Tag: Qualia

Deep Zombies

Mark Davis1 Comment

There is a slang nominal form of the word “deepening” for when a person seems to be purposefully adding awe, mystery, and unknowns to their arguments: deepenings. It often arises in discourse on religion and mystical experiences. As a child in the 70s we had Bigfoot, Nessy, the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, near-death experiences, and the strange stuff from Velikovsky, von Däniken, and Sitchin. The books and movies built deepenings into communities and businesses just as surely as Catholicism, Mormonism, or Scientology have done. There is a human desire for mystery. But it doesn’t make the mysteries true. But many religious folks hold on to thin threads that point towards mystery as an added data point for justifying their faiths as real, true, valuable, and beautiful.

Given this, I was curious about David Bentley Hart’s All Things are Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life after Ross Douthat praised it at New York Times. It’s a big book and I’ve just skimmed around a fair bit so far, but there is a repetition of an error (among the extensive repetitions in the volume) concerning the mind-body problem that is also related to arguments from Alvin Plantinga concerning evolution. Specifically, the notion of philosophical zombies is largely irrelevant I think to claiming that subjective experience (“what it’s like…”) is non-material or of a distinct nature from the brain and the nervous system. Given what we know about evolutionary development, I don’t think that we can even conceive of a p-zombie in the way it was originally proposed.

We might try to imagine an evolutionary development of homo sapiens that does not include this subjective experience, but that would not lead to an identical human sans the qualia-experiencer because the developmental trajectory would have to be different, resulting in differing brains.… Read the rest

Wordle and the Hard Problem of Philosophy

Mark Davis2 Comments

I occasionally do Wordles at the New York Times. If you are not familiar, the game is very simple. You have six chances to guess a five-letter word. When you make a guess, letters that are in the correct position turn green. Letters that are in the word but in the wrong position turn yellow. The mental process for solving them is best optimized by choosing a word initially that has high-frequency English letters, like “notes,” and then proceeding from there. At some point in the guessing process, one is confronted with anchoring known letters and trying to remember words that might fit the sequence. There is a handy virtual keyboard displayed below the word matrix that shows you the letters in black, yellow, green, and gray that you have tried, that are required, that are fit to position, and that remain untested, respectively. After a bit, you start to apply little algorithms and exclusionary rules to the process: What if I anchor an S at the beginning? There are no five-letter words that end in “yi” in English, etc. There is a feeling of working through these mental strategies and even a feeling of green and yellow as signposts along the way.

I decided this morning to write the simplest one-line Wordle helper I could and solved the puzzle in two guesses:

Sorry for the spoiler if you haven’t gotten to it yet! Here’s what I needed to do the job: a five letter word list for English and a word frequency list for English. I could have derived the first from the second but found the first first, here. The second required I log into Kaggle to get a good CSV searchable list.… Read the rest