• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

To put this in perspective, consider the criteria that we effortlessly apply (I first wrote “unconsciously”, but then I thought that that was a strange word choice, in these circumstances!) when we watch the antics of the humanoid robots R2-D2 and C-3PO in Star Wars. When one of them acts fearful and tries to flee in what strike us as appropriate circumstances, are we not justified in applying the adjective “frightened”? Or would we need to have obtained some kind of word-usage permit in advance, granted only when the universe that forms the backdrop to the actions in question is a universe imbued with élan mental? And how is this “scientific” fact about a universe to be determined?

If viewers of a space-adventure movie were “scientifically” informed at the movie’s start that the saga to follow takes place in a universe completely unlike ours — namely, in a universe without a drop of élan mental — would they then watch with utter indifference as some cute-looking robot, rather like R2-D2 or C-3PO (take your pick), got hacked into little tiny pieces by a larger robot? Would parents tell their sobbing children, “Hush now, don’t you bawl! That silly robot wasn’t alive! The makers of the movie told us at the start that the universe where it lived doesn’t have creatures with feelings! Not one!” What’s the difference between being alive and living? And more importantly, what merits being sobbed over?

Quibbling in Universe Q

At chapter’s end, we are thus brought back full circle to the “pedantic semantic” pronoun issues with which we began. Should we use different pronouns to refer to Universe Q’s Dave Chalmers (which is clearly a “he”) and to its indistinguishable zombie twin in Universe Z (who is just as clearly an “it”)? Of course such semantic quibbles aren’t limited to humans and their zombie twins. If a mosquito in our universe — our warm and fuzzy Universe Q overflowing with élan mental — is unquestionably a swattable “it”, then what about a turkey? And if a turkey is unquestionably just a Thanksgiving dinner, then what about a chinchilla? And if a chinchilla is just a fur coat, then what about a bunny and a cat and a dog? And then what about a human fetus? And what about a newborn baby? Where lies the “who” / “which” cutoff line?

As I said at the chapter’s outset, I see these as important questions — questions that in the end have everything to do with matters of life and death. They may not be easy to answer, but they are important to ponder. Semantics is not always just pedantic quibbling.

CHAPTER 23

Killing a Couple of Sacred Cows

A Cerulean Sardine

THERE’S an idea in the philosophical literature on consciousness that makes me sea-blue, and that is the so-called “problem of the inverted spectrum”. After describing this sacred cow as accurately I can, I shall try to slaughter it as quickly as I can. (It suffers from mad sacred cow disease.)

It all comes from the idea that you are supposedly so different from me that there is no way to cross the gap between our interiorities — no way for you to know what I am like inside, or vice versa. In particular, when you look at a bunch of red roses and I look at the same bunch of red roses, we both externalize what we are seeing by making roughly the same noise (“red roses”), but maybe, for all you know, what I am experiencing as redness inside my private, inaccessible cranium is what you, if only you could “step inside” my subjectivity for a moment or two, would actually call “blue”. (By the way, advocates of the inverted-spectrum riddle would spurn any suggestion that you and I actually are already inside each other, even the littlest bit. Their riddle is predicated upon the existence of an Unbridgeable You–Me Chasm — that is, the absolute inaccessibility by one person of any other person’s interiority. In other words, belief in the inverted spectrum is a close cousin to belief in Cartesian Egos — the idea that we are all disjoint islands and that “you can’t get there from here”.)

Bleu Blanc Rouge = Red, White,