Month: April 2012

Can Things Be Counted?

From the mail:

I saw your blog post the other day titled Saying and Showing  where you talked about Wittgenstein's exchange with Russell on 'things', along with his Kantian perspective. Toward the end you say this: "What goes for 'world' also goes for 'thing.'  You can't count things. How many things on my desk?  The question has no clear sense.  It is not like asking how many pens are on my desk.  So Wittgenstein is on to something.  His nonsense is deep and important."

In fact, E. J. Lowe says something similar toward the beginning of his book The Possibility of Metaphysics. However, I have never entirely understood the motivation behind this claim. It seems to me that, as a matter of fact, a man *can* count the number of things on his desk. There will certainly be very *many* things (the composite objects, their parts down to the atoms, and so forth), but what stops them from being *in principle* counted?  [. . .]

Let's begin by clearing up an ambiguity.  I can count the cats in my house; cats are things (in the very broad sense in which the term means the same as: object, entity, existent, being, item); and so one might think that one can count things.  I'll grant that.  But what we cannot do — and this was my claim –is count things as things.  I can sensibly ask how many cats, cat whiskers, unicorns, pachyderms, and bottles of tequila are presently in my house, and I can sensibly give the following answers: 2, <40, 0, 0, 1.  What I cannot do is sensibly ask how many things or existents are in my house.

Why is this? Well, when I count Fs, what I am doing is counting instances of the concept F.  To count I need a concept, a classificatory device.   To count the spatulas in a drawer I have to have the concept spatula.  I have to know what 'counts' as a spatula.  I have to know WHAT a spatula is to know whether there are any and how many there are.  I have to be able to identify a particular item as a spatula (as opposed to, say, a ladle) and I have to be able to re-identify it — so that I don't count it twice.  To count three spatulas and two ladles I need the concepts spatula and ladle.  That makes five utensils.  How many electrical appliances? Zero.  In each of these cases, what we are counting are the instances of a concept.   

How many utensils in the drawer? Five.  How many entities?  This question has no clear sense.  The question presupposes that some definite answer is possible in terms of a finite or even a transfinite cardinal. But any answer given, whether 5 or 50 or aleph-nought will be arbitrary.  Do we count the handle of the ladle as distinct from the rest of it?  Is one ladle two entities?  But of course, parts themselves have parts, and they have parts, etc.  Suppose the ladle is ultimately composed of simple (indivisible) bits of matter.  Suppose there are n such bits.  In the region of space occupied by the ladle are there n entities or n + 1 entities?  Is the whole ladle countably distinct from its parts?  Or is the whole ladle just those parts?  (Compare van Inwagen's denial of artifacts.)  And what about the space occupied by the ladle?  It is not nothing! So do we count it too when we count the entities in the drawer?  And the time during which it exists?

And then there are properties and relations and relational properties and perhaps also property-instances.  Do I count the properties of the spatula and the relations in which it stands to the other things in the drawer when I (try to) count the entities in the drawer? 

Suppose in the drawer there is a triangular piece of mental.  Now everything triangular is trilateral, and vice versa.  And this is true as a matter of broadly-logical necessity.  So, when I count (or try to count) the entities in the drawer, do I count triangularity and trilaterality as two properties or as one property?

From considerations like these one can see that the question How many entities? has no clear sense.  We can give a sense to it, but that would involve the arbitrary imputation of conceptual content into 'entity.'  Suppose I define:

X is an entity df= x is either a feral cat or a piece of cooked seaweed.

That 'definition' would allow me to count the entities in my house.  And the answer is . . . (wait for it): zero. 

To count is to count the instances of a concept.  Existence is not a concept that has instances.  Therefore, one cannot count existents as existents.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Death and Resurrection

Johnny Cash, Ain't No Grave
Johnny Cash, Redemption
Mississippi John Hurt, You've Got to Walk that Lonesome Valley
B. B. King, See That My Grave is Kept Clean
Blind Boy Grunt (Bob Bylan), Gospel Plow
Bob Dylan, Fixin' to Die
Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus
Johnny Cash, Hurt
Johnny Cash, Final Interview.  He speaks of his faith starting at 5:15.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 45e: "Go on, believe! It does no harm."

Good Friday Meditation: Wittgenstein on Christianity

From Culture and Value, p. 32e, tr. Peter Winch:

Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief that is appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe, through thick and thin, which you can do only as the result of a life. Here you have a narrative!–don’t treat it as you would another historical narrative! Make a quite different place for it in your life.–  There is nothing paradoxical about that!

The "nothing paradoxical" may be an allusion to Kierkegaard who is discussed in nearby 1937 entries.  For Kierkegaard, it is is absurd that God should become man and die the death of a criminal, but this absurdity or paradox is precisely what  the Christian believer must embrace.  Wittgenstein appears to be rejecting this view, but also the view that S. K. also rejects, namely, that Christianity is grounded in verifiable historical facts such as that Jesus Christ was crucified by the Romans, died, was buried, and on the third day rose from the dead. 

I interpret Wittgenstein to be saying that Christianity is neither an absurd belief nor an historically grounded one.  It is a groundless belief, but not groundless in the sense that it needs, but lacks, a ground, but in the sense that it is a framework belief that cannot, because it is a framework belief, have a ground and so cannot need one either.  Christianity is a form of life, a language-game, self-contained, incommensurable with other language-games, under no threat from them, and to that extent insulated from logical, historical, and scientific objections, as well as from objections emanating from competing religious language-games.

But is it true?

When Jesus told Pontius Pilate that he had come into the world to bear witness to the truth, Pilate dismissed his claim with the cynical, "What is truth?"  Presumably, the Wittgensteinian fideist cannot likewise dismiss the question of the truth of Christianity.  If it is true, it is objectively true; it corresponds to the way things are; it is not merely a set of beliefs  that a certain group of people internalize and live by, but has an objective reference beyond itself. 

Here is where  the Wittgensteinian approach stops making sense for me.  No doubt a religion practiced is a form of life; but is it a reality-based form of life?  And no doubt religions can be usefully viewed as language games.  But Schachspiel is also a Sprachspiel.  What then is the difference between Christianity and chess?  Chess does not, and does not purport to, refer to anything beyond itself.  Christianity does so purport.

Here is an extended post on Wittgensteinian fideism.

Social Justice or Subsidiarity?

Just over the transom from James Anderson:

I appreciated your recent posts on "social justice." I agree that the phrase is a mendacious rhetorical device and that conservatives should refuse to use it. But what should we use instead? In one post you asked what's wrong with "plain old 'justice.'"  One problem is that the phrase "social justice" has now become so depressingly commonplace that many folk, unaware of this conceptual revisionism, understand "justice" as shorthand for "social justice". So conservatives need their own distinctive qualifier. Fight fire with fire. What would be your suggestion?

One possibility is "natural justice". Not only does it tip its hat toward the venerable natural law tradition, it also communicates the idea that justice is inextricably tied to the intrinsic nature of things (specifically, the nature of human beings) as opposed to being a mere social construction (as, perhaps, "social justice" suggests). And like "social justice" it has the virtue of being unobjectionable on the face of it. To adapt the opening sentence of one of your posts: "How could any decent person be opposed to natural justice?" What would be the alternative? Unnatural justice?

I'd love to read your own thoughts on this, if you're inclined to share them.

I wish I had a worked-out theory and I wish I had a good answer for Professor Anderson.  But I won't let the absence of both stop me from making a few remarks. Nescio, ergo blogo.

As a sort of joke I might suggest that 'subsidiarity' be used by conservatives instead of 'social justice.'  The trouble with that word, of course, is that it conveys no definite idea to the average person whereas 'social justice' seems to convey a definite idea, one that the average person is inclined to embrace.  It sounds so good!  Who could be opposed to social justice and a just society?   But once one understands what 'social justice' means in the mouth of a leftist, then one has excellent reason to oppose it.  The Left has hijacked the phrase and now they own it; it would be quixotic for a conservative to try to infuse it with a reasonable meaning and win it back.  Let the Left have it!

Anderson and I therefore  agree that we conservatives should never use 'social justice,' or 'economic justice' for that matter.  Beyond that, we might take to using 'socialist justice' as an informative and accurate  way of referring to what leftists call social justice.  But what word or phrase should we use?   How about 'local justice'?  That's not very good, but at least it points in the the subsidiarist direction. Plain old 'justice' is better.  Anderson's 'natural justice' is serviceable.  It has the virtue of combating the notion that justice is a social construct.  But it doesn't combat the top-down control model of socialists and collectivists.  This brings me to subsidiarity.

David A. Bosnich, The Principle of Subsidiarity:

One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.

The principle of subsidiarity strikes a reasonable balance between statism and collectivism as represented by the Obama administration and the libertarianism of those who would take privatization to an extreme.  By the way, one of the many mistakes Rick Santorum made in his campaign was to attack all government-sponsored education.  He was right to question whether the Federal government has any role to play in education, but to question the role of state and local government in education was a foolish extremism that befits a libertarian, not a conservative.

I take it that subsidiarity is easily detachable from other Catholic doctrines.  Professor Anderson needn't fear that he will be driven in the direction of papal infallibility or Transubstantiation.  In any case, Catholics don't own subsidiarity.  In the ComBox to this excellent post, we find:

"SPHERE SOVEREIGNTY: A principle of Reformed Christian social ethics, usually associated with the thought of Dutch Prime Minister Abraham Kuyper*, that identifies a number of God- ordained creational spheres, which include the family, the state, culture, and the church. These spheres each have their own organizing and ruling ordinances, and each maintains a measure of authority relative to the others. Just social and political structures, therefore, should be ordered so that the authority of each sphere is preserved (see Limited Government and Subsidiarity, The Principle of)."

Subsidiarity also fits well wth federalism, a return to which is a prime desideratum and one more reason not to vote for Obama come November.  By the way, 'federalism' is another one of those words that does not wear its meaning on its sleeve, and is likely to mislead.  Federalism is not the view that all powers should be vested in the Federal or central government; it is the principle enshrined in the 10th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Permit me to coin 'malaptronym.'  If an aptronym is a name that suits its bearer, then 'federalism' is a malaptronym, a name that not only does not suit its bearer, but misleads as to the nature of said bearer.   And the same, of course, is true in spades of 'social justice.'

I say we consign it to the dreaded index verborum prohibitorum!

Obama on Constitutional Law: Did He Lie or Is He Just Ignorant?

Asked recently whether SCOTUS would uphold the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) or strike it down as unconstitutional, President Obama replied, "I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."  Strong majority?   Unprecedented?  As a former law professor, Obama must know that what he said was false.  Now a false statement is not the same as a lie.  For a false statement to be a lie it must be made with the intention to deceive.  But since the statement in question is one that one would reasonably expect a former law professor to know is false, then it is reasonable to suspect a lie on Obama's part.  Thomas Sowell concludes that "he is simply lying."

James Taranto rather more charitably maintains that "The president is stunningly ignorant about constitutional law."

Peter Wehner in a seeming synthesis of Sowell and Taranto opines that Obama "jumped the shark."

Daniel Henninger piles on.

According to John Fund, "There appear to be few limits on how far President Obama will distort the facts."

Obama is a disaster for the country.  He is ignorant/dishonest not only with respect to constitutional law, but also about the debt crisis.

Transitivity of Predication?

I dedicate this post to London Ed, who likes sophisms and scholastic arcana.

Consider these two syllogistic arguments:

A1. Man is an animal; Socrates is a man; ergo, Socrates is an animal.
A2. Man is a species; Socrates is a man; ergo, Socrates is a species.

The first argument is valid.  On one way of accounting for its validity, we make two assumptions.  First, we assume that each of the argument's constituent sentences is a predication.  Second, we assume the principle of the Transitivity of Predication: if x is predicable of y, and y is predicable of z, then x is predicable of z.  This principle has an Aristotelian pedigree.  At Categories 3b5, we read, "For all that is predicated of the predicate will be predicated also of the subject." So if animal is predicable of man, and man of Socrates, then animal of Socrates.  

Something goes wrong, however, in the second argument.  The question is: what exactly?  Let's first of all see if we can diagnose the fallacy while adhering to our two assumptions.  Thus we assume that each occurrence of 'is' in (A2) is an 'is' of predication, and that predication is transitive.  One suggestion  — and I take this to be the line of some Thomists — is that (A2) equivocates on 'man.'  In the major, 'man' means 'man-in-the-mind,' 'man as existing with esse intentionale.'  In the minor, 'man' means 'man-in-reality,' 'man as existing with esse naturale.'  We thus diagnose the invalidity of (A2) by saying that it falls afoul of quaternio terminorum, the four-term fallacy.  On this diagnosis, Transitivity of Predication is upheld: it is just that in this case the principle does not apply since there are four terms.

But of course there is also the modern Fregean way on which we abandon both of our assumptions and locate the equivocation in (A2) elsewhere.  On a Fregean diagnosis, there is an equivocation on 'is' in (A2) as between the 'is' of inclusion and the 'is' of predication.  In the major premise, 'is' expresses, not predication, but inclusion: the thought is that the concept man includes within its conceptual content the subconcept species.  In the minor and in the conclusion, however, the 'is'  expresses predication: the thought is that Socrates falls under the concepts man and species.  Accordingly, (A2) is invalid because of an equivocation on 'is,' not because of an equivocation on 'man.'

The Fregean point is that the concept man falls WITHIN but not UNDER the concept animal, while the object Socrates falls UNDER but not WITHIN the concepts man and animal.  Man does not fall under animal because no concept is an animal.  Animal is a mark (Merkmal) not a property (Eigenschaft) of man.  In general, the marks of a concept are not its properties.  But concepts do have properties.  The property of being instantiated, for example, is a property of the concept man.  But it is not a mark of it.  If it were a mark, then man by its very nature would be instantiated and it would be a conceptual truth that there are human beings, which is false.

Since on the Fregean scheme the properties of concepts needn't be properties of the items that fall under the concepts, Transitivity of Predication fails.  Thus, the property of being instantiated is predicable of the concept philosopher, and the concept philosopher is predicable  of Socrates; but the property of being instantiated is not predicable of Socrates. 

On the Misuse of ‘Unilateral’

The following  post from the old blog written 20 July 2005 makes a point that bears repeating.

John Nichols of the The Nation appeared on the hard-Left show, "Democracy Now," on the morning of 2 September 2004. Like many libs and lefties, he misused 'unilateral' to mean 'without United Nations   support.' In this sense, coalition operations against Saddam Hussein's regime were 'unilateral' despite the the fact that said operations were precisely those of a coalition of some thirty countries.

The same willful mistake was made by his boss Victor Navasky on 17 July 2005 while being interviewed by David Frum on C-Span 2.

Words have established meanings. Intellectually honest people respect those meanings. Too many libs and lefties do not. Out to win at all costs, they will do anything to secure their ends, including hijacking the terms of a debate and piloting them to some Left-coast destination.

When they are not corrupting established words, they are inventing question-begging epithets such as 'homophobia,' and 'Islamophobia.'  A phobia is an irrational fear.  There is nothing irrational about fear of radical Islam.  And there neeedn't be anything fearful or irrational about opposition to homosexual practices.

The Case of Morris Starsky

Quite by chance this morning I stumbled upon materials relating to one Morris Starsky, a professor of philosophy at Arizona State University who was fired from a tenured position for his political views in 1970.  Here is the Wikipedia article; here is something from the Phoenix New Times; this is from The Militant.  All of these sources to be consumed cum grano salis. 

A search at PhilPapers turned up nothing on the man, which says something.  Some commentary later, perhaps, once I know more about the case.

Addendum (7:05 PM):  The ever-helpful Dave Lull reports that Morris Joseph Starsky earned the Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1967 with a dissertation entitled, "On the Ontological Problem of Oratio Obliqua.

Addendum (5 April):  Lull informs me that the Morris J. Starsky archives are housed at the ASU library.

Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” Law Irrelevant to Trayvon Martin Case

This is one of the points made by Mona Charen in her excellent column, If Obama Had a Son:

We are now engaged in another fruitless shouting match about whether young black men are being hunted on the streets of America and whether "stand your ground" laws are dangerous. But as the estimable Ann Coulter has pointed out, Florida's "stand your ground" law was irrelevant to the Martin case. Whichever version of events that night you believe: A) that Zimmerman followed and shot Martin in cold blood; or B) that Zimmerman shot Martin in the midst of a fight; the law, which does not require a person who fears for his life to retreat before using deadly force, is not implicated.

Here is what the laws says:

  • It establishes that law-abiding residents and visitors may legally presume the threat of bodily harm or death from anyone who breaks into a residence or occupied vehicle and may use defensive force, including deadly force, against the intruder.

  • In any other place where a person “has a right to be,” that person has “no duty to retreat” if attacked and may “meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”

  • In either case, a person using any force permitted by the law is immune from criminal prosecution or civil action and cannot be arrested unless a law enforcement agency determines there is probable cause that the force used was unlawful.

  • If a civil action is brought and the court finds the defendant to be immune based on the parameters of the law, the defendant will be awarded all costs of defense.

    • On scenario (A), the law does not apply because Zimmerman on that scenario is not defending himself.  On scenario (B), the law does not apply because Zimmerman is not able to retreat.  (Charen does not make this clear, but this was basically Coulter's point.)  If someone is on top of you pounding you then you don't have the option to either retreat or not retreat.

    But of course much depends on what exactly happened.  In any case, the law is eminently reasonable whether or not it applies to the Trayvon Martin case.

    And note the law is not a gun law despite what lying liberals will tell you.  You can stand your ground with your fists, a baseball bat, a knife, a can of Easy-Off oven cleaner . . . .

    Literal or Antiphrastic?

    Elliot writes,

    When I began to read your “Who doesn't need philosophy?” post, I immediately started to think of reasons why adherents of religious and nonreligious worldviews need philosophy as inquiry. Indeed, one can think of many good reasons why such adherents (especially the dogmatic ones) need philosophy.

    However, as I continued to read, I noticed the irony of your post (particularly the final paragraph). It seems at least possible that your entry is a dialectic antiphrasis to make the point that we all need philosophy as inquiry, including sincere believers and religious and nonreligious dogmatists. Humanity needs to inquire because humanity needs truth. As Aristotle put it in the first sentence of the Metaphysics, all humans by nature seek to know.   

    Over the weekend, I found myself wondering whether your post is antiphrastic or literal. Do you really think philosophy as inquiry is unnecessary for the religious person? Or do you think the religious person should philosophize? I think the latter; I am curious to know what you think; either way I appreciate the thought provoking post.

    To answer the reader's question I will write a commentary on my post.

    Philosophy: Who Doesn't Need It?

    The title is a take-off on Ayn Rand's Philosophy: Who Needs It?  Rand's rhetorical question is not intended to express the proposition that people do not need philosophy, but that they do.  So perhaps we could call the question in her title an antiphrastic  rhetorical question.

     Who doesn't need philosophy?

    I don't approve of one-sentence paragraphs in formal writing, but blogging is not formal writing: it is looser, more personal, chattier, pithier, more direct.  And in my formal writing I indent my paragraphs.  That too is a nicety that is best dropped in this fast medium.

    People who have the world figured out don't need it. If you know what's up when it comes to God and the soul, the meaning of life, the content and basis of morality, the role of state, and so on, then you certainly don't need philosophy. If you are a Scientologist or a Mormon or a Roman Catholic or an adherent of any other religious or quasi-religious worldview then you have your answers and philosophy as inquiry (as opposed to philosophy as worldview) is strictly unnecessary. And same goes for the adherents of such nonreligious worldviews as leftism and scientism and evangelical atheism.

    The first two sentences are intended literally and they are literally true.  'Figured out' is a verb of success: if one has really got the world figured out, then he possesses the truth about it.  But in the rest of the paragraph a bit of irony begins to creep in inasmuch as the reader is expected to know that it is not the case, and cannot be the case,  that all the extant worldviews are true.  So by the end of the paragraph the properly caffeinated reader should suspect  that my point is that people need philosophy.  They need it because they don't know the ultimate low-down, the proof of which is the welter of conflicting worldviews. 

    (The inferential links that tie There is a welter of conflicting worldviews to People don't know the ultimate low-down to People need philosophy as inquiry all need defense. I could write a book about that.  At the moment I am merely nailing my colors to the mast.)

    He who has the truth needn't seek it. And those who are in firm possession of the truth are well-advised to stay clear of philosophy with its tendency to sow the seeds of doubt and confusion.

    Now the irony is in full bloom.  Surely it cannot be the case that both a Communist and a Catholic are in "firm possession of  the truth" about ultimate matters.  At most one can be in firm possession.  But it is also possible that neither are.  There is also the suggestion that truth is not the sort of thing about which one side or the other can claim proprietary rights. 

    Those who are secure in their beliefs are also well-advised to turn a blind eye to the fact of the multiplicity of conflicting worldviews. Taking that fact into cognizance may cause them to doubt whether their 'firm possession of the truth' really is such.

     The final paragraph is ironic.  I am not advising people to ignore the conflict of worldviews.  For that conflict is a fact, and we ought to face reality and not blink the facts.  I am making the conditional assertion that if one values doxastic security over truth, then one is well-advised to ignore the fact that one's worldview is rejected by many others.  For careful contemplation of  that fact may undermine one's doxastic security and peace of mind.  (It is not for nothing that the Roman church once had an index librorum prohibitorum.)  Note that to assert a conditional is not to assert either its antecedent or its consequent.  So it is logically consistent of me to assert the above conditional while rejecting both its antecedent and its consequent.

    The reader understood my entry correctly as "a dialectic antiphrasis to make the point that we all need philosophy as inquiry, including sincere believers and religious and nonreligious dogmatists."

    In saying that I of course give the palm to Athens over Jerusalem.  But, if I may invoke that failed monk and anti-Athenian irrationalist, Luther:  Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders.

    Suppose You Build a Conscious Robot. . .

     . . . would that solve the mind-body problem?

    One aspect of the mind-body problem is the problem of the subjectivity of conscious experience. As I have argued on numerous occasions, the subjectivity of conscious experience and the manner in which it  connects to its physical substratum in the brain cannot be rendered intelligible from an objectifying 3rd-person point of view. Even if we had in our possession a completed neuroscience, we would not be able to understand how conscious experiences arise from the wetware of the brain.

    But suppose someone objects as follows:

    Robotics is making tremendous strides. In the future we may be able to build robots that are behaviorally indistinguishable from human beings. They will walk, talk, and look like human beings. One can even imagine them being made so human-like that a superficial physical examination would not reveal their robotic status. Imagine a 'female' robot that could pass a cursory gynecological     examination and fool a gynecologist or a 'male' robot that could pass a superficial prostate exam and fool a urologist . . .

    Suppose further that such a robot not only passes all linguistic and non-linguistic behavioral  tests for being conscious, but really is conscious, really does feel ill at ease in the physician's office, even though the  physical substratum of the feelings is silicon-based. Suppose, in other words, that consciousness and indeed self-consciousness  emerge in this robot.

    We will then have an answer to the mind-body problem: we will know that consciousness is nothing special and nothing mysterious. We will know that it does not have a higher, meta-physical or super-natural origin, but is simply the byproduct of the functioning of a sufficiently complex machine, whether the machine be an artifact of a human artificer or the 'artifact' of natural selection.

    But if we think about this carefully, we realize that even if this sci-fi scenario were realized, we would still not have a solution to the mind-body problem. For the problem is to render intelligible to   ourselves, to understand, HOW consciousness can arise from matter. Building a robot in which consciousness DOES arise or manifest itself  does nothing to render understandable how the arisal occurs.  Nor does it show that the arisal is an emergence from matter.    The mere fact of consciousness is no proof that it has emerged from a physical substratum, and the mere claim that it has so emerged is an empty asseveration unless the exact mechanism of the emergence can be laid bare.  And good luck with that.

    Suppose that there is a group of philosophizing robots.  These machines are so sophisticated that they ask Big Questions.  One of the problems under discussion might well be the mind-body problem in robots. The fact that they know that they had been constructed by human robotics engineers in Palo Alto, California would do nothing to alleviate their puzzlement. In fact, one of the philosophizing robots could propose the theory that the emergence of consciousness in their silicon brains is not to be interpreted as an emergence from matter  or as a dependence of consciousness on matter, but as a Cartesian mind's becoming embodied  in them: at a point of sufficient complexity, a Cartesian mind embodies itself in the robot.

    In other words, what could stop a philosophizing robot from rejecting emergentism and being a substance dualist? He knows his origin, or at least the origin of his body; but how does knowing that he is a robot, and thus a human artifact prevent his considering himself to be an artifact housing a Cartesian mind?  He might trot out all the standard dualist arguments. 

    Our philosophizing  robot would be able to exclude this Cartesian possibility only if he understood HOW consciousness arises from matter. If he knew that, he would know that he does not have a higher origin.  And let's not forget that our philosophizing robot is very smart: so smart that he sees right  through the stupidity of eliminative materialism.

    In sum, even if we knew how to build (really) conscious machines, such know-how would not be the knowledge necessary to solve the mind-body problem.