Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[GrandizerII]

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.

Yes, I feel like I am experiencing things and experiencing things is used as evidence by me to conclude that I am experiencing things, that I have consciousness.
That evidence is not accessible to you.
So, I know what you are talking about.

I'm pretty sure you do. I'm not a solipsist, lol.

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.

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.

There is this assumption that it is possible to make a perfect copy of a human, where every atom is in the right place yet it is lacking the “soul”.
And you are calling that the zombie.
Why do you think that it is possible to have an atomic copy of a human that is lacking the consciousness, the soul?

I don't see anything incoherent about it, so it's not logically impossible. After all, consciousness is not one and the same with the arrangement of atoms.

The other issue that I think polymath257 was trying to raise is that maybe your senses are fooling you. Maybe your experiences are insufficient and you don’t qualify to get the certificate of “This pile of atoms has consciousness”. Maybe no human is qualified to get that certificate.

What does it mean for my experiences to be insufficent? If it's out there in my face, it's an experience I'm having. And that's all that takes to know I'm having an experience. Sure, I could be vividly seeing more stuff than I am right now, but I'm still vividly seeing stuff.

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.

It depends. First, you have to know what you are looking for. A good definition of consciousness is needed.
I think that definition will have to be based on a certain circuit or program.
If we decide that we are looking for a certain super complex circuit and we find such a circuit in an ant’s brain, we can certify that the ant has consciousness.

Even if consciousness is based on a certain circuit or program, it's clearly not the same as that circuit or program. They're qualitatively two different things. Consciousness is not an abstract label we're applying to circuitry.

For example, let’s forget this consciousness thing in this example.
Let’s say I am looking for an ADDER circuit.
I can open up every IC chip and inspect the connections between the transistors. If I find a circuit that matches up with the design of an ADDER circuit, I can certify: “This chip poses the ability to add two 32 bit integers”.
I can look at pieces of rocks, wood and everything and look for ADDER circuits.

But, if someone claims that adding integers is done by a soul.... what the heck is a soul? What I am looking for?

As far as the adding is concerned, this is the work of the hardware in your example.

No one's saying that the ability to add is inexplicable. So I'm not sure this is a good example.

You seem to think consciousness is a label we apply to the activity of specific circuitry, in the same way you can point to specific circuitry and say "that's addition". That's not the case.

More like why should there be a 1 at all?

I don’t know. At this point in time, the brain looks like a certain circuitry and I guess, when there is a certain complexity to it or a certain circuitry, there is this phenomenon of “feeling like you are special”. Along with that, there is abstract thought, the ability to develop a language, the ability to ask “Why” questions and be curious.

And there's this unexplained capacity to vividly experience things. Try to imagine how you can get to that from neural activity. There's clearly a gap there that is being left unexplained.