Non-existence

[Edwardo Piet]

You are shifiting the burden of proof then, for you don't have actual evidence of other minds.

There is no evidence for philsophical zombies either. There is merely a failure of evidence for the consciousness of others. This doesn't mean they're philosophical zombies. It's far more likely that they are the same as me but...the reason why I can't detect their consciousness....is that I'm not them!.

I need evidence that 'my own consciousness' means I'm 'more conscious than they are'. The fact that they completely emulate it is evidence, since unless I was capable of emulating it too - I myself couldn't be conscious!

As far as I'm concerend there's no evidence for my own consciousness.....in the way consciousness in normally understood.

There is evidence that I think, yeah. But not that there is an 'I' that does all the thinking. Only that thoughts pop in and out. And one thought that thinks 'I thought that' can be a completely different 'self' to another self that later thinks once again 'I thought that'.

I know of no evidence of a 'me' that governs of my mind. Only of thought itself.

So yes, I have self-evidence of my consciousness. But that's it. I dont acually have self evidence of one big 'me' that 'thinks', the 'self', the 'ego'. So in the traditonal sense I guess I'd argue that my consciousness doesn't exist. Because there is no single 'me' or 'self' to 'have' consciousness. There is only a brain itself full of consciousness, attached to the rest of the body that composes 'me'.

Do you know of what Dan Dennett refers to as 'Zimboes' that's on the wikipedia article about Philosophical zombies?

to quote from part of the wikipedia article "

"[...]One response is to claim that the idea of qualia and related phenomenal notions of the mind are not coherent concepts, and the zombie scenario is therefore incoherent. Daniel Dennett and others take this line. They argue that while consciousness, subjective experiences, and so forth exist in some sense, they are not as the zombie argument proponent claims they are; pain, for example, is not something that can be stripped off a person's mental life without bringing about any behavioral or physiological differences. Dennett coined the term zimboes (philosophical zombies that have second-order beliefs) to argue that the idea of a philosophical zombie is incoherent"

[...]Zimboes think they are conscious, think they have qualia, think they suffer pains - they are just 'wrong' (according to this lamentable tradition), in ways that neither they nor we could ever discover!""

- I would suscribe to the view of these two quotes. There is evidence of consciousness, but not that it is anything but the brain...because, there is evidence of own belief in consciousness, and the workings of the brain itself, and no further. My brain gets totally effected when it gets effected physically. As far as I know consciousness is nothing special.

EvF

EDIT: An interesting extract from an article on the matter: http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/unzombie.htm

If Philosophical Zombies are behaviorally indistinguisable then they must include consciousness, because if you strip the consciousness off you change the behavior. Because there is no evidence that consciousness is somehow some special seperate part of the brain or whetereever and that stripping it wouldn't effect the brain. There is only evidence of our belief in it (mine of mine, yours of yours, etc), and then other than that there's just how our brains are physically effected.

EvF