The Scripture Is False And The Biblical God Is Dead.

[Paleophyte]

Can you explain how we'd do any planning without consciousness? No self-awareness, no awareness of the future, no planning for any self in any future.

If you write code using complicated nestings of conditional statements (if/else statements), you have pretty much built something artificial that can do something akin to planning/decision-making (at least in the rudimentary sense) without the need for any qualia whatsoever.

The trouble being that if you have sufficiently complex code one begins to wonder if those machines aren't getting a little sparky. The simple mimics obviously don't but they bugger up given an even vaguely novel situation. The more advanced genetic algorithms get a bit spooky that way.

So it seems to me, then, that it is possible for an organism like the human being to plan ahead without any "inner movie running in their head".

So computers building an internal digital representation of their external environment and interpreting it doesn't hint at what might be going on in that organic mess in our heads?

Pain is little more than a damage indicator. Don't do this, it hurts. About as complicated as a check engine light. There's some pretty obvious survival advantage to avoiding an unnecessarily punctured hide.

And if pain is DMitry's bar for qualia then he's just thrown humanish p-zombies out the window. Every organism down to and including single-celled organisms exhibit some level of distress when damaged. It's about as fundamental a reaction as you can find.

Yeah, but there is also the feeling of pain as well. That is what Dmitry is referring to, not the outward behavior exhibiting it (or the activities in the nervous system that lead to it), but the inner subjective feeling of it.

Are you likely to get reaction without feeling?

And yeah, hypothetically, you could have p-zombie versions of dogs and other non-human animals that we believe have consciousness. It's not just humans beings that have phenomenal consciousness, of course.

I'm not seeing the hypothetical.