RE: Philosophical zombie.
June 8, 2017 at 8:12 am
(This post was last modified: June 8, 2017 at 8:23 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Some people would go the other way with that, and ask whether or not -we- are the p-zombies. I also wonder whether there's some threshold in which a system "wakes up" as it were, to consciousness..whereas before it was just complex processing, for example. It does seem as though complexity must play a part in some individual example of consciousness (I don't expect a cat to have quite as rich a consiousness as my own - but who knows, right?)..but it's fairly easy to suggest that the idea of a hard dividing line is bound up more in our language and how we think about this than in any evidence or data to support that conclusion.
Consciousness may be a sliding scale, but even then..I don't see how complexity, itself, makes it happen. Bridges are complex too. Plants are so complex our consciousness cannot fully comprehend or explain how they do what they do (and, to sweeten the pot, they demonstrably exhibit the recognizable behaviors of conscious creatures). Neither seems to be concious, at least, not in the way that we are - if we are, if there's a specific way. The whole subject is kind-of a rat's nest of tangled propositions.
But, for agreement! I think that there; something incoherent about the p-zombie proposition myself. An entity that is not only equally complex, but equally complex in a host of specified ways? A creature, for example, with a brain just like ours (or it's equivalent)...with behaviors just like ours (or their equivalents)..and yet, not like us? That's like picking up two identical toasters..except that one of them is, mysteriously, a HAM radio.....
Consciousness may be a sliding scale, but even then..I don't see how complexity, itself, makes it happen. Bridges are complex too. Plants are so complex our consciousness cannot fully comprehend or explain how they do what they do (and, to sweeten the pot, they demonstrably exhibit the recognizable behaviors of conscious creatures). Neither seems to be concious, at least, not in the way that we are - if we are, if there's a specific way. The whole subject is kind-of a rat's nest of tangled propositions.
But, for agreement! I think that there; something incoherent about the p-zombie proposition myself. An entity that is not only equally complex, but equally complex in a host of specified ways? A creature, for example, with a brain just like ours (or it's equivalent)...with behaviors just like ours (or their equivalents)..and yet, not like us? That's like picking up two identical toasters..except that one of them is, mysteriously, a HAM radio.....
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