Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[polymath257]

The question by polymath257 is badly formed. He isn't asking what the definition of zombie is.
He is in fact asking, "How do I know that I am experiencing anything?"
How is that determined?
How does the human determine that he is experiencing things? Is he the judge of himself? He might say "He isn't experiencing anything." which means that he might be wrong.
How does the zombie determine that he is experiencing things? Is he the judge of himself? He might say "He IS experiencing things." which means that he might be wrong.

There is this claim that you can have a person who does not experience anything and that it behaves just as any other human.

If I ask you to ponder whether you experience things or not, wouldn't you know that you are? You're seeing the words on this screen, right? The color, the font, and all. You're seeing the screen. It's all out there in your face.

I don't know. What does it mean to 'experience' something? What would be different if I was a zombie?

The zombie clearly *detects* the colors on the screen and reacts to them. In what sense does he not 'see' them? He clearly detects pain and reacts to it. In what sense does he not experience it?

The most a zombie can do, on the other hand, is state - or even believe - that they do experience things, but they wouldn't really know it because they lack that intimate acquaintance with such experiences. There is nothing out there in their face. Now you might not be able to tell if the other person is a zombie or a conscious being since perhaps they still give you the same response no matter what. But from your perspective, you have the intimate acquaintance with your experiences, so you would know that you are indeed experiencing things.

How would it be *possible* to have 'nothing there' if they are detecting and reacting to stimuli all the time? That seems like nonsense to me.

And, again, how do I know I am actually 'experiencing' things as opposed to simply reacting to them?

Yes, you're the judge of yourself. And the zombie is the judge of their self. You would be correct in your judgement, but the zombie would have no idea what they're saying when they report having experiences, or they're thinking of a different sense of the word "experience", one that they can fathom. As an example of the latter sense, a rock in a river experiencing the splash of water against it. The rock most probably doesn't have a visual field or a first-person perspective. It's just interactions.

The river and rock have no information processing. We are talking about something physically identical to a person. How is it possible that they *not* have experiences?

The pain sensors are still active. They still respond to the pain. They still have ears that detect sound. They still smile when they hear a certain melody. They brighten up when a 'loved one' comes around. They have the same stimulation of the emotional centers.

How is it possible to have ALL of that and NOT have experiences? That, to me, seems utterly impossible.

Anyway, such objection doesn't show that a zombie is incoherent, only that you can't infallibly know if someone else is a zombie or not.

But from what you said above, the zombie gets to determine if they experience things or not. And they report that they do. So they *are* conscious by your criterion.

How can you have 2 without 1?

More like why should there be a 1 at all?

Because you have complex interactive processing of information about an environment together with complex reaction to that information. What else do you want for 'awareness'?

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I think you guys are thinking graphically. You are imagining that atoms/molecules are little balls moving around randomly and you want to call the average speed the temperature.

So far, it sounds like nobody is having difficulty in understanding this.

In this universe with its laws of physics and such, the temperature is the motion of those molecules. In another universe or world, perhaps temperature is something different, but that's not really the point.

The point is that, in this universe, this is all what temperature is. There is nothing else about temperature unless we also include our sensations of it, but then that is not really adding to what temperature is perse. That's just our experiences.

And in this universe, your experience of red is the same as your brain processing the information obtained from your eyes in the visual cortex.

They are the same thing from different perspectives.

I’m not sure about GrandizerII.
Are you saying that consciousness is unrelated to the brain? It looks like you accept that you can have zombies.

Maybe. They certainly are logically possible. Are they metaphysically possible? Am agnostic about this.

What is the difference between 'logically possible' and 'metaphysically possible'? What metaphysics are you using?

Are they physically possible? Most likely not.

And that is all that is required. In *this* world, they are impossible. Just like temperature and molecular motion are identified in *this* world.

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First thing's first, no offence mate, but I don't think I can handle this conversation twice over, so if it's okay with you, can we keep this interlude brief? These sorts of conversations take a lot out of me, and I didn't realise how hard it would be to explain what to me is a perfectly simple and intuitive concept.

The question by polymath257 is badly formed. He isn't asking what the definition of zombie is.
He is in fact asking, "How do I know that I am experiencing anything?"
How is that determined?
How does the human determine that he is experiencing things? Is he the judge of himself? He might say "He isn't experiencing anything." which means that he might be wrong.

Beyond what I've said to polymath, I don't know how to answer this. Conscious experience is just something that is evident and different from nothing... there's the perception of something, anything. Even if you go deep down to the rawest level of it... forget colours or any other specific qualia, there is just at the very least the perception of change... there is something say over here on your visual field that is different from something over there... or change of perceptions over time. There is something there... that requires an explanation. And sure you can pretend it doesn't exist or write it off as an illusion, but I don't think that's helpful. I'm open to it being an illusion in some sense, but in the main sense of awareness of something, anything, of change, of time... of something different than nothing, it's not an illusion; there is something there needing an explanation. So I don't know what to say really; if you truly think it's possible to doubt the presence of your own conscious experience, then have at it if it helps you sleep at night, but I don't think there's anywhere for us to go in conversation.

But, again, if a zombie is physically identical to a conscious person, they would *also* perceive differences in their visual field. They would still react to pain. They would still be awed by a sunset.

What ese is required to be conscious?

How does the zombie determine that he is experiencing things? Is he the judge of himself? He might say "He IS experiencing things." which means that he might be wrong.

There is this claim that you can have a person who does not experience anything and that it behaves just as any other human.
[...]

I'll answer the bottom bit first... how can you have 2 without 1? Because the brain and body is a physical system that obeys the laws of physics, and it's my contention that everything in consciousness has a neural representation, and therefore to the extent that consciousness is some sort of mirror/emergent property of the brain and/or its information processing, it only represents what is already represented neurally in the brain, and is therefore seemingly superfluous, dragged along for the ride as it were, but with no causal power of its own... a sideshow as it were. So it's my contention that it's at least theoretically possible for there to be such thing as a PZ; something that ticks along as the physical and biological machine that it is, but without that sideshow. It's not that I believe PZ's are definitively a thing, and as I said there'd be no way to detect one anyway even if they did exist, but more that I can't rule them out as a logical possibility. Ie in my view, there's nothing about the brain that necessitates the presence of phenomenal consciousness, therefore making it seem superfluous, and therefore making the possibility of its lack something I can't rule out.

And that seems, to me, to be similar to saying you can have molecular motions and temperature is superfluous and 'carried along for the ride'. There could be no 'actual temeprature' even though everything is identical.

That makes no sense to me.

As to the experience of the PZ... for one thing it wouldn't have experience, but it would still have the same neural representations as one that did... so if you asked it a question, it would still receive the same audio signals and process them in the same way, just not hear them as a phenomenal experience of sound, it would still neurally trigger the same memories, just not experience them in the mind's eye, because it has no mind's eye, it would still trigger the same brain areas involved in say planning and language, and the motor neurons involved in turning all of that into the behaviour of speaking to reply. As to the purely unprompted introspective... if the conscious can do it, so should the PZ, and again I see no reason why not; the brain is basically a black box, deeper than just direct inputs and outputs... as the behaviourists (hopefully) learnt long ago... ie we have a whole mental life ticking along under the hood (daydreaming, planning etc), not directly conditioned by external stimuli... and I'd contend that those processes involved in that are no different... they have their own neural representations to be activated, and do not require phenomenal consciousness. So in my view the PZ would daydream in the sense that it activates all the relevant neural representations, but it would not daydream in the sense of actually experiencing the phenomena of a daydream.

OK, I simply don't see that as possible. If your brain daydreams, so do you.

I guess at this point, I see it as a reductio ad absurdum in about the same ways as solipsism is an absurdity. It isn't a *logical* absurdity: it is logically possible I am the only thing in the universe and everything else is an illusion.

But the concept is still absurd.

Is it logically possible that I am the only conscious thing in the universe and everyone else is a zombie? Yes. It is logically possible.

But it is still absurd.