[FRIAM] P Zombie Couches

[Eric Charles]

Inspired by conversation in FRIAM a few weeks ago, I finally finished my
overdue blog post on the mystery of Philosophical Zombie Couches.

Fixing Psychology: Deep thoughts: P Zombie Couches
<https://fixingpsychology.blogspot.com/2021/10/deep-thoughts-p-zombie-couches.html>

I wrote several years ago about the classic "Stomach in a Jar
<https://fixingpsychology.blogspot.com/2014/12/deep-philosophical-thoughts-stomach-in.html>"
problem that has vexed philosophers for decades. I write today about the
equally complex Philosophical Zombie Couch problem, which has fascinated
philosophers since Keith Campbell and Robert Kirk introduced the idea in
the early 1970s, and David Chalmers popularized it in the mid 1990s. Many
of you will not be familiar with the problem, so let me lay it out simply
to start out with.

You could summarize the argument with a single premise: We can all imagine
an object with all the properties of a couch, but which does not contain
couchishness.

Wikipedia  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie>makes it a
bit more complicated, summarizing Chalmers's argument as follows:

   1. According to physicalism, all that exists in our world (including
   couchishness) is physical.
   2. Thus, if physicalism is true, a metaphysically possible world in
   which all physical facts are the same as those of the actual world must
   contain everything that exists in our actual world. In particular,
   couchishness must exist in such a possible world.
   3. In fact we can conceive of a world physically indistinguishable from
   our world but in which there is no couchishness (a zombie couch world).
   From this (so Chalmers argues) it follows that such a world is
   metaphysically possible.
   4. Therefore, physicalism is false.

That's it, whether you work off the simple premise or more complicated
argument, its implications can keep an introductory philosophy class going
for weeks. The quixotic objects in question are called Zombie Couches. When
we examine them, we find that they are physically identical to a regular
couch. When we interact with them, we encounter reactions that make them
indistinguishable from a real couch. And yet they are without any actual
couchishness.

The questions that follow are obvious:

   - How would we ever know if we were dealing with such a couch?
   - Is it possible that our couch is the only one with couchishness, and
   that all other couches we interact with are Zombie Couches?
   - If our couch were a P Zombie Couch, would we even know?

This riddle is central to the "Hard Problem of Couchishness" that has been
a focal point of the field for some time. What is it like to be a couch?
Can something be exactly like a couch, without actually being a couch? Even
just the logical possibility of such an object seems like it would refute
the very notion of physicalism, because it implies that we readily
recognize that a purely physical explanation of couchishness is
insufficient.

Of course, there are those who claim the P Zombie Couch problem is a
bamboozle from the start. Daniel Dennett is key among them, and he has
claimed that any philosopher who claims to be able to conceive of a Zombie
Couch either hasn't fully conceived of the object in question, or is
inadvertently porting in "second-order couchishness" in one manner or
another. As Dennet states:

Supposing that by an act of stipulative imagination you can remove
couchishness while leaving all couch-entailed systems intact — a quite
standard but entirely bogus feat of imagination — is like supposing that by
an act of stipulative imagination, you can remove structural integrity
while leaving all structural objects and relations intact. … Structural
integrity isn’t that sort of thing, and neither is couchishness (1995,
325... roughly).


Others counter that P Zombie Couches are quite easy to imagine: For
example, what if we created microscopic machines that replaced every-other
fiber in your couch cushions? The machines would take the input from any
fiber, and pass the input along to the next fiber, but not be a fiber
itself. Clearly the resulting object would not have couchishness, while
still appearing couchish in all interactions. Q.E.D.

There are, of course, many other objections to the Zombie Couch line of
arguments. Should "metaphysical possibility" influence our thinking about
the actual world we find ourselves in, or can such factors only play into
discussions of "possible worlds"? Can the argument hold if we define
couchishness in purely functional terms? The richness of these discussions
connects the Zombie Couch problem with many other areas of philosophical
investigation.

Several famous thought experiments relate to this issue, for example: What
if, when throwing a couch away in a swamp, a bolt of lightning hit the
couch and destroyed it, and at the same instance another bolt of lightning
some distance away rearranged different atoms into an exact duplicate of
your couch. If, startled by the happening, you brought *that *couch home,
the Swamp Couch
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davidson_(philosopher)#Swampman> would
function exactly like your original couch, including showing any and all
effects of your original couches experiences, but it would not be your
original couch at all. The Swamp Couch would have no historic connection
with what your couch experienced, and that socio-historic context (it is
asserted) was the key to the couchishness of the original object - without
that socio-historical context, we cannot reasonably say any couchishness is
present.

As Kirk summarizes, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
<https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/>: Regardless of whether those
pessimistic readings of the debate are correct, and of whether the zombie
idea itself is sound or incoherent, it continues to stimulate fruitful work
on couchishness, physicalism, furniture concepts, and the relations between
imaginability, conceivability, and possibility.
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