Monist vs. Dualist Experiment?

[bennyboy]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but all I'm seeing is agreement here. Given that, do you agree that the philosophical zombie is likely to be a nonsensical concept?

I can't assign likelihood to that thesis. You already know, though, that given a robot which behaves identically to a human, I'd be suspicious of whether it was really experiencing qualia or seeming to.

As for my skepticism of dualism, there are quite a lot of tries I accept as valid:
-mind is intrinsic to matter, rather than an emergent property of it. i.e., physical monism is true, because physical reality isn't what I think it is
-idealism is true, and all "physical" things (including QM particles) are part of some great mind
-plurality is true, but not duality (i.e. you'd need a soul to reconcile the brain and mind)
-duality is true, because the apparently completely different substances, while unique, are reconciled by a framework (i.e. the universe)
-ambiguism is true: mind is BOTH viewable as totally physical and non-physical, depending not on its own reality, but on the way it's being examined.

I'm skeptical of all these, not only of physical monism. However, the idea that mind is an emergent property of non-mental matter doesn't work for me, because mind doesn't just seem to be a property-- it's also a new framework, in which ideas may exist and interact. And to me, that feels like something "extra" is being created out of nothing-- much like God creating the universe. And that idea doesn't ring true for me.

The only problem here is that the process of gaining knowledge doesn't have to be strictly scientific. We make knowledgeable inferences in our daily lives by association everyday.

Gaining knowledge doesn't have to be scientific. But what about proving the validity of the knowledge you've aquired? I know, for example, that I experience qualia. How could I prove that to others, if they weren't willing on principle to take it as given?

What, for example, if I was a robot, and I woke up on the assembly line knowing the wonders of qualia? How could I convince that bennyboy guy I wasn't just blindly acting on my Windows 2043 programming?

I don't think it is redundant at all. The kind of explanation required depends upon the level at which you are examining the process. For example, I can give you details about how the hardware works and what signals it sends and it won't help you understand what functions does the software perform.

What is software but ideas imbued into a physical mechanism? It is exactly BECAUSE the people who make Windows are already sentient, and already experience qualia, that they can formulate such a thing and imprint it onto the mechanism of a computer, which could normally not do anything. Basically, it's the story of Genesis, with the human mind as God.

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Errrr.... so you base it on the fact that you are addressing another human being?.... what was that about zombies a few days ago?

I'm back at defining qualia as something purposefully unreachable, and as a consequence nothing more than mental masturbation...

Right. My acceptance of the qualia of others is a philosophical assumption, based on my social instinct and philosophical pragmatism. It's not something I was able to infer by objective means.

As for qualia being "purposely unreachable," I didn't make the universe, or the human mind. I didn't decide that my qualia would be unreachable by others-- I have just noticed that it is the case.