(January 18, 2022 at 11:00 am)polymath257 Wrote:(January 18, 2022 at 12:10 am)GrandizerII Wrote: Can I hear the argument for that?
Well, let's consider what Chalmers proposed. Imagine a conscious person. Then imagine another being that is physically identical in every way with that conscious person. The question is whether it is coherent to say the construct is not conscious. I don't believe it is.
For example, if the conscious person waxes eloquent about their experience of the color red, so will the zombie. If the conscious person goes into a long discussion about their qualia, so will the zombie. if the conscious person acknowledges Mary might have learned something when she saw red, so would the zombie. In every single physical situation, the two will be *exactly* the same in how they respond.
And no, I don't think it is possible for that to occur without the 'zombie' actually being conscious. At some point in some way, there would be something where a non-conscious being would react differently than a conscious one and *that* would be a physical difference between the two.
The zombie is meant to be a thought experiment, nothing more. Chalmers' point is that, logically speaking, one can have all the "outward appearance" of a conscious person and behave like such, and yet still lack qualia. If it's even logically possible (even if perhaps not metaphysically possible) for a p-zombie to exist, then this lends credence to the hard problem.
Quote:I suspect that the desire is for some sort of 'mechanism'. That, I believe, is a deep philosophical mistake. We cannot detect causality. What we can detect is correlation. And certain types of correlation we *call* causality. That is what it *means* to say X causes Y.
Of course, an explanation that invokes a mechanism is desired. If science cannot provide that, then that just means science has its limitations (which is what I said earlier).
Correlations alone can't resolve the hard problem. Even if you were to establish that the correlation was causal, there'd still be a hard problem. Simply because establishing that neuron firings in the CNS cause qualia does nothing to explain how that works. How something that is an electrochemical process leads to something so radically (and qualitatively) different.
