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Is the philosophy of a zombie different from a human. "Puzzle with the toxin" 10 thought experiments of modern philosophy

Few people believe in the actual existence of zombies, but many believe that they are at least conceivable, that is, they are logically or metaphysically possible. It is argued that if zombies are at least minimally possible, then physicalism is erroneous and it is necessary to recognize some duality (duality) of this world. It is in this conclusion that most philosophers see the main merit of the zombie theory. At the same time, it is also interesting for its assumptions about the nature of consciousness and about the relationship between the material (physical) and spiritual (phenomenal), and the use of the zombie idea in the criticism of physicalism raises more general questions about the relationship of the conceivable (imaginability), representable (conceivability) and possible (possibility). ). Finally, the idea of zombies leads researchers to such a difficult problem of the theory of knowledge as the problem of "other minds" ("other minds" problem).

Types of zombies

"P-zombie" (p-zombie) was used primarily as an argument against certain types of physicalism, such as behaviorism. According to behaviorism, mental states exist solely in terms of behavior: thus belief, desire, thinking, consciousness, and so on, are simply certain behaviors or inclinations towards them. It then turns out that a pi-zombie that is behaviorally indistinguishable from a "normal" human, but lacks conscious experience, is logically impossible according to the behaviorist position as a being. This is explained by the strict dependence in the origin of consciousness on behavior. Based on the foregoing, we can conclude that appealing to intuition about the existence of the pi-zombie described in this way reinforces the argument about the falsity of behaviorism.

There are several types of zombies. They vary in degree of similarity to "normal" human beings and is applied in various thought experiments as follows:

"Behavioral Zombie"(behavioral zombie) is behaviorally indistinguishable from a human and yet has no conscious experience.
"Neurological Zombie"(neurological zombie) has, this is emphasized, a human brain and is otherwise physically indistinguishable from a human; however, there is no conscious experience.
"Soulless Zombie"(soulless zombie) lacks a soul, but is otherwise completely human; this concept is used to find out what, in any case, the soul could mean.

However, the "philosophical zombie" is primarily seen in the context of arguments against physicalism (or functionalism) in general. Thus, a pi-zombie is generally understood to mean a being that is physically indistinguishable from a "normal" human but lacks conscious experience, the qualia.

"Zombies" and physicalism

Kripke

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Saul Kripke

Good way to showcase weak spots physicalism - to address some of the ideas of the American analytical philosopher Sola Kripke set forth in his Naming and Necessity (1972).
Imagine God, writes Kripke, creating the world and deciding to bring the entire physical universe into existence according to the full definition of P in purely physical terms. P describes things like the placement and states of elementary particles throughout space and time, along with the laws that govern their behavior. Now the question is, having created a purely physical universe according to this specification, did God have to do something else to condition the existence of human consciousness? A positive answer to this question implies that there is more to consciousness than just the physical facts from which it could be inferred (dualism). Since consciousness requires non-physical properties in the strict sense, and such properties would not exist in a purely physical world, it would be a zombie world. Physicalists, on the other hand, chose to answer the question in the negative. Then they must say that by establishing purely physical facts according to P, God has thus established all the mental facts about the organisms whose existence is provided for by P, including facts about people's thoughts, feelings, emotions, and events.
Obviously, physicalists are true to the notion that the physical world defined by P is the only true order of things, with all other true statements being alternative ways of talking about the same world. In this sense, physicalists must hold that the facts of consciousness "follow" the physical facts, and that zombie worlds are "not possible." Therefore, proving the possibility of the existence of zombies will show that the mental facts do not follow the physical facts: that a zombie world is possible and physicalism is wrong.

Chalmers

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David Chalmers

However, the zombie argument against physicalism in general has been best applied and developed in detail. David Chalmers in The Conscious Mind (1996). According to Chalmers, it is possible to coherently (coherently) imagine a whole world of zombies: a world physically indistinguishable from our world, but completely devoid of conscious experience. In such a world, the counterpart of every being that is conscious in our world would be a "pi-zombie". The structure of Chalmers' version of the "zombie argument" can be outlined in in general terms in the following way:

1. If physicalism is correct, then it is not possible to have a world in which all physical facts are the same as those in the real (our) world, but in which there are also additional facts. This is because, according to physicalism, all facts are completely determined by physical facts; thus, any world that is physically indistinguishable from our world is completely indistinguishable from our world.

2. But there is possible world, in which all physical facts are the same as in the real world, but in which there are additional facts. (For example, it is possible that there is a world exactly like ours in every physical respect, but in it everyone lacks certain mental states, namely any phenomenal events or qualia. People there look and act exactly like people in the actual world , but they do not feel anything; when, for example, someone is successfully shot, the latter screams in pain, as if he really feels it, but this is not at all)

3. Therefore, physicalism is false. (Conclusion follows modus tollens (((A&B) & non-B) → non-A))

An argument is logically valid because if its premises are true, then the conclusion must also be true. However, some philosophers doubt that his premises are correct. For example, regarding premise 2: is such a zombie world really possible? Chalmers states that "there certainly seems to be a logically coherent situation depicted; I cannot see the contradiction in the description." Since such a world is conceivable, Chalmers claims that it is possible; and if such a world is possible, then physicalism is wrong. Chalmers argues solely for the sake of logical possibility, and he believes that this is the essence of all that his argument requires. He states: "Zombies are probably not possible in nature: they probably cannot exist in our world, with its natural laws."
This leads to the following questions, for example, in what sense is the concept of "possibility" used here? Some philosophers argue that the relevant kind of possibility is not as weak as the logical possibility. They believe that, despite the logical possibility of a zombie world (that is, there is no logical contradiction in any complete description of the situation), such a weak concept is not relevant (does not correspond) to the analysis of a metaphysical thesis like physicalism. Most philosophers agree that the corresponding concept of possibility is a kind of metaphysical possibility. That the claimant of the "zombie argument" is the only one who can say, sitting in a chair and using only the power of reason, that this whole zombie situation is metaphysically possible. Chalmers states: "From the conceivability of zombies, the proponents of the argument infer their metaphysical possibility." Chalmers argues that this conclusion from conceivability to metaphysical possibility is not entirely valid, but it is valid for phenomenal concepts such as consciousness. In fact, according to Chalmers, what is logically possible is also, in this case perhaps metaphysically.

Criticism of the "zombie argument"

Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett - A well-known critic of the "zombie argument", as he believes that it is of no use in philosophical discussions, it is based on illusions and contradictory in nature, to the extent that it correlates with the concept of man. Although it should be noted that Dennett himself, in his 1991 work Mind Explained, referred to the idea of "zombies" as "something well known and even states "general agreement among philosophers" that "zombies are or would be such people who demonstrate a completely natural, accompanied by attention and speech, lively behavior, but at the same time in reality they are completely devoid of consciousness, being something like automatons. The physicalist could respond to the zombie argument in several ways. Most answers deny premise 2 (Chalmers' version above), that is, they deny that a zombie world is possible.
The unequivocal answer is that the idea of qualia and the corresponding phenomenal representations of consciousness are unrelated concepts, and the idea of a zombie is therefore controversial. Daniel Dennett and others take this position. They argue that although subjective experience, etc. exists in some view, they do not come forward as claims of a proponent of the zombie argument; pain, for example, is not something that can be quietly separated from a person's mental life without causing behavioral or physiological deviations (divergences). Dennett coined the term "zimboes" ("philosophical zombies" who have second-tier beliefs or "advanced self-monitoring mechanisms") to argue that the idea of a philosophical zombie is controversial. He states: "Philosophers should hastily abandon the idea of zombies, but since they continue to be in close embrace, this gives me an excellent opportunity to focus on the most seductive error in the current thinking."
In a similar way Nigel Thomas argues that the notion of zombies is inherently self-contradictory: because zombies, barring various assumptions, behave exactly like normal humans they would claim to be conscious. Thomas insists that any interpretation of this claim (that is, whether it is taken to be true, false, or neither true nor false) inevitably entails either a contradiction or sheer absurdity. Taking the position of physicalism, one had either to believe that anyone, including themselves, could be a zombie, or that no one can be a zombie - a consequence of the assertion that one's own belief that zombies exist (or do not exist) is a product of the physical world and is therefore no different from anyone else's. This argument was advanced by Daniel Dennett, who argues that Zimbos are conscious, they have qualia, they endure pain - they are only "wrong" (according to this sad tradition) in a way that none of them can ever discover." While it has been argued that zombies are metaphysically impossible under the assumption of physicalism, it has also been argued that zombies are not conceivable. concepts (or fantasies), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition."
According to Dennett, there are no differences at all between people and "philosophical zombies". After all, consciousness, which zombies supposedly lack, simply does not exist, and in the sense in which it exists, zombies completely possess it. That is why, if desired, all people can be called zombies.

conclusions

The zombie argument is difficult to bear because it reveals disagreements about the basic questions that philosophers have about the method and boundaries of philosophy itself. He gets to the core of the controversy about the nature and abilities of conceptual analysis. Proponents of the zombie argument, such as Chalmers, think that conceptual analysis is a central part (if not the only part) of philosophy and therefore it (the zombie argument) will certainly help to do a lot of important philosophical work. However, others, such as Dennett, Paul Churchland, Willard Quine and others, have diametrically opposed ideas about nature and the field. philosophical analysis. Therefore discussion of the zombie argument remains vigorous in modern philosophy consciousness.

Literature

1. Vasiliev V. V. “The Difficult Problem of Consciousness”. M.: "Progress-Tradition", 2009
2. Volkov D. B. D. Dennett’s theory of consciousness: dissertation for the degree of candidate of philosophical sciences: 09.00.03 / Dmitry Borisovich Volkov; [Place of protection: Mosk. state un-t im. M.V. Lomonosov].- M., 2008
3. Gartseva N. M. Naturalistic dualism of D. Chalmers: dissertation for the degree of candidate of philosophical sciences: 09.00.03 / Gartseva Natalya Mikhailovna; [Place of protection: Mosk. state un-t im. M.V. Lomonosov].- M., 2009
4. Chalmers D. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1996
5. Chalmers D. Consciousness and its Place in Nature, in the Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, S. Stich and F. Warfield (eds.), Blackwell, 2003
6. Chalmers D. Imagination, Indexicality, and Intensions, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 68, no. 1, 2004
7. Dennett D. Consciousness Explained, Boston, Little, Brown and Company. 1991
8. Dennett D. The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies, Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 2, no. 4, 1995. P. 322–326.
9. Dennett D. The Zombic Hunch: Extinction of an Intuition?, Royal Institute of Philosophy Millennial Lecture, 1999
10. Kripke S. Naming and Necessity, in Semantics of Natural Language, ed. by D. Davidson and G. Harman, Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, 1972, pp. 253-355.
11. Thomas N.J.T. Zombie Killer, in S.R. Hameroff, A.W. Kaszniak, & A.C. Scott (eds.), Toward a Science of Consciousness II: The Second Tucson Discussions and Debates (pp. 171–177),

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What is a thought experiment?

A thought experiment in philosophy, physics and a number of other sciences is a form of cognitive activity, where a situation is modeled not in the form of a real experiment familiar to each of us, but in the imagination. This concept was first introduced into use by the Austrian positivist philosopher, mechanic and physicist Ernst Mach.

Today, the term "thought experiment" is actively used by various scientists, entrepreneurs, politicians and specialists in various fields around the world. Some of them prefer to conduct their own thought experiments, and some give all sorts of examples of them, with the best examples of which we want to introduce you.

As the name implies, we will consider eight experiments in total.

Philosophical zombie

Imagine a living dead. But not sinister, but such a modest, harmless, similar to an ordinary person. The only thing that distinguishes him from people is that he cannot feel anything, does not have conscious experience, but he is able to repeat their actions and reactions after people, for example, if he is burned with fire, he skillfully imitates pain.

If such a zombie existed, it would go against the theory of physicalism, where the perception of a person is due only to the processes of the physical plane. The philosophical zombie also does not correlate in any way with behavioral views, according to which any manifestations, desires and consciousness of a person are reduced to behavioral factors, and such a zombie cannot be distinguished from an ordinary person. This experiment also partially concerns the problem of artificial intelligence, because in the place of a zombie there may be a notorious android capable of copying human habits.

quantum suicide

The second experiment concerns quantum mechanics, but here it changes - from the position of an eyewitness to the position of a participant. Take Schrödinger's cat, for example, shooting himself in the head with a gun powered by the decay of a radioactive atom. The gun can misfire 50% of the time. , there is a collision of two quantum theories: "Copenhagen" and many-worlds.

According to the first, the cat cannot be in two states at the same time, i.e. he will either be alive or dead. But according to the second, any new attempt to shoot, as it were, divides the universe into two alternatives: in the first, the cat is alive, in the second, it is dead. However, the alter-ego of the cat, who remained to live, will remain unaware of his death in a parallel reality.

The author of the experiment, Professor Max Tegmark, leans towards the theory of the multiverse. But most of the experts in the field of quantum mechanics, who were interviewed by Tegmark, trust the "Copenhagen" quantum theory.

Poison and reward

Curtain of ignorance

A wonderful experiment on the topic of social justice.

Example: everything related to social organization is entrusted to a certain group of people. In order for the concept they came up with to be as objective as possible, these people were deprived of knowledge about their status in society, belonging to classes, intelligence quotient and others that can guarantee competitive superiority - this is all the “curtain of ignorance”.

The question is, what concept of the organization of society will people choose, being incapable of taking into account their own personal interests?

Chinese room

A man who is in a room with baskets filled with hieroglyphs. He has at his disposal a detailed manual in his native language, explaining the laws of combining unusual signs. It is not necessary to understand the meaning of all hieroglyphs, because only the drawing rules apply. But in the process of working with hieroglyphs, you can create a text that is no different from the written language of a Chinese resident.

Outside the door of the room are people passing cards with questions in Chinese to the recluse. Our hero, taking into account the rules from the textbook, answers them - his answers do not make sense for him, but for the Chinese they are quite logical.

If we imagine the hero as a computer, the textbook as an information base, and people's messages as questions and answers to the computer, the experiment will show the limitations of the computer and its inability to master human thinking in the process of simply responding to initial conditions through programmed way.

Infinite monkey theorem

Based on this experiment, an abstract monkey, if he beats the keys of a printing mechanism in a chaotic manner for eternity, at one of the moments will be able to print any text that was originally given, for example, Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Attempts were even made to bring this experiment to life: teachers and students at the University of Plymouth raised two thousand dollars to give out a computer to six macaques in the zoo. A month has passed, but the “testees” have not achieved success - their literary heritage contains only five pages, where the letter “S” predominates. The computer was almost completely destroyed. But the experimenters themselves said that they learned a lot from their project.

You can come up with some of your own unusual thought experiments - for this you just need to turn on your head and. But have you ever thought, by the way, that many of us, almost everyone, mentally conduct all kinds of experiments involving, for example, ourselves, someone close to us or even pets? The next time you imagine a situation, write it down on paper or even publish it - maybe your ideas will get a good development.

Have you ever been able to tell what the other person is thinking? How could you know this? It is one thing to assume that we are not in a position to know anyone's thoughts at all; it is quite another thing to assume that a person may not have thoughts at all that you could know.

The philosophical zombie is a thought experiment, a concept used in philosophy to explore the problems of consciousness and its relationship to the physical world. Most philosophers agree that they don't really exist. Here's the thing: the people you meet in the world actually look like characters in a computer game. They talk as if they have consciousness, but they don't. They may say "oops" if you kick them, but they don't feel pain. They simply exist to help your mind explore the world, but do not have their own.

The concept of a zombie is used mainly to criticize physicalism, according to which there is nothing but physical things, and everything around can be determined solely by its physical properties. The conceivable argument assumes that anything conceivable is possible, and hence such zombies are possible. The very possibility of this - unlikely but possible - raises all kinds of problems related to consciousness, for example, the following kind.

Qualia is, saying in simple terms, the objective experience of the other. It may seem simple to assert the impossibility of accurately knowing the experiences (experience) of another person, but the idea of qualia (this is plural, the singular will be “quale”) brings this assertion into the complex section.

For example, what is hunger? We all know what hunger tastes like, right? But can you be sure that your friend Alexander or Vasily will feel the same hunger as you? We can even describe it as "an empty feeling in a rumbling stomach." Not bad, but for Alexander this "emptiness" will be completely different than yours. Or, for example, "red". Everyone knows what red looks like, but how would you describe it to a blind person? Even if we break the red color into light frequencies and find out which of them produce the reference red, we still cannot be one hundred percent sure that Vasya or Sasha do not see the reference green in it.

This is where the weird starts. A famous qualia thought experiment involves a woman growing up in a black and white room, getting all the information about the world from black and white monitors. She learns and comprehends everything there is to know about the physical aspects of color and vision: wave frequencies, how the eye perceives color - everything. She becomes an expert and eventually knows all the factual information on these matters.

Then, one day, she leaves the room and sees colors for the first time. In the process, she learns something about flowers that she didn't know until that time. But what? First of all, what it is like to see color.

Descriptivist theory

The British philosopher John Stuart Mill in the 19th century outlined a theory of names that lasted for many years - its essence is that the meaning of a proper name is that this name carries in the outside world. Pretty simple. The only problem with theory is with things that don't exist in the outside world. The sentence "Harry Potter is a great wizard" is completely meaningless according to Mill.

The German logician Gottlieb Frege challenged this view with his Descriptivist theory, according to which the meanings - the semantic contents - of names are a collection of descriptions associated with them. With this explanation, the above sentence would make sense because the reader and author would mean something along the lines of "pop culture character" or "a fictional boy created by Rowling" when referring to Harry Potter.

It seems simple, but in the philosophy of language - before Frege - there was no distinction between meaning and reference. That is, there are several meanings associated with the word - with the object to which this term refers, and the way in which this term refers to this object.

Believe it or not, descriptivist theory is riddled with holes that have come to light in it in the last few decades, notably by the American philosopher Saul Kripke in his 1971 book Naming and Necessity. Take at least one argument (in a nutshell) that if the information about the subject of the naming is incomplete or incorrect, the name may refer to another person about whom the information will be more accurate. Kripke's objections only ignited the fire of debate.

The mind-body problem

The mind-body problem is one aspect of dualism, a philosophy that basically holds that the principle of dividing all things into two types, such as good and evil, light and dark, wet and dry, is true for all systems, and that these two things are necessarily must exist independently of each other and be equal in terms of their influence on the system. Dualistic religions assume the existence of God and Satan, monistic ones reduce everything to a single deity or monad, pluralistic ones allow the existence of many gods.

The mind-body problem is much simpler: what is the relationship between body and mind? If dualism is correct, then humans must be either physical or mental entities, yet we seem to exhibit properties of both. This raises a number of issues that manifest themselves in different ways: are mental and physical states kind of the same? If yes, which ones exactly? What is consciousness and how is it different from physical body, can it exist outside of it? What is "I" - is "you" physically you? Or is "you" your mind?

The problem is that dualists cannot find a satisfactory picture for themselves of tying body and mind together, which can bring them back to the concept of philosophical zombies. Unless the next point intervenes and destroys this whole philosophy.

Simulation Argument

Ever since The Matrix came out, we've all been wondering: ? This idea is incredibly strong and suits everyone at least at the level of argumentation. And while the "yes, it's just a movie" argument has convinced many, the roots of the movie's idea stem from the so-called simulation argument, which may frustrate many of you.

First, let's look at the so-called sleep argument. During sleep we do not know that we are dreaming; we are fully convinced that the dream is real. From this perspective, dreams represent the pinnacle of virtual reality and prove that our brains can deceive themselves into thinking that pure sensory input represents our physical reality when it actually doesn't. Moreover, it is almost impossible to say for sure whether you are sleeping now - or always sleeping. Now let's think about something else.

Apparently, humans have lived as a species long enough to create a computer simulation that simulates human beings with artificial intelligence. Informing artificial intelligence about its nature - simulation - is contrary to the goals, because the model will not be authentic. If such models and characters are not banned, we will definitely launch billions of them - to study wars, history, diseases, cultures and more. Some, if not most, of these simulations will also develop similar technology and run their own model, ad infinitum.

So who are we really? One indigenous civilization that will develop this technology, or one of a billion simulations? Of course, it is more likely that we are just a model.

Synchronicity is a term coined by renowned psychologist and philosopher Carl Jung. It stands for "significant coincidences," and Jung was partly inspired by a very strange event involving one of his patients.

Jung took as a basis the idea that coincidences that do not seem to happen by chance may initially manifest themselves in the mind of the person who perceives these coincidences. One patient was suffering from some kind of subconscious trauma, and one night he dreamed of a golden scarab beetle, a large and rare such beetle. The next day, during a session with Jung and after describing the dream, an insect hit the window of the room. Jung took it - it was a golden scarab, very rare for the climate of this region. He let him into the room, and while the patient raised his jaw from the floor, he described in detail his theory meaningful matches.

The meaning of the scarab is that the patient was familiar with its meaning - the totem of death and rebirth in ancient Egyptian philosophy. For the patient, he was a symbol of the rejection of old ways of thinking that made his treatment difficult. For Jung, however, the incident reinforced the idea of synchronicity and its consequences: our thoughts and ideas, even subconscious ones, can have a real effect on the physical world and manifest in it in ways that matter to us.

Orchestrated objective reduction

You probably understand that the main focus of many of these concepts is an attempt to understand the nature of consciousness. The theory of "orchestrated objective reduction" does not differ from them, but was born in the works of two intelligent people independent of each other from two different points vision - mathematical (Roger Penrose, famous British physicist) and anesthesiology (Stuart Hameroff, anesthesiologist). They assimilated their work into a unified "Orch-OR" theory after several years of separate work.

The theory is an extrapolation of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, which revolutionized mathematics and states that "any<…>a theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete.” In general, it proves the incompleteness of mathematics and of any particular system in general. Penrose went further, arguing that since mathematics is a "system" and theorems like Gödel's are provable by human mathematicians, "the inevitable conclusion is that mathematicians do not use known procedures of calculation to discover mathematical truth. We conclude that mathematical understanding—the means by which mathematicians reach their conclusions in search of mathematical truth—cannot be reduced to blind calculations.”

Roughly speaking, the human brain simply does not perform calculations and calculations - like a computer, only faster - but does ... something else. Something that no computer could replicate, some "incomputable process" that cannot be described by an algorithm. There are not many things in science that fit this description. For example, .

Uncertainty principle

deals with particles (or waves, whichever you prefer) that are so small that even the act of observing or measuring them can affect what they do. This is the basic idea of the so-called uncertainty principle, which for the first time.

The dual nature of quanta was born to explain the following. If a particle appears in two places at the same time, or functions as a wave at one point and as a particle at another, or appears and disappears in principle - this may be in the order of things at the quantum level. But the act of observing or measuring will affect what is observed at the present moment.

For this reason, although we can get an accurate representation of one state of a quantum object (say, the speed of an electron), the means that will be used to make measurements (say, shooting a photon to intercept) will affect its other properties (location and mass), so a complete picture of the state of this object is simply impossible in principle, and its properties become undefined.

eternal return

There are a number of problems associated with the Big Bang cosmological model, not the least of which is the likelihood of the so-called , according to which the Universe is going to collapse or heat death. One theory that can eliminate these problems is the Eternal Return theory - which simply states that there was no beginning or end to the universe. It is eternal and has always existed.

The theory relies on infinite time and space. Within Newtonian cosmology, it has been proven by at least one mathematician that the "eternal return" of the universe is a mathematical certainty. And of course, this concept is reflected in many religions, ancient and modern.

This concept is central to Nietzsche's writings and has serious philosophical implications for the nature of free will and destiny. It weighs heavily on the very essence of our existence - we are doomed to be tied to space and time and experience the fullness of our existence for eternity. Unless, of course, you consider alternative theories.

Ease

If the concept of a universe without beginning and end, in which the same events repeat without meaning and without end, looks heavy, one can consider philosophical concept"lightness", which is exactly the opposite. In a Universe that has a beginning and an end, the existence of anything is absolutely meaningless, because it is fleeting and does not carry any consequences. Such a universe is filled with lightness and completely meaningless.

An easy version of this concept was considered in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. The same concept is approved by Zen Buddhism and teaches to enjoy it. Many Eastern philosophies teach lightness and strive for it as a form of perfection and enlightenment.

In the end, you have the right to accept any point of view. Or you can't take any.

quantum suicide

Just like the well-known problem with a cat languishing in a box, this experiment touches upon the problems of quantum mechanics - only from the point of view of not the observer, but the participant in the process himself. In place of Schrodinger's cat, there is a conditional hero who shoots himself in the head with a gun with a mechanism that depends on the decay of a radioactive atom. The probability of a misfire is 50%. At the moment the trigger is pressed, two quantum theories collide - the so-called "Copenhagen" and many-worlds. According to the first, the observed hero cannot be in two states in parallel - he is definitely either alive or dead.

But the second option is much more romantic - each new shot attempt splits the universe into two alternative versions: in one, the participant remains alive, and in the other, he dies. But the hero's surviving alter ego will never know about own death in a parallel world. The author of the experiment, MIT professor Max Tegmark, firmly adheres to the concept of the multiverse, but is in no hurry to test it on himself. “Everything will be all right with me, but my wife Angelica will remain a widow,” he explained in an interview. And it's hard to argue with that.

But as seductive as the theory of alternative universes was, most quantum mechanics interviewed by Tegmark himself in 1997 agreed with the Copenhagen concept. And later polls of scientists in the "zero" repeated the same result.

Survival Lottery

British philosopher John Harris came up with a cruel ethical puzzle. Imagine a world where organ transplants are carried out perfectly, and the ethical rules are such that letting a person die and killing him is one and the same. As a result, all of humanity agrees to participate in the "survival lottery" - as soon as any person is near death, a random lot indicates who must sacrifice his life to save him. And since one donor can save several dying people, his sacrifice is quite justified statistically. Everything seems to be fair, but you don’t want to live in such a world. But there is reason to reflect on the justification of self-sacrifice and the line between non-intervention and murder.

The philosopher himself in this story was worried about another important problem. “In many cases it will be painfully difficult to decide whether a person is to blame for his misfortune. There are many ways in which he can drive himself into this trap, and the task is to determine to what extent a person is responsible for his own destiny and how much his actions were conscious. And how can we be sure that a person is not to blame for the misfortune that befell him, and can we rely on this confidence to save him? In other words, even if the "lottery of survival" is considered ethically sound, is it worth saving a smoker from lung cancer? The main thing is that real doctors do not think about this issue.

Philosophical zombie

This hypothetical living dead, unlike the characters in Resident Evil, does not eat people: he is a completely harmless creature, outwardly indistinguishable from an ordinary person. The only difference is that the philosophical zombie is not capable of feeling anything and has no conscious experience, but can imitate any human reactions and actions. For example, if you prick him with a needle, he will quite convincingly depict pain.

The possibility of the existence of such a zombie refutes the concept of physicalism, according to which human perception is due only to physical processes. The philosophical zombie also struggles with the ideas of behaviorism. Indeed, in terms of behavior, such a dead person is indistinguishable from a real person, and according to this theory, consciousness, desires and other mental manifestations are reduced only to behavioral patterns.

This experiment indirectly affects the problem of artificial intelligence - in place of a zombie, you can just as well imagine an android copying all human habits. Such an android would surely pass the Turing test - while continuing to remain unaware of itself. And this forces us to reconsider the criteria of reasonableness.

Maria's room

Like a philosophical zombie, this experiment makes you think about the difference between real experience and knowledge about how the experience should be. Imagine a black-and-white room, where Maria, a specialist in the neurophysiology of vision, sits at a black-and-white monitor. She has never seen color, but she has all the information about the human reaction to it: she knows exactly what we experience when we see a blue sky or a scarlet rose. The question is, will Maria learn anything new if she sees the color herself?

This is another stone in the garden of physicalists, who believe that any knowledge is knowledge only about physical facts. However, some authoritative philosophers (including the famous American cognitive scientist) are of the opinion that the personal experience of color is unlikely to surprise an omniscient scientist. Even if you try to play a trick on Maria and give her a blue banana instead of a normal one, theoretical knowledge about the color of all things in the world will help her respond adequately. However, for the purity of the experiment, perhaps it would be worth replacing the banana with something more spectacular - for example, a painting by Matisse.

Infinite monkey theorem

A favorite thought experiment of the physicist and fans of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy claims that an abstract monkey, chaotically hitting the keys of a typewriter for eternity, will sooner or later type any predetermined text (the most popular version is Shakespeare's Hamlet).

Enthusiasts have already tried to implement this experiment: in 2003, students and teachers at the University of Plymouth spent $2,000 on research by giving a computer to six monkeys at the local zoo. But in a month of work, aspiring writers Elmo, Gum, Heather, Rowan, Holly and Omela did not really succeed - their creative legacy amounted to only five pages, mostly containing only the letter “S”, and by the end of the project the computer was more than a deplorable sight. However, representatives of the university claimed that they learned a lot of useful things from the experiment.

But interest in the question does not fade: perhaps because this theorem is as old as the world. Specialists in probability theory became interested in it at the beginning of the 20th century, but even more thought about the possibility of randomly generating a meaningful text. ancient philosophers. For example, in Cicero, the role of a monkey was played by an abstract man throwing metal letters to the ground, and instead of "Hamlet" there were "Annals" by Ennius. “It is unlikely that by chance even one line can turn out in this way,” the philosopher delivered a verdict.

But mathematicians do not agree - the probability of sooner or later printing a full-fledged book, randomly poking at the keyboard, although negligible (about 1/10183 800), still exists. And the recognized expert on quantum mechanics, Seth Lloyd, argues that this is how everything that exists appeared. Unless, of course, we take the Universe itself for a computer, and random quantum fluctuations for monkeys. Thus, the fantastic assumption became the basis of a new branch of science - quantum information theory.

Poison and reward

Another inhumane fantasy: a certain millionaire places a vial of poison in front of the hero. The poison is not fatal, but its use causes terrible torment during the day. The rich man makes an offer that cannot be refused: if the hero agrees to drink poison tomorrow afternoon, then tomorrow morning he will receive a million dollars. That is, in principle, it is not necessary to take poison - the daredevil will receive a prize before the time comes for poisoning. Common sense dictates that the most logical thing to do is agree, get rewarded, and not drink the toxin. But here a paradox arises: how can one intend to do something (and after all, money is given out precisely for intention), without intending to do it? It turns out that honestly fulfilling the agreement without drinking poison is still impossible.

Curtain of ignorance

An excellent experiment on the topic of social justice, invented by the American philosopher John Rawls. Suppose all decisions on the organization of the society of the future are entrusted to a certain group of people. In order to make the concept they came up with as objective as possible, they were deprived of knowledge about their own social status, class affiliation, IQ and other personal qualities that could provide a competitive advantage (the so-called “curtain of ignorance”). It turns out that when making a decision, they cannot take into account their own interests in any way. What concept will they choose?

It must be said that Rawls himself was a liberal, and his Political Views implicitly affect the purity of the experiment: the curtain case is initially based on the fact that fairness means equality of opportunity. But in democratic politics, he could be a good litmus test for any lawmaker.

Chinese room

A man who doesn't know Chinese sits in a room with baskets full of Chinese characters. He has a detailed textbook in his native language explaining the rules for combining hieroglyphs. In this case, only the outlines of the characters are used - it is not necessary to understand their meaning. But as a result of such manipulations, it is possible to create a text that is no different from the written language of an ordinary Chinese. Behind the door are people who pass signs of questions in Chinese to the recluse. The hero, guided by the textbook, sends answers - meaningless for him, but quite logical for readers.

In fact, the hero symbolically passes the Turing test: he plays the role of a computer, the textbook is a database, and the messages are the questions of the person to the machine and its answers to them. The experiment shows the limits of the machine and its inability to learn human thinking simply by reacting to given conditions in a learned way. It also warns against a mechanical approach to learning: the practiced skill of solving specific problems does not mean that a person really understands what he is doing. So the compilers of assignments for the exam should keep this experiment in mind.

Types of zombies

There are several types of zombies. They vary in their degree of resemblance to "normal" human beings and are applied in various thought experiments as follows:

"Behavioral Zombie"(behavioral zombie) is behaviorally indistinguishable from a human and yet has no conscious experience.
"Neurological Zombie"(neurological zombie) has, this is emphasized, a human brain and is otherwise physically indistinguishable from a human; however, there is no conscious experience.
"Soulless Zombie"(soulless zombie) lacks a soul, but is otherwise completely human; this concept is used to find out what, in any case, the soul could mean.

"Zombies" and physicalism

Kripke

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Saul Kripke

A good way to visually demonstrate the weaknesses of physicalism is to refer to some of the ideas of the American analytical philosopher Sola Kripke set forth in his Naming and Necessity (1972).
Imagine God, writes Kripke, creating the world and deciding to bring the entire physical universe into existence according to the full definition of P in purely physical terms. P describes things like the placement and states of elementary particles throughout space and time, along with the laws that govern their behavior. Now the question is, having created a purely physical universe according to this specification, did God have to do something else to condition the existence of human consciousness? A positive answer to this question implies that there is more to consciousness than just the physical facts from which it could be inferred (dualism). Since consciousness requires non-physical properties in the strict sense, and such properties would not exist in a purely physical world, it would be a zombie world. Physicalists, on the other hand, chose to answer the question in the negative. Then they must say that by establishing purely physical facts according to P, God has thus established all the mental facts about the organisms whose existence is provided for by P, including facts about people's thoughts, feelings, emotions, and events.
Obviously, physicalists are true to the notion that the physical world defined by P is the only true order of things, with all other true statements being alternative ways of talking about the same world. In this sense, physicalists must hold that the facts of consciousness "follow" the physical facts, and that zombie worlds are "not possible." Therefore, proving the possibility of the existence of zombies will show that the mental facts do not follow the physical facts: that a zombie world is possible and physicalism is wrong.

Chalmers

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David Chalmers

2. But there is a possible world in which all physical facts are the same as in the real world, but in which there are additional facts. (For example, it is possible that there is a world exactly like ours in every physical respect, but in it everyone lacks certain mental states, namely any phenomenal events or qualia. People there look and act exactly like people in the actual world , but they do not feel anything; when, for example, someone is successfully shot, the latter screams in pain, as if he really feels it, but this is not at all)

3. Therefore, physicalism is false. (Conclusion follows modus tollens (((A&B) & non-B) → non-A))

Criticism of the "zombie argument"

Daniel Dennett

conclusions

The zombie argument is difficult to bear because it reveals disagreements about the basic questions that philosophers have about the method and boundaries of philosophy itself. He gets to the core of the controversy about the nature and abilities of conceptual analysis. Proponents of the zombie argument, such as Chalmers, think that conceptual analysis is a central part (if not the only part) of philosophy and therefore it (the zombie argument) will certainly help to do a lot of important philosophical work. However, others, such as Dennett, Paul Churchland, Willard Quine and others, have diametrically opposed views on the nature and scope of philosophical analysis. Therefore, discussion of the zombie argument remains vigorous in contemporary philosophy of mind.