I Am a Strange Loop

believe anything? I would hope you would say no. Does the float-ball in a flush toilet sincerely believe anything? Once again, I would hope you would say no.

So suppose we backed off on the sincerity bit, and merely said that Universe Z’s Dave believes the falsities that it is uttering about its enjoyment of this and that. Well, once again, could it not be argued that belief is a kind of feeling? I’m not going to make the argument here, because that’s not my point. My point is that, like so many distinctions in this complex world of ours, the apparent distinction between phenomena that do involve feelings and phenomena that do not is anything but black and white.

If I asked you to write down a list of terms that slide gradually from fully emotional and sentient to fully emotionless and unsentient, I think you could probably quite easily do so. In fact, let’s give it a quick try right here. Here are a few verbs that come to my mind, listed roughly in descending order of emotionality and sentience: agonize, exult, suffer, enjoy, desire, listen, hear, taste, perceive, notice, consider, reason, argue, claim, believe, remember, forget, know, calculate, utter, register, react, bounce, turn, move, stop. I won’t claim that my extremely short list of verbs is impeccably ordered; I simply threw it together in an attempt to show that there is unquestionably a spectrum, a set of shades of gray, concerning words that do and that do not suggest the presence of feelings behind the scenes. The tricky question then is: Which of these verbs (and comparable adjectives, adverbs, nouns, pronouns, etc.) would we be willing to apply to Dave’s zombie twin in Universe Z? Is there some precise cutoff line beyond which certain words are disallowed? Who would determine that cutoff line?

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 elan 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 elan 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 elan 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, and Blue

Let’s consider this idea. Maybe, just maybe, when all fifty million French people look at blood and declare that its color is “rouge”, they are actually experiencing an inner sensation of blueness; in other words, blood looks to them just the way melted blueberry ice cream looks to Americans. And when they gaze up at a beautiful cloudless summer sky and voice the word “bleu”, they are actually having the visual experience of melted raspberry ice cream. Sacrebleu! There is a systematic deception being pulled on them, and simultaneously a systematic linguistic coverup is going on, preventing anyone, including themselves, from ever knowing it.

We’d be convinced of this reversal if only we could get inside their skulls and experience colors in their uniquely bleu-blanc-rouge way, but alas, we’ll never do that. Nor will they ever see colors in our red-white-and-blue way. And by the way, it’s not the case that some wires have been crossed inside those French skulls — their brains look no different from ours, on every scale, from neurotransmitters to neurons to visual cortex. It’s not something fixable by rewiring, or by any other physical operation. It’s just a question of, well, ineffable feelings. And what’s worse is that although it’s true, nobody will ever know that it’s true, since nobody can ever flit from one interiority to another — we’re all trapped inside our own cranium.

Now this scenario sounds downright silly, doesn’t it? How could it ever come about that the fifty million people living inside the rather arbitrary frontiers of a certain hexagonally shaped country would all mistakenly take redness for blueness and blueness for redness (though never revealing it linguistically, since they had all been taught to call that blue sensation “red” and that red sensation “blue”)?

Even the most diehard of inverted-spectrum proponents would find this scenario preposterous. And yet it’s just the same as the standard inverted spectrum; it’s simply been promoted to the level of entire cultures, which