(March 3, 2018 at 3:54 pm)Hammy Wrote:
(March 2, 2018 at 2:11 pm)polymath257 Wrote: OK, I think we just disagree here. It seems clear to me that this level of complexity is the same as having an internal state that is conscious. They would have *seeming*.
That p-zombies would then be conscious is a proof of their impossibility.
And I don't see what information processing has got to do with it. Like I said, we don't know what it is that makes matter conscious. And we should stop pretending to know. We know we're conscious, and we can use inductive reasoning to believe that apes and primates and mammals that are closely related to us are perhaps conscious to a lesser and lesser extent the further we go back through our evolution, but we can't know what it is about us that makes us conscious or why. We know it lies somehwere in the brain, but there's no reason to believe it's "information processing" or that if you get a super computer that's super enough and can process enough information it suddenly has qualia lol.
P-zombies can't be conscious.
The only interesting sense of a P-Zed is a person who is unconscious but science has no way of telling.
Like I said, if you get two people who are identical twins except each of their brains are slightly different, and one of them has a conscious brain and the other doesn't... and science is unable to tell which is conscious and which isn't.... then you still have a hard problem of consciousness and you still have a P-zed in the way that P-zeds are actually interesting. They're unconscious beings that we are unable to tell are unconscious. If you want to go ahead and say they're not P-zeds just because their brains aren't physically identical, then fine they're not P-zeds. But I can then deem them pseudo-P-zeds and their pseudoness doesn't even matter because they're interesting for the exact same reason that a P-zed would be, except without the stupid dualism or non-physicalism. Obviously physicalism is true so obviously if you get a brain that is indentical to another brain physically either they're both conscious or both not. That is all obvious and uninteresting. The interesting part is that there's no reason to believe consciousness is anything more than an epiphenomenon and thus... it's very possible to conceive of two people who behave and act exactly the same way but one of their brains is only slightly different so as to remove them of consciousness.... and yet science is unable to tell which is which. Beings that behave exactly the same way despite no consciousness ARE possible, and if a being that looks and acts conscious but isn't and we can't tell they're not conscious isn't classified as a zombie... then I don't know what the hell you would classify them as. Consciousness doesn't appear to actually do anything or have any function, and that does make the possibility of zombies in the sense I described interesting.
On the contrary, if both of those twin act in every way as if they are conscious, then they are, in fact, conscious. If they have that complex of an interaction with the rest of the universe and talk about internal states, etc, then they *are* in fact conscious.
