The Philosophy of Mind: Zombies, "radical emergence" and evidence of non-experiential

[Edwardo Piet]

Empathy is about the only useful function of consciousness that I can come up with.  @Hammy, how can we experience empathy without consciousness?

Well, it's like I said to Khem when I pointed out that robots can still behave as if they like stuff without having the qualia we call "liking". The only part that appears to be missing is the actually liking stuff. But the fact that a robot could behave exactly the same or a philosophical zombie could behave exactly the same without liking... just leads back to my same point about qualia being useless.

N.B. The trouble was Khem appeared to be begging the question by merely building liking itself into the definiton of qualia.

So, my point here is it's the same with empathy. If we literally define empathy itself as requiring consciousness then we win immediately and can simply declare victory by building empathy into the definition... which begs the question and goes back to the philosophical zombie argument and only changes from consciousness generally to empathetic conscious states specifically.

If a creature behaved completely empathetic without feeling empathy then you may say "they're not really empathetic because empathy requires feeling empathy", well sure... but then they wouldn't need to be conscious either. The feeling of empathy is a conscious state... so of course consciousness is required for the feeling of it: But then my point about empathy is exactly the same as my point about consciousness. As an experiential state, as qualia, it doesn't appear to actually do anything. All the useful behavior you get from consciousness or empathy... doesn't seem to require the qualia or the feeling. It's back to strawson's point about how a creature could react as if in pain and have alarm systems and sense danger and detect light all without experiencing any of those things subjectively.

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As if seeming wasn't the most real and knowable thing in the world... and as if all empirical knowledge didn't depend on it...

That's the rub.  Literally everything I know or believe I have done so through the agency of mind.  The only true brute fact is consciousness.  The rest is all derivative.  Watching apples drop from trees-- experience.  Listening to physics teacher talk about how wave functions that can't be unambiguously defined in either space or time-- experience.  Measuring things with a ruler, looking through microscopes, asking people what they smell when you poke their brain with a needle-- all experience.

As soon as you move to the shorthand version: "The professor said X" rather than "What seemed like a professor seemed to say X," then you are already begging the question without knowing it.  That's because there are very many frameworks which could provide a seeming-of-things that don't require a material monopoly.

Exactly. That's why I love the concept of the Lebenswelt so much. And why I keep asking Khem to address the distinction between phenomenal and noumenal reality (he has ignored that crucial point every single time, by the way, and just changes the subject when I say that... as he moves onto the next red herring or false analogy).

The fact existence must exist is the only other absolute truth that I know. And that's just down to the impossibility of nonexistence. All other tautologies seem to be down to semantics that require experience... but that one doesn't. That one's deeper. If no minds existed, something still would have to exist... simply because nothing can't.

I wouldn't call the necessity of existence a brute fact though... consciousness is a brute fact because it requires experience to be known. Existence is a necessarily logical truth because it must be true whether there are any minds around to know it or not.

So yeah, consciousness is the only absolute brute fact. It isn't necessary in all possible worlds though... unlike existence itself (obviously existence is necessary for all possible worlds... the only impossible world is a nonexistent one... and the concept of "a nonexistent world" is an incoherent concept. There's literally no such thing as a nonexistent world. To say "there is a such thing as a nonexistent world" or even that there could be such a thing as nonexistent world would be to say "a nonexistent world could be existent"... which is like saying "a square could be a circle" or "X could be not X"... and is just a logical contradiction).

(If you're interested in more on the matter of the necessity of existence.... check this video out under the hidetag)

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