swambies - a thought experiment in philosophy of mind

David Chalmers has his famous (our, should i say infamous?) zombie-argument: he conceives the existence of zombies (physically the same as us, in make up and actions) in a possible world to be conceivable. These zombies would have, as said, the same physical properties, but not the qualia that we - normal non-zombie folks - experience. Since the possible pysical world would be the same, in Chalmers' situation there'd be no causal relevance of our qualia to the pysical world - i myself find this highly troubling, but lets leave that for now. I want to take up the idea of a kind of zombie, i call it a swambie, in this world n now.

I might have got this idea from somewhere in Chalmers' book (1995), i do believe in cryptomnesia, but I don't think my idea is quite the same as his.So here it is:

imagine a swamp - i do love those places. Now in our swamp there is a pool, a lifeless pool (i.e. no organisms whatsoever). Nevertheless there is slow but certain movement (simply by the temperatures), which, over an endless time, forces all present elements to be in all possible combinations. Now, do realize there is some energy in there, electricity, and also imagine those ''elements'' to be the things that make up a human body.

Now here comes the fun:
on a certain moment, per definition, there has to be a composition, by chance, of elements which equals the composition of your brain (or mine, i don't mind (pun :P)) or even better, your body.
Now here's even more fun:
i guess some materialists might have to be forced by now, by this highly improbable situation, though completely conceivable, to say there emerges consciousness in our chance-made body.
I find this higly counterintuitive: it can simply NOT be conscious.

My intuition would not force to a form of strong immaterialism per se, but it does have some interesting consequenses:
a) the meaning of ''body'', ''brain'' and ''mind'' seem to involve their history (help! does this sound like something teleological, though in backward direction?), their context, the meaning of states (in social situations?). A lot of interesting directions here.
b) from a: tangible ''matter''* alone cannot be held responsible for our conscious states.

*it is of course a problematic point i am yet to get clear about: what to mean by matter and what not?

so my swambies. I don't know whether it adds anything to the discussions in the philosophy of mind; i do like to think about them.

peace,
fedde


Chalmers, David. 1995. The conscious mind: in search of a fundamental theory.

the question

me, respons to Anke's happines: ''smiles are gold''

Anke: ''@Fedde, YES!''

''Yes!'' has a powerful and affirmative question, affirmative. And i guess, i feel, that in this context, and a lot of other contexts, goes beyond affirming the simple affirming of my statement. I suppose it goes on in a sense to affirm life, or at least a large conceptual web of associations around my statement (whatever it may consist of).

So the question of the day:
to affirm or not to affirm - in a wide and strong sense.

Should we accept life? Affirm suffering? Should we say ''yes'' to joy? To ENjoy it? To be in the joy; to lose thyself. Or should we neglect it?

The Middle Way? Simply being Content as happiness - having enough and being dumb.



remember: truth hurts
know: certainty is too far away
be: playful
make it be: truthful and joyful

peacefully,
fedde
(thinking aphoristically, abstract yet very concrete, cannot follow myself :D)

dreams

pfff

dreams are weird stuff. They are real, yet unreal; their strangeness can be clear, yet not clear enough to reveal the identity of the dream as a dream.

Knowledge breaks apart the world in pieces; fragmenst our perception; denies the deepness and veracity of connections.

Stupidity is to trust knowledge - wisdom to see the relativity of knowledge and then the active skill to bypass the fragmentation, or: to heal the wound, or: to not even have the wound.
Something like that i suppose.

''Reality'' is really a construct. It is sooo relative, sometimes this hurts - the relativity. But it heals the joy.

So in a dream i had last night (better: this morning) i married a girl (whom i don't even like in real life) - why on earth. Some things (even tactile) i recall as so vivid. So strange this is... might Freud be right?
or perhaps Jung?
recalling the dream i had of getting a girlfriend - now i got married; perhaps there is some teleology in this (i.e. perhaps this is goal-oriented): this would imply i'm going through this experiences in dreams to leave them behind in real life.
This last one is a) the most convenient explanation (i.e. i'd prefer it) and b) as proveable as Freuds'. Point b is debatable - i guess with the preference of possible evidence going towards both options.

dreaming on
fedde

peace