Thanks a lot Chalmers

I've been having some disturbing thoughts recently. Namely, I think that I may have come up with a new argument for the existence of God. As an atheist, this seems like a counterintuitive use of time, but I am increasingly convinced that this results follows logically from David Chalmers' two dimensional semantics.
I began reading Chalmers during my BA in Cincinnati, under the guidance of Tom Polger, and I've always had the nagging feeling that something wasn't right. However, the best I could come up with at the time was that his argument for property dualism via 2-D semantics strongly assumes a foundationalist epistemology, especially with his characterization of primary intensions. Since then I've put Chalmers on the backburner.
Last week, after I read the creationist push to apply Chalmers' Hard Problem for their agenda, my interest was suddenly peaked again, but this time I came to a disturbing tentative conclusion: there is much more to Chalmers argument for dualism.

I am again pressed for time, so I will pretty much copy and paste an email I sent to a colleague on the matter. For now I will add the proviso that the language in the email is pretty loose, and needs much cleaning up to really get the details of Chalmers argument, but then again these are just preliminary thoughts:


Consider first Chalmers' description of phenomenal consciousness, and other related topics-it's FULL of appeals to intuition exactly where someone like me expects a substantive argument or observation. For example:

"Consciousness is the biggest mystery. It may be the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe." (1996, xi)

"The easiest way to develop a 'theory' of consciousness is to deny its existence, or to redefine the phenomenon in need of explanation into something it is not. This leads to an elegant theory, but the problem does not go away...Some say that consciousness is an 'illusion', but I have little idea what this could even mean...True, I cannot prove that there is a further problem, precisely because I cannot prove that consciousness exists. We know about consciousness more directly than we know about anything else, so 'proof' is inappropriate...There is no denying that this involves an appeal to intuition at some point; but all arguments involve intuition somewhere." (1996 xii-xiii)

Now, replace the word "consciousness" with the word "God", i.e.:

"God is the biggest mystery. It may be the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe."

"The easiest way to develop a 'theory' of God is to deny his existence, or to redefine the phenomenon in need of explanation into something it is not. This leads to an elegant theory, but the problem does not go away...Some say that God is an 'illusion', but I have little idea what this could even mean...True, I cannot prove that there is a further problem, precisely because I cannot prove that God exists. We know about God more directly than we know about anything else, so 'proof' is inappropriate...There is no denying that this involves an appeal to intuition at some point; but all arguments involve intuition somewhere."

This is already fascinating; I've changed ONE WORD, and the force of the comments retain EXACTLY the same force, applied to the respective problem of God's existence. This maneuver also works equally well at other places in his texts, e.g. dismissing Type-A materialism, and conceiving zombies. The next step for me is to apply Chalmers' argument structure to each of the steps where we replace language of "consciousness" with "God". Here's a few ideas in that direction:

1.) First, Chalmers' theory of semantics strongly assumes a theory of epistemology called foundationalism. The basic tenet of this theory is that there are basic experiences that we have that are beyond doubt, and whose experience guarantees their reality. Epistemologists call these "basic beliefs" while Chalmers calls them "Qualia".


2.) It is possible to describe people's experience of God as a kind of Qualia. Things such as Revelations or Mystical Experiences offer two intuitive examples for this class of experiences. Within these things "God", or whatever, plays a central role.
There are several theories that have logically and analytically defended arguments of the reality of Revelation by God or Angels based on epistemic foundationalism. In fact, they actually define this class of mental states as "Qualia". I'm thinking, actually of William Alston's work on epistemology and religious experience, Epistemic Justification (1989), and Perceiving God (1993), respectively.

3.) If it is denied that people have these experiences, then I have two responses;
(a) Use Chalmers' rhetoric in defense of consciousness - Denial = not taking the problem seriously: there are many people who do in fact take these experiences seriously, and denial from skeptics is not going to make these go away. People who

(b) Define these experences as an example of "implicit knowledge". This move is used often in the philsophy of mind and philosophy of language in the context of defining e.g. knowledge of grammar and knowledge of concepts, like by Frank Jackson (Who thought up the Mary-the-blind-neuroscience argument). This strategy is based, historically, on Noam Chomsky's Universal Grammar; a controversial but necessary assumption for the study of language.


Now I simply apply Chalmers' 2-D semantic argumentation.

1.) Primary intensions, i.e. conceptual content of qualia (water is wet, pain is painful etc) represent epistemic possibilities.

2.) Conceptual content preserves an identity relation with a referent in all possible worlds when it designates a necessary relation between this object and its conceptual content (i.e. pain is painful = necessarily true based only on experience [i.e. it is a priori] ; water =H2O is only necessary a posteriori [i.e. we need more than experience])

3.) Mystical experience of God = a class of qualia, whose conceptual content is preserved a priori

4.) Epistemic possibilities represent metaphysical reality when the identity relation between conceptual content designates a referent in all possible worlds.

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5.) Therefore, the conceptual content that designates God in my mystical experience guarantees that God is a metaphysical reality. QED (1-4)

...

I meant for this argument to be a reductio against Chalmers' dualism (assuming the existence of God is absurd), but then I realized that there are probably people who will buy into this whole-heartedly. What to do?
I am currently working on a draft of this with a colleague of mine Kim Boström, a quantum physicist-cum-neurobiologist, and we intend to present this to anyone who wishes to hear it, and perhaps publish it in the near future, if it is well-received.