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Philosophy In-Joke Hilarity Galore

When you do philosophy for a living, philosophy novices are frequently inflicting on you the same small stock of stale and unimaginative philosophy jokes and overrated Monty Python philosophy related sketches. So that’s probably why I find this contemporary, philosophically acute, esoteric latest comic strip from Chaos Pet strip a  breath of fresh, hilarious air:

2009-09-28-regrets
Your Thoughts?

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This entry was written by Daniel Fincke, posted on September 29, 2009 at 10:54 am, filed under Comic Strips, Hilarious, Parody, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

No Responses to “Philosophy In-Joke Hilarity Galore”

  1. Pete says:
    September 29, 2009 at 12:10 pm

    I think “Pete” is a good name for him.

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  2. The Vicar says:
    September 29, 2009 at 12:32 pm

    I suspect that the whole notion of a P-Zombie in philosophy is a way of trying to sneak religion into more serious discourse through the back door, the same way “Intelligent Design” is a way of sneaking creationism into the science classroom.

    Basically: if you accept a materialist view of the world — no souls — then P-Zombies are impossible. After all, they are supposed to be INDISTINGUISHABLE from ordinary beings, which means that any test devised by neurology or biology will indicate that they are normal. So, therefore, they must contain ordinary nerves and an ordinary brain, structured in the same way as a non-P-Zombie brain. But if their brains are functionally identical on the material level, and there is no non-material level, then the distinction between a P-Zombie and a normal being ceases to exist. It is only by postulating the existence of an unprovable, untestable non-material portion of intelligence — a soul — that the notion of a P-Zombie can have any meaning, and so postulating the existence of P-Zombies in a thought experiment is the same as postulating that a religious worldview is true.

    (In fact, the whole notion of qualia is a red herring. Philosophers should be banned from talking about intelligence and thought unless they have a good solid grounding in neuroscience. And if they were smart enough for that, most of them wouldn’t be philosophers.)

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