Philosophical zombies

[Edwardo Piet]

I've heard Daniel Dennett's arguments that philosophical zombies can't possibly exist.... and I think they're terrible.

His argument is basically that the part of the brain that is used to simulate consciousness also leads to consciousness. So if someone seemed conscious enough they would be conscious.

And his caveat is that "or maybe we're all zombies" because he does after all hold that retarded "consciousness is an illusion" view.... when consciousness is the one thing in the universe that is NOT an illusion. The whole world could be an illusion but the fact we are conscious of that illusory world is NOT an illusion.

His notion of consciousness being like a "user illusion" makes no sense.... because he draws an analogy with a computer's operating system. And while it's true that the way a computer works on the inside is nothing like how we navigate it on Windows or Mac OS or Linux or whatever.... that doesn't change the fact that the screen we are looking at and the operating system we are using is NOT an illusion in the sense that it actually is there and we actually are looking at it and using it.

If it SEEMS that we are conscious... we are conscious. To say that the seeming itself is an illusion when the seeming conscious is the reality of consciousness as far as consciousness is concerned.... makes no sense. He tries to explain consciousness but it doesn't work because he tries to get into what consciousness really is.... when we already know what it is, so he can explain how the brain works as much as he likes.... but he has to use that information to explain what consciousness is, and not what his own redefinition of consciousness is. Or he's talking about something else.

So what he's done is redefined consciousness as a way to make it possible that consciousness can be illusory. To him, seeming conscious isn't consciousness because consciousness is something else to him.

And I think this is the only way anyone can debunk a possible philosophical zombie. By redefining shit. He does the same with free will. As all compatabilists do.

I'm an epiphenomenalist so I believe that consciousness is an effect that has no effect. We could survive and eat and kill and fight and reproduce with all our mental complexity without the consciousness part. We could behave conscious without being conscious. Consciousness is utterly useless and we're merely both very unfortunate and very fortunate to have it.... depending on happy or unhappy we are.

The evolutionary path that we have happened to have taken has happened to lead to our brain's complexity resulting in the useless side effect of consciousness. Our body could react and flinch to pain without it needing to hurt. Our brain could be rewarded for certain things without feeling pleasure, etc.

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It struct me recently that "time is money", because I really need it right now. I feel like I have no time for non productive chatter.

If you think philosophy is just "unproductive chatter".... then you're in the wrong subforum, mate.

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I'm leaning towards saying we are all zombies, or rather, it makes no difference if we are or not. It's the same thing.

Agreed.  A difference which makes no difference is no difference.

Boru

So basically we're not zombies but philosophical zombies are not impossible, lol.

The difference is... a philosophical zombie wouldn't actually feel anything or be conscious. But it would seem to everyone else that they would. The crucial and very real difference is that there would be no seeming to THEM. Daniel Dennett thinks this is impossible. Because he likes to use his own definitions and equivocate a lot. God, Daniel Dennett is annoying. He doesn't even have a first-person version of consciousness. To take the third person perspective of consciousness to such an extent that he denies the first person is as nutty as you can get when it comes to consciousness. Consciousness is as first person as it gets.

Galen Strawson coined a term to describe what Daniel Dennett does to words. It's to looking-glass a word.

Here there is a wonderful irony, for the false naturalists – even as they doubt or deflate or deny the existence of experience, and revile Descartes, their favourite target, for being an outright realist about experience – are themselves in the grip of a fundamentally Cartesian conviction: the conviction that experience can’t possibly be physical, that matter can’t possibly be conscious. The irony is fierce because Descartes was at bottom aware that one can’t rule out the possibility that matter may be conscious. Many of the false naturalists, by contrast, have no such doubts.

Some of them will deny this. They will insist that they do admit the existence of consciousness or experience, and do allow that it can be physical. But they do this by changing the meaning of the word ‘conscious’ into something that involves no consciousness. They ‘looking-glass’ the term, by which I mean use it in such a way that whatever they mean by it, it excludes what the term actually means.