(January 13, 2023 at 6:01 am)Dmitry1983 Wrote:(January 10, 2023 at 4:18 pm)HappySkeptic Wrote: I believe consciousness is a byproduct of a highly evolved brain - one that requires us to have a sense of self and inner dialog for survival.Since p-zombies don't need qualia to survive what is the evolutionary advantage of having subjective experience?
Are you honestly using one non-existent entity to try and prove another non-existent entity? Or were you suggesting that creationists are mindless beasts that are merely mimicking sentience?
P-zombies are the sort of rubbish that can only be produce by assuming that we're the pinnacle of creation and that sentience is a binary, all-or-nothing trait. They fall to shambling pieces the moment you realize that sentience is a sliding scale. Humans may be further up that scale than most of our evolutionary brethren but we're by no means at the top. In fact there may not be a top to be at. Since some degree of sentience has been demonstrated in a wide variety of animals (primates, canines, felines, cetaceans, corvids, octopi, etc...) you have to go an awfully long way down toward single-celled organisms to find much of anything too dim to experience "qualia" of some form. And that makes all this blather of "p-zombies that are kinda like humans but not" look like it was dreamt up by somebody whose brains had already been snacked upon.
