3 ms·
On re-reading your post several hours after my first response, there are a couple of things that now seem clearer to me. The first is the question of "existing
by mannykannot 3y ago
On re-reading your post several hours after my first response, there are a couple of things that now seem clearer to me.
The first is the question of "existing absent qualia": is this a reference to the p-zombie argument, which claims to show the metaphysical possibility of entities that are physically identical to us but which do not have qualia? I (and many others) reject this argument by rejecting the inference from conceivability to possibility, on account of it depending on a question-begging definition of conceivability.
If you do accept the zombie argument, then you are, ipso facto, accepting the metaphysical possibility of some things having qualia and other, otherwise identical things not having them - which would introduce a boundary into your panpsychic hypothesis that mirrors the one you are trying to use to reject emergent physicalism.
Secondly, you are misconstruing Occam's razor here: it is not a claim that constrains what sort of conclusion it is acceptable to argue for; it is, instead, an argument about what constitutes an acceptable set of premises. Both Occam's razor and logic in general accept that one can validly argue for a conclusion for which there is no other evidence than the evidence for your premises in conjunction with the argument you are making. To reject this would be to reject deductive and inductive reasoning!
Nevertheless, your argument does attempt to show that emergent physicalism would be predicated on a premise for which you say there is no evidence: the assumption that there are some things that are not conscious. This is mistaken, however: it simply does not take a position on that question, as its universe of discourse is limited to things with consciousness. Its conclusion almost certainly would have the corollary that many things are not conscious, but, as we have seen in the previous paragraph, there is nothing wrong in that, and an emergent-physicalist hypothesis would not be refuted even if there were no independent evidence for non-conscious entities (which is a claim that I have already disputed, in the final section of my previous reply.) To falsify the hypothesis on this basis, you would have to rule out there being anything without consciousness.