but qualia aren't.

So can you explain what mental states you believe are real. and why?

And how Dennett would answer the same question?

Simply and clearly, avoiding ambiguity as much as possible.

"What mental states are real?" Um. . .all of them? (You can’t literally be asking that question, so maybe I’m just being an idiot.)

I mean, unless you’re dealing with a crazy person, any mental state they say they have is going to be real. I’ll even grant that some mental states can be both unconscious and real if they have measurable impacts on behaviors. And some can be implicit.

What Dennett and I are saying is that qualia are not real, and that qualia are a bad theoretical flourish that is unnecessary, not that there are mental states that don’t exist. You can cheerfully say that people have conscious experiences, even that they have something we would allow were usefully called “raw feels,” without all the theoretical baggage that philosophers of mind have saddled these concepts with.

One test I use is whether you accept the plausibility of a David Chalmers zombie. If you reject it, you can probably reject qualia, too. But to accept the plausibility of a Chalmers zombie means you accept qualia in some form or other.

Now, if you want a solid answer on what Dennett (and I) think conscious experiences actually are, you can either read Consciousness Explained, or the very good paper “Are We Explaining Consciousness Yet?” published in a fantastic special edition of COGNITION along with several other papers.

It covers, from a philosophical angle, the growing consensus model of consciousness in cognitive neuroscience called the Global Neuronal Workspace. (This model, neurologically, is pretty much what Consciousness Explained spelled out philosophically ten years before this paper was published.)

The GNW can be summarized as follows, from a paper by Dehaene and Naccache in the same volume, with numbered footnotes Dennett addresses later:

At any given time, many modular (1) cerebral networks are active in parallel and process information in an unconscious manner. An information (2) becomes conscious, however, if the neural population that represents it is mobilized by top-down (3) attentional amplification into a brain-scale state of coherent activity that involves many neurons distributed throughout the brain. The long distance connectivity of these "workplace neurons" can, when they are active for a minimal duration (4), make the information available to a variety of processes including perceptual categorization, long-term memorization, evaluation, and intentional action. We postulate that this global availability of information through the workplace is (5) what we subjectively experience as a conscious state.

Dennett’s elaborations to the above go as follows:

(1) Modularity comes in degrees and kinds; what is being stressed here is only that these are specialist networks with limited powers of information processing.

(2) There is no standard term for an event in the brain that carries information or content on some topic (e.g., information about color at a retinal location, information about a phoneme heard, information about the familiarity or novelty of other information currently being carried, etc.). Whenever some specialist network or smaller structure makes a discrimination, fixes some element of content, "an information" in their sense comes into existence. "Signal," "content-fixation," (Dennett, 1991), "micro-taking," (Dennett and Kinsbourne, 1992) "wordless narrative" (Damasio 1999), and "representation" (Jack and Shallice) are among the near-synonyms in use.

(3) We should be careful not to take the term "top-down" too literally. Since there is no single organizational summit to the brain, it means only that such attentional amplification is not just modulated "bottom-up" by features internal to the processing stream in which it rides, but also by sideways influences, from competitive, cooperative, collateral activities whose emergent net result is what we may lump together and call top-down influence. In an arena of opponent processes (as in a democracy) the "top" is distributed, not localized. Nevertheless, among the various competitive processes, there are important bifurcations or thresholds that can lead to strikingly different sequels, and it is these differences that best account for our pretheoretical intuitions about the difference between conscious and unconscious events in the mind. If we are careful, we can use "top-down" as an innocent allusion, exploiting a vivid fossil trace of a discarded Cartesian theory to mark the real differences that that theory misdescribed. (This will be elaborated in my discussion of Jack and Shallice below.)

(4) How long must this minimal duration be? Long enough to make the information available to a variety of processes-that's all. One should resist the temptation to imagine some other effect that needs to build up over time, because . . .

(5)The proposed consensual thesis is not that this global availability causes some further effect or a different sort altogether-igniting the glow of conscious qualia, gaining entrance to the Cartesian Theater, or something like that-but that it is, all by itself, a conscious state. This is the hardest part of the thesis to understand and embrace. In fact, some who favor the rest of the consensus balk at this point and want to suppose that global availability must somehow kindle some special effect over and above the merely computational or functional competences such global availability ensures. Those who harbor this hunch are surrendering just when victory is at hand, I will argue, for these "merely functional" competences are the very competences that consciousness was supposed to enable.

Here is where scientists have been tempted-or blackmailed-into defending unmistakably philosophical theses about consciousness, on both sides of the issue. Some have taken up the philosophical issues with relish, and others with reluctance and foreboding, with uneven results for both types. In this paper I will highlight a few of the points made and attempted, supporting some and criticizing others, but mainly trying to show how relatively minor decisions about word choice and emphasis can conspire to mislead the theoretician's imagination. Is there a "Hard Problem" (Chalmers, 1995, 1996) and if so what is it, and what could possibly count as progress towards solving it? Although I have staunchly defended-and will defend here again-the verdict that Chalmers' "Hard Problem" is a theorist's illusion (Dennett, 1996b, 1998), something inviting therapy, not a real problem to be solved with revolutionary new science, I view my task here to be dispelling confusion first, and taking sides second. Let us see, as clearly as we can, what the question is, and is not, before we declare any allegiances.
Basically, I agree with everything Dennett writes above 100% if you want to know my views in some detail on what conscious states actually are and how they are instantiated in a human nervous system.

[Atla]

What Dennett and I are saying is that qualia are not real, and that qualia are a bad theoretical flourish that is unnecessary, not that there are mental states that don’t exist. You can cheerfully say that people have conscious experiences, even that they have something we would allow were usefully called “raw feels,” without all the theoretical baggage that philosophers of mind have saddled these concepts with.

One test I use is whether you accept the plausibility of a David Chalmers zombie. If you reject it, you can probably reject qualia, too. But to accept the plausibility of a Chalmers zombie means you accept qualia in some form or other.

The "raw feels" are the qualia. Quining qualia means eliminating the "raw feels" and ending up with p-zombies.

Now, if you want a solid answer on what Dennett (and I) think conscious experiences actually are, you can either read Consciousness Explained, or the very good paper “Are We Explaining Consciousness Yet?” published in a fantastic special edition of COGNITION along with several other papers.

It covers, from a philosophical angle, the growing consensus model of consciousness in cognitive neuroscience called the Global Neuronal Workspace. (This model, neurologically, is pretty much what Consciousness Explained spelled out philosophically ten years before this paper was published.)

The GNW can be summarized as follows, from a paper by Dehaene and Naccache in the same volume, with numbered footnotes Dennett addresses later:
At any given time, many modular (1) cerebral networks are active in parallel and process information in an unconscious manner. An information (2) becomes conscious, however, if the neural population that represents it is mobilized by top-down (3) attentional amplification into a brain-scale state of coherent activity that involves many neurons distributed throughout the brain. The long distance connectivity of these "workplace neurons" can, when they are active for a minimal duration (4), make the information available to a variety of processes including perceptual categorization, long-term memorization, evaluation, and intentional action. We postulate that this global availability of information through the workplace is (5) what we subjectively experience as a conscious state.
Dennett’s elaborations to the above go as follows:

(1) Modularity comes in degrees and kinds; what is being stressed here is only that these are specialist networks with limited powers of information processing.

(2) There is no standard term for an event in the brain that carries information or content on some topic (e.g., information about color at a retinal location, information about a phoneme heard, information about the familiarity or novelty of other information currently being carried, etc.). Whenever some specialist network or smaller structure makes a discrimination, fixes some element of content, "an information" in their sense comes into existence. "Signal," "content-fixation," (Dennett, 1991), "micro-taking," (Dennett and Kinsbourne, 1992) "wordless narrative" (Damasio 1999), and "representation" (Jack and Shallice) are among the near-synonyms in use.

(3) We should be careful not to take the term "top-down" too literally. Since there is no single organizational summit to the brain, it means only that such attentional amplification is not just modulated "bottom-up" by features internal to the processing stream in which it rides, but also by sideways influences, from competitive, cooperative, collateral activities whose emergent net result is what we may lump together and call top-down influence. In an arena of opponent processes (as in a democracy) the "top" is distributed, not localized. Nevertheless, among the various competitive processes, there are important bifurcations or thresholds that can lead to strikingly different sequels, and it is these differences that best account for our pretheoretical intuitions about the difference between conscious and unconscious events in the mind. If we are careful, we can use "top-down" as an innocent allusion, exploiting a vivid fossil trace of a discarded Cartesian theory to mark the real differences that that theory misdescribed. (This will be elaborated in my discussion of Jack and Shallice below.)

(4) How long must this minimal duration be? Long enough to make the information available to a variety of processes-that's all. One should resist the temptation to imagine some other effect that needs to build up over time, because . . .

(5)The proposed consensual thesis is not that this global availability causes some further effect or a different sort altogether-igniting the glow of conscious qualia, gaining entrance to the Cartesian Theater, or something like that-but that it is, all by itself, a conscious state. This is the hardest part of the thesis to understand and embrace. In fact, some who favor the rest of the consensus balk at this point and want to suppose that global availability must somehow kindle some special effect over and above the merely computational or functional competences such global availability ensures. Those who harbor this hunch are surrendering just when victory is at hand, I will argue, for these "merely functional" competences are the very competences that consciousness was supposed to enable.

Here is where scientists have been tempted-or blackmailed-into defending unmistakably philosophical theses about consciousness, on both sides of the issue. Some have taken up the philosophical issues with relish, and others with reluctance and foreboding, with uneven results for both types. In this paper I will highlight a few of the points made and attempted, supporting some and criticizing others, but mainly trying to show how relatively minor decisions about word choice and emphasis can conspire to mislead the theoretician's imagination. Is there a "Hard Problem" (Chalmers, 1995, 1996) and if so what is it, and what could possibly count as progress towards solving it? Although I have staunchly defended-and will defend here again-the verdict that Chalmers' "Hard Problem" is a theorist's illusion (Dennett, 1996b, 1998), something inviting therapy, not a real problem to be solved with revolutionary new science, I view my task here to be dispelling confusion first, and taking sides second. Let us see, as clearly as we can, what the question is, and is not, before we declare any allegiances.

A functionalist explanation of GNW information processing in no way addresses the Hard problem.
The issue of 'conscious vs unconscious events in the mind' also in no way addresses the Hard problem.

Fallacies are fallacies, even if they are buried under hundreds of pages of functionalist talk. The GNW is a good attempt, but I think Dennett and his followers should just steer clear of philosophy altogether. They just don't know what they are talking about, and end up denying the existence of consciousness.

[Gertie]

Faustus

"What mental states are real?" Um. . .all of them? (You can’t literally be asking that question, so maybe I’m just being an idiot.)

I mean, unless you’re dealing with a crazy person, any mental state they say they have is going to be real. I’ll even grant that some mental states can be both unconscious and real if they have measurable impacts on behaviors. And some can be implicit.

What Dennett and I are saying is that qualia are not real, and that qualia are a bad theoretical flourish that is unnecessary, not that there are mental states that don’t exist. You can cheerfully say that people have conscious experiences, even that they have something we would allow were usefully called “raw feels,” without all the theoretical baggage that philosophers of mind have saddled these concepts with.

Alright, great. Lets not worry about different definitions of ''qualia'' and ''consciousness'' and ''mental'' and home in on phenomenological 'what it is like' experience then. We agree that exists.

Now, if you want a solid answer on what Dennett (and I) think conscious experiences actually are, you can either read Consciousness Explained , or the very good paper “Are We Explaining Consciousness Yet?” published in a fantastic special edition of COGNITION along with several other papers. It covers…

OK, but that's basically talking about how brains function. And we are confident that at least some specific brain activity correlates with specific experience, neuroscience can fill in those details.

Philosophy of mind rather tries to explain that correlation, in terms of understanding how and why experience exists. (We can understand the function of experience in terms of utility). That's the philosophical issue. Because if we look to our physicalist scientific model of the world - reducible material stuff and forces which act on it - there is no apparent explanation for how certain physical brain activities correlate to experience. It wouldn't be predicted by our physicalist understanding of how the world works. It can't apparently explain it. In fact there is no place for experience in the Standard Model. There is an Explanatory Gap.

That's what I'd like to know your thoughts on. How do we explain experience, not in terms of its function/behavioural effects, but how it fits into our monist material substance model of what the world is made of, and how that substance acts in terms of physical forces/fields/properties/processes?

[GE Morton]

Well, that is question-begging. Yes, mental events are caused by brain events. But that doesn't entail that they are brain events. You are assuming that brain events can only cause other brain events (or perhaps other "physical" events).

That is not an assumption, it is me paying strict attention to the evidence that actually exists without unjustified spin.

Well, I think most people --- virtually everyone --- would disagree, would affirm that the evidence shows, conclusively, that brain events do indeed cause mental events. Everyone, that is, who experiences mental events and who knows anything about brain functions. But if you dogmatically insist that physical events can only cause other "physical" events, (with "physical" understood in the colloquial sense), then you'll be forced to an easily refuted claim the mental event and correlated, causative brain event are identical.

There is no evidence whatsoever that brain events cause further physical events that are mental events but not brain events. If I am wrong, please cite an example from the peer reviewed scientific literature.

Oh, there are thousands of those. Anyone who undertakes to locate the neural underpinnings of color discrimination, olfactory or tactile or auditory discriminations, depression or elation, etc. --- all mental events --- will acknowledge that difference. Some of them, like you, may believe a subjective color sensation is "identical" to the causative brain process, but their very analysis, and their terminology, belies that belief. After all, if mental events were clearly identical to brain events there would be nothing to explain --- there is no problem to solve.

But clearly there is some problem to solve, as everyone working on it (including Dennett) admits by that very fact.

If we can distinguish between a mental phenomenon (such as the sensation I experience when beholding a red square) and the activities of a group of neurons observable as EKG traces or under a microscope, then they are obviously not identical.

It is not obvious at all that they are not identical, otherwise there would not be an abundance of scientists and philosophers who do think they are, in fact, identical. Talk about ACTUAL question begging, here.

"An abundance of scientists who believe . . ." Are you now resorting to appeals to authority? It is obvious that they are not identical if one uses the term "identical" with its common definitions. I gave those earlier: There is Leibniz's definition ("two things are identical if they cannot be distinguished from one another") and the compositional sense (one thing can be reduced to the other, e.g., "lightning is a stream of electrons," or, "Table salt is sodium chloride"). Mental events and brain events are not identical per either of those criteria. Perhaps you can set forth the criteria for "identity" you have in mind.

All I can can conclude is that there is a causal relation between them.

Then you should embrace the dualism that is fundamentally at the heart of the way you see consciousness, and stop trying to deny it. There is no documented case anywhere of brain events causing anything other than other brain or nervous system events.

Of course there is. There are millions of them. If you experience distinctive sensations which allow you to distinguish between the color of a rose blossom and the color of the nearby leaves, then you know about mental events, and what "qualia" are. Are you suggesting those sensations are not caused by brain processes? If they are, then we clearly have evidence that physical events can cause some non-physical (in the colloquial sense) events.

You need to abandon that monism/dualism bugaboo. It is a relic of a wrong-headed ontology.

You can't call mental events physical events (but not brain events) unless you can point to exactly what measurable particles carry them that aren't part of the brain. They can't be physical if they are not addressed or addressable by physics.

Yes, you can. You may call an event or effect "physical" if it is produced by a physical system. What you're claiming there is that an effect can't be "physical" unless it is reducible to accepted laws of physics, and derivable from accepted physical models. But for well-understood reasons mental phenomena cannot be so reduced or derived. That is just a "brute fact" we have to live with.

You're doing exactly what all dishonest scholars of his work do--cherry picking what looks convenient and ignoring what goes directly against the misrepresentation you are trying to push. Very early on in one of the papers you cite ("Quining Qualia"), he says, in plain English:

"Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. "

So there you go. He believes in the reality of conscious experiences, he just thinks the way folks like you theorize about them is misguided.

Yes, Dennett does not deny conscious experience. He denies qualia because he construes that term as implying some "non-phyical substance." But it doesn't. In the paper you cite ("Are we explaining consciousness yet?") he says:

"(2) There is no standard term for an event in the brain that carries information or content on some topic (e.g. information about color at a retinal location, information about a phoneme heard, information about the familiarity or novelty of other information currently being carried, etc.). Whenever some specialist network or smaller structure makes a discrimination, fixes some element of content, `an information' in their sense comes into existence. `Signal', `content-fixation' (Dennett, 1991), `micro-taking' (Dennett & Kinsbourne, 1992), `wordless narrative' (Damasio, 1999), and `representation' (see Jack and Shallice in this volume) are among the
near-synonyms in use."

https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/Den ... ss2000.pdf

Well, yes there is such a "standard term." It is, "qualia." My own definition, given earlier, was, "the distinctive quality of a sensory impression which allows us to distinguish it from other impressions delivered over the same or other sensory channels."

Dennett is warring against a mere term, because he takes it to carry vacuous archaic implications. His own definitions above, and mine, carry no "dualistic" implications whatsoever.

But the existence of qualia (and other mental phenomena) are not products or consequences of any theoretical or ideological commitments.

That is exactly what qualia are. Otherwise, there would not be philosophers and scientists who deny that they exist while being perfectly happy to acknowledge that mental states are real.

You can only admit mental states and deny qualia if you are imbuing the latter term with spurious implications or connotations.

Feel free be the revolutionary pioneer who transforms what cognitive science is. Step one: find out a way to articulate how mental event can be a physical state that is not also a brain state and then verify it experimentally. Good luck with that!

I would not be a pioneer. Many other cognitive scientists are perfectly willing to acknowledge qualia.

[GE Morton]

What Dennett and I are saying is that qualia are not real, and that qualia are a bad theoretical flourish that is unnecessary, not that there are mental states that don’t exist. You can cheerfully say that people have conscious experiences, even that they have something we would allow were usefully called “raw feels,” without all the theoretical baggage that philosophers of mind have saddled these concepts with.

One test I use is whether you accept the plausibility of a David Chalmers zombie. If you reject it, you can probably reject qualia, too. But to accept the plausibility of a Chalmers zombie means you accept qualia in some form or other.

Just a couple of points. "You can cheerfully say that people have conscious experiences, even that they have something we would allow were usefully called “raw feels,” without all the theoretical baggage that philosophers of mind have saddled these concepts with."

Well, then you have the problem of explaining "raw feels," which, like qualia, are not reducible to the laws of physics, or "identical" to brain states. No knowledge of physics will allow me to know in advance what an electric shock will feel like before I grab the hot wire. That's just a fact; there is no philosophical baggage involved.

Chalmers' zombies are plausible, in the sense of being logically conceivable. But it is theoretically inelegant, because it would require us to assume that we, who unquestionable do have conscious experience, differ in a fundamental way from all those others who resemble us in numerous other respects. We would become singularities --- thus handing us a problem even more difficult to explain.

[Atla]

Well, I think most people --- virtually everyone --- would disagree, would affirm that the evidence shows, conclusively, that brain events do indeed cause mental events. Everyone, that is, who experiences mental events and who knows anything about brain functions.

There is zero evidence in all of science that would show that brain events cause mental events.

Wonder what you are doing on a philosophy forum?