Chalmers and South Asian Perspectives on Qualia — Epoche B2
Can a Self Be Switched Off? The Zombie Argument and an Indian Dispute About Consciousness The argument, and the premise nobody examines David Chalmers's The Conscious Mind (1996 [1] ) revived an old worry in a sharp new form. Imagine a being physically indistinguishable from you — the same neurons, the same firing patterns, the same words coming out of its mouth — for which there is no inner life at all. Chalmers calls such a being a philosophical zombie [2] . His argument runs in three steps. Zombies are conceivable. What is conceivable in the relevant sense is metaphysically possible. If a world physically like ours can lack experience, then experience is not fixed by the physical facts, and so materialism is false. Almost all of the enormous literature on this argument attacks the second step, the move from conceivability to possibility. The first step is usually granted, sometimes explicitly, on the grounds that we can see nothing incoherent in the description. This review argues that the first step is not a datum but the product of a substantive theory of what a subject is: the theory that a subject can be completely specified without settling whether it is conscious. That theory has been asserted and denied by name. Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika asserted it and built a doctrine of liberation on it; Rāmānuja [3] , in the Śrī Bhāṣya , argued at length that it is incoherent. If Rāmānuja's argument works, the zombie argument fails at step one — and it fails without materialism being true, which is what makes the result worth having. What the zombie has to be Two features of the zombie scenario matter here. First, the zombie is a duplicate : it is not merely a lump of matter arranged like a person, but a counterpart of a particular person, atom for atom. Second, it is a duplicate of which something is true, namely that there is nothing it is like to be it. Chalmers is explicit that the lights are off inside. The scenario is therefore not just a description of a physical arrangement; it is the claim that a certain individual exists and lacks a certain property. Put that way, the scenario presupposes an answer to a question it never raises. Is a subject of experience the kind of thing that can be fully pinned down by physical description, with consciousness left over as an optional extra? If yes, the zombie description is coherent and we can argue about whether coherence implies possibility. If no, the description does not pick out a possible individual at all, and there is nothing for step two to work on. Nyāya's stone-like self The claim that a self can be fully what it is without any consciousness is not a philosopher's invention for the sake of an argument. It was the settled position of one of India's major schools. Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika holds that the self ( ātman ) is a substance, and that cognition ( jñāna ) is a quality that arises in that substance when the self makes contact with the internal organ, the internal organ with a sense faculty, and the sense faculty with an object. Consciousness is thus adventitious. It comes and goes; the self is the standing thing in which it comes and goes. The doctrine has a striking consequence, which the school accepted rather than avoided. Liberation, apavarga , is defined in the Nyāya-sūtra (I.1.22) [4] as final release from pain. On the Vaiśeṣika analysis this means the destruction of the self's specific qualities — cognition, pleasure, pain, desire, aversion, effort and the rest. The liberated self persists as a bare substance with no experience whatever. Rival schools found this appalling and said so; the standard jibe was that Nyāya's liberation is indistinguishable from becoming a stone. What matters here is not the jibe but the structure. Nyāya is committed to exactly the thesis the zombie scenario needs: that a self can be numerically the same self, in full possession of its own nature, with the experience subtracted. If Nyāya is right about selves, then Chalmers's first premise is not merely conceivable but instantiated at the end of the spiritual path. Rāmānuja's reply Rāmānuja (c. 1017–1137) is often mishandled in comparative discussions, so it is worth being exact about what he holds. His Viśiṣṭādvaita is not an idealism. Matter, acit , is genuinely real and genuinely non-sentient; selves, cit , are genuinely real and genuinely distinct from one another; both stand to Brahman as a body stands to the self that animates it, inseparable from it but not identical with it. Anyone who reads Rāmānuja as denying that there is a non-conscious physical order has misread the central architecture of his system. His disagreement with Nyāya is narrower and sharper. For Rāmānuja the individual self is both a knower and of the nature of knowledge. It possesses what his tradition calls attributive consciousness, dharmabhūta-jñāna — a consciousness that belongs to the self as light belongs to a lamp, contracted by past action in embodied life and fully expanded in release. The lamp analogy is doing real work. A lamp does not have light as an optional accessory; a lamp that emits nothing is not a dimmed lamp but a different object. The argument Rāmānuja presses, in the long opening discussion of the Śrī Bhāṣya under Brahma-sūtra I.1.1, is that the self is given to itself as an "I", and that this self-presentation is not a further cognition of the self by something else. It is the self being manifest. Against Advaita he insists that this "I" survives liberation rather than dissolving into an attribute-free absolute; against Nyāya he insists that it cannot be stripped away while the self remains. A substance whose manifestation to itself has been removed has not lost a quality. There is nothing left to be the bearer. What this does to the zombie Transpose that argument. The zombie scenario asks us to hold a subject fixed and remove its experience. Rāmānuja's claim is that this operation has no coherent result, because being a subject is not a status a thing has independe