Comment by jibal

Philosophy may be exempt from accusations of arguments from authority--because that's a category mistake--but philosophers certainly aren't.

Hauser's papers are just a part of a large literature rejecting/refuting Searle's Chinese Room, but he has probably taken Searle more seriously than most. After Searle's well known response that waves away numerous objections, many people dismissed him as acting in bad faith. (It would have been even worse if they had known about the accusations of sexual assault. Sure, that would be ad hominem and intellectually dishonest, but we're talking about human beings, same as with arguments from authority.) See, e.g., https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/12/21/the-mystery-of-c... where Daniel Dennett writes:

> For his part, he has one argument, the Chinese Room, and he has been trotting it out, basically unchanged, for fifteen years. It has proven to be an amazingly popular number among the non-experts, in spite of the fact that just about everyone who knows anything about the field dismissed it long ago. It is full of well-concealed fallacies. By Searle’s own count, there are over a hundred published attacks on it. He can count them, but I guess he can’t read them, for in all those years he has never to my knowledge responded in detail to the dozens of devastating criticisms they contain; he has just presented the basic thought experiment over and over again. I just went back and counted: I am dismayed to discover that no less than seven of those published criticisms are by me (in 1980, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1993).

etc. If you've never read any of this literature yet can facilely write what you did above about Searle's discussion of the Chinese Room being "the most important work here", I don't expect you to start now ... but at least reconsider posing as a philosopher who is knowledgeable about such things.

Your reason to be less open to "push back against" (an odd formulation--the burden is on those who claim that they are conceivable, and therefore physicalism is false) philosophical zombies seems to hinge on another radical failure to understand the issue and unfamiliarity with the literature.

Philosophical zombies are completely independent of solipsism. The conceivability of zombies says that, if this is a world in which you are the sole inhabitant and you are conscious, then there is a possible world that is physically identical to this world and has the same physical laws, but the sole inhabitant (scoofy'), while physically identical to you and behaves identically, isn't conscious. That is, consciousness is not a consequence of physical laws and contingencies but is some sort of ethereal goop that accompanies physical entities. Of course Chalmers and other modern dualists don't subscribe to Descartes' substance dualism, but their attempts to formulate "process dualism" or some other nonsense solely because they need some alternative to physicalism--which they reject because they are hopelessly confused about the nature of consciousness and "qualia"--are frankly incoherent.

Maybe read Kirk's book and learn something about the subject. Here's a review that gives you a peek at what you'll find there: https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2...

Over and out.