Personally I think it’s silly as hell. Qualia is obviously a biological component of experience… Not some weird thing that science will never be able to put in to words.
I’ve been listening to a lot of psychology podcasts lately and for some reason people seem obsessed with the idea despite you needing to make the same logical leaps to believe it as any sort of mysticism… Maybe I am just tripping idk
But this is a semantic argument of what “Mary Had Knowledge” means, not what qualia is… When you say knowledge I am including the physical characteristics you have ascertained through your subjective experience. Defining knowledge otherwise seems tricky. To say Mary has knowledge of the color of red is basically saying Mary can recreate your memory of the color red. I don’t see how you can recreate a memory without knowledge of what that memory contains, so that at least is where my logic is flowing. Red is an entirely subjective definition depending on your historic eyes’ cones and your historic position in spacetime.
I vaguely get what you are saying: put a preying mantis’ brain in a human and they could likely react to the moving car… most animals on the planet earth do not react properly to a speeding car. I don’t think a P Zombie could ever have this conversation. Is that a good distinction?
Yeah I just dont think P Zombies actual make sense as proposed. I don’t think you can get a human in my exact form that exhibits the behaviors of a preying mantis. I think that my form is directly responsible for my behavior.
No, it’s a terrible destination, because all you’ve done is articulate an inconsistent position.
Maybe you should actually make the smallest effort to understand what is being proposed, rather just assuming your some big smart boy who automatically knows better than all the dumb-dumb professional philosophers.
You’re proposing an entity with my exact form that does not contain my exact mind state. That cannot exist. That is a category error. You are assigning a string variable to fucking integer.
You need to define what you mean by a P Zombie exactly like me that does not possess consciousness. What does that mean? I think consciousness is in the brain. Define how its not? Even if your argument is NOT a category error, what you are relaying to me is a category error. Should be solvable through syntax alone.
It does not contain the qualia associated with your mind state
You really love begging the question.
Fuck off back to reddit with these completely empty cliches.
Damn, I wonder if the original paper might have done that. Guess you’ll never know, given your refusal to do any actual investigation before asserting your right to speak.
If we were to recreate a P Zombie of me right now why would they ever respond to you without qualia?
DAMN STRAIGHT. Finally you’re making some sense. Why would a P Zombie EVER read that fucking paper? The assumption with a P Zombie is they only do whats biologically imperative to survive. Paper never needed. Writing paper… never needed. Reading paper? What is reading? Not needed. Avoid car.
“How can chat gpt respond to me if it’s not conscious”.
Once again: because they are behaviourally identical to you.
Ok. Just straight up admitting you don’t know shit and you’re proud of it. Just a hillbilly afraid those damn scary books.
What part about their homeostasis dictates that responding to you is necessary to achieve a fruitful life?
DAMN STRAIGHT. And you’re just a city slicker too afraid of them country Jays that have too experience with the real world… many such cases.
I beg of you: descibe to me a P Zombie that is a physical clone of me that doesn’t have my mental state. Describe to me how that P Zombie is uniquely different from the version of me that you froze of me 20 minutes ago. Where does the distinction lie? You say theres no consciousness, I say theres no way for that to be? Again, me arguing on hexbear is the OPPOSITE OF FUCKING. I should be FUCKING right now. I am getting the OPPOSITE of DICK.
The same as yours. The only difference is that they don’t experience qualia
Least arrogant Redditer
Read. The. Fucking. Paper
I did. Its wrong. It explains no FUNCTIONAL reason for me to be arguing with you right now instead of getting my bump and grind on. We can theorize a robot that does 1:1 what I do in real life,. That doesnt mean I was written in fucking c#
Yeah, it seems like semantics really get in the way of serious consideration of the example, and I don’t really think it leads anywhere interesting.
I’m not sure what I can say here other than it isn’t necessary to consider P zombies as an argument, but there should be a little bit of willingness to ask what if rather than resorting to intuition to dismiss them. The idea should be to approach this from a position of intellectual curiosity - if it were possible to have a creature that resembled a human in all respects except for the fact that it lacked subjectivity, would we be able to tell the difference? What would we need to know to tell? It doesn’t seem sufficient to conclude that certain behaviors are inherent properties of “usness” simply on the basis of intuition, because neuroscience has found that a lot of behaviors that seem conscious and volitional may not, in fact, be so.
Talking strictly in terms of what p zombies can and cannot do feels a bit like asking whether unicorns would be able to fart rainbows if they existed. Do you want them to?
To me, entertaining the thought of a P Zombie is like asking me whether a unicorn can fart: sure why not but does that actually provide any utility to the conversation?
My belief is that consciousness is a result of your physical state, so asking me to make something with my physical state that isn’t conscious is like asking me to imagine a computer that doesn’t have a processor. That can’t be. A computer is defined by its relationship to the processor!
How do we dissect a P Zombie that is fake conscious? How do we even suspect it’s a P Zombie? Is the P Zombie dead after I take it’s brain out?
I think the idea is designed to get you to move beyond belief and consider your personal epistemology. Sure, consciousness seems central to your behavior, but recent neuroscience research suggests that even some of the behavior that seems conscious might not fully be - in some situations, the consciousness may be providing post-hoc rationalizations of actions that are decided elsewhere in the brain.
On that note, there’s probably flaws to the analogy you’re using to reject the idea of a p-zombie. If consciousness is a result (your word) of your physical brain-state, then the computer analogy does not hold because processors are not a result of the rest of the physical material that comprises a computer. I can also freely swap processors and still have a computer that functions more or less the same unless I remove a component completely, so while processors are necessary, they aren’t sufficient.
That’s basically the question of a thought experiment. If it were possible for a being to exist that exhibits human behavior but isn’t conscious, how would we be able to tell? What would need to be different? It’s pointing to gaps in our current understanding.
It looks like Mark Zuckerberg.
Presumably. The brain is more than just the consciousness, given that people are capable of survival (albeit not independently) while in comas. There’s also other examples where consciousness appears to be lost or modified while the brain continues to do its thing - did Phineas Gage stop being Phineas Gage and start being someone else when he lost his frontal lobe? What’s going on with sleepwalkers? What about Alien Hand Syndrome?
They aren’t gaps to a physicalist though. We would end up dissecting the P Zombies brain and concluding it’s literally exactly the same as ours, and he was probably actually conscious.
We could even envision a technology that is able to capture, in data, the entirety of your brain state. We could then take a copy of your brain, and the p Zombies brain, and see if any differences exist. Once we determine that A = A (as the thought experiment claims at least) we would conclude the P Zombie is conscious.
This has actually happened before. People went diving for vital essences and came up with a better understanding of biology instead.
Instead of a computer with no processor we can just boil it down to what I actually think we are: biological agents with a proclivity for homeostasis. You remove the “agency” and you cannot achieve homeostasis. You can’t achieve homeostasis you will not be a biological creature very long. The biological creatures that lack agency lose to my lawn mower every spring.
Consciousness simply is agency, which p Zombies lack in the thought experiment, but cannot lack in reality without being BTFO by the weather.