Wolfgang Schwarz

Just Two Atoms, and Zombies

I started this as a comment on Brian Weatherson's latest posting. But it grew so long that I decided to post it here instead and test my trackback implementation on it.

Imagine a world in which there are nothing but two atoms.

This is ambiguous. Does it mean I should imagine a world in which there are two atoms and nothing else, not even the fusion of these atoms? Or is "nothing but" restricted to things distinct from the two atoms? I can follow the instruction on the latter interpretation but not on the former: a world with two atoms and nothing that is not identical to one of them is inconceivable to me.

Now those who don't believe in fusions say that what they imagine when they follow the second reading also is a world that contains nothing that is not identical to one of the atoms. Brian argues that since this can be expressed in pureley logical vocabulary, viz.

1) ExEy (~x=y & Az (z=x v z=y)),

terminological refinement can't possible settle the issue. I'm not entirely sure about this. Most quantifiers are restricted, and if the existential quantifiers in (1) are restricted like the "nothing but" in Brian's instruction above, then (1) is possible and conceivable. It's impossible and inconceivable (to me) if they are not so restricted. So there seems to be a possibility of refinement. But I'm afraid it won't get us very far unless we claim that the non-believers altogether lack the conceptual resources of unrestricted quantification.

As a believer in fusions I would say that the non-believers misdescribe what they imagine when they describe it as satisfying the unrestricted reading of (1). In this respect their mistake is like the mistake of those who say they can imagine water not being H2O (given that 'water' rigidly denotes H2O): they should rather describe the world(s) they imagine as a world where the watery stuff isn't H2O. The interesting difference is that in the water case but not in the fusion case, the mistake can be explained by two-dimensionalism as a confusion of satisfaction and verification, or of 'considering as actual' and 'considering as counterfactual'. In this respect the fusion case is like the case of people who say they can imagine Fermat's Theorem being false: they also don't confuse actual with counterfactual, but still they misdescribe what they imagine.

Brian notes that the fact that lots of people take (1) to be prima facie conceivable (and that it might even be ideally conceivable on some definition of ideal conceivability) is no reason to believe that it is possible. He asks why we can't say the same about Zombies.

The problem is that in the former case we don't have to deny that what the non-believers imagine is possible. What they imagine is an ordinary two-atoms world which they misdescribe as a world verifying (1). But can we say the same about Zombie conceivings? That would mean that people misdescribe the conceived Zombie world when they take it to be a world where all physical facts are like they are here but where nobody ever feels pain. What then is the correct description of this world? Presumably the correct description entails that lots of people do after all feel pain there.

Unfortunately lots of people would balk at the idea that they could be mistaken about whether in a given counter-actual scenario they feel pain or not. They would say that in the counter-actual Zombie scenario it definitely seems to them that they don't feel pain. That's somehow directly and infallibly entailed by the imagining. But whatever seems to feel like pain really feels like pain, they say. So they can't possibly have misdescribed the Zombie world, they say.

We type-A materialists have to reject people's authority on these matters. They really misdescribe the alleged Zombie world when they describe it as a Zombie world, just as the non-believers in fusions misdescribe the two-atoms world as a (1)-world.