Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[emjay]

The main paradox for me, and what really boggles my mind, is if phenomenal consciousness is basically a mirror (or emergent property or whatever) of let's call it 'neural consciousness' (ie the neural correlates of consciousness)... if both are identical but viewed from different perspectives... just two sides of the same coin... (which is how I see it, and it looks like you do similarly as well)... then it's curious if we would treat them differently depending on if they had or did not have phenomenal consciousness. And intuitively I think we would treat them differently because (ie a non-PZ or PZ interacting with a hypothetically confirmed PZ (even though there'd be no way to confirm it, but just for argument's sake say it was confirmed somehow)) we feel empathy and sympathy for others based on not wanting them to feel pain, but feeling pain we intuitively see (or at least I see) as a purely phenomenal aspect of consciousness... ie sure there are distributed physical and neural correlates of that consciousness, and thus that pain... our brain state that is mirrored (for want of a better term) in/by consciousness, but nonetheless, I cannot intuitively look at those distributed processes in isolation, which is what the concept of a pZ is about, and feel the same sort of emotional response to it, in the sense of empathy/sympathy, as I would for imagining a phenomenally conscious state.

This reminds me of an opinion of Descartes that the torture of animals was OK since animals only 'appear' to be in pain, but are not *actually* in pain because they are not conscious. It also parallels the question of the middle ages about whether women have souls. Somehow, cries of agony and desperate attempts to avoid the torture are not enough to recognize something is in pain.

I see what you're saying... but at the same time, these extreme examples you're giving, notwithstanding their brutality, seem self-refuting and contradictory on the merits of their own supposed logic... in the sense that if the goal/purpose of inflicting torture/punishment is to cause suffering, then if you truly do not believe that the recipient of those actions has consciousness, and thus the ability to suffer, then the act is pointless for that goal... it would be the equivalent of trying to punish a rock for instance. Realistically I think the most you could logically infer from this sort of thinking is that you should be indifferent to that which you do not believe has consciousness, not that you should go out of your way to cause it harm, just as you are indifferent towards the fate of a rock on account of believing it not to have consciousness, rather than trying to hurt it.

And this is another aspect of the zombie question: a zombie that is crying out in pain *is* in pain. A zombie that obviously 'appears' deeply moved by a piece of music or poetry *is* deeply moved by the music or poetry. A zombie that appears to be overwhelmed by the beauty of a sunset *is* overwhelmed by the beauty of a sunset.

And this is one reason why zombies are simply incoherent. Whatever they have, we *should* identify as being conscious.

The way I look at it is this; *anything* in consciousness that we can *notice*... beit the content of our senses or meta-content so to speak (ie an example of the latter would be the visual field itself, and the former - content - what we see in the visual field)... *must* in my view have a neurally accessible representation because we are able to name it or mentally refer to it (ie you don't need to explicitly name something, though you can, in order to mentally refer to it as something like an instance in memory... 'ie that [unnamed] experience I had the other day which nonetheless I can explicitly refer to in my memory'), which I believe would require neurally associating either the language representation of a name/label or similar for an instance of memory. Roughly I would liken this view to that of a very complicated switchboard, but the main thing is that there is nothing about this concept that to me implies the necessity for phenomenal consciousness; I think all of this could tick along perfectly fine without it... this constant flux of activation and association, and so to me, the question is why it does not. So where you don't seem to be able to conceptualise the beauty of a sunset as apart from phenomenal consciousness, I disagree, and think that if you can notice it, or anything else, in consciousness, and associate things with it, it must have a neurally accessible representation... and if it has that, then it is subject to physics and determinism, thus making phenomenal consciousness seem, as I said, superfluous and unnecessary.

Granted this is just a theory, and it's been a long time since I've been seriously interested in neuroscience, but the logic still seems perfectly reasonable to me. But all I'm trying to show is where I'm coming from, but like I said, I do accept that this view follows from my own particular perspectives on all this and could well be flawed... and that others, such as yourself, with other perspectives can see it vastly differently. As I said, I'm open to seeing it another way, if convinced, but these are my reasons for seeing it as I currently do.