RE: Philosophical zombies
March 5, 2018 at 11:52 am
(This post was last modified: March 5, 2018 at 11:55 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(March 5, 2018 at 11:05 am)Hammy Wrote: However my question to put to those who hold that opinion is the following question: If you have two people with different brains and one of them is sentient and one of them is not... but despite having different brains... science is unable to tell who is sentient and who isn't... what would you call the person who isn't sentient?If they have meaningfully different brains then we would likely refer to that meaningful difference as a possible explanation between the two. If whatever meaningful difference they have produces no discernible effect..such as we cannot otherwise tell between the two which is the control and who is the outlier....then we might suppose that specific disparity between us is functionally inconsequential to consciousness in the first place.
Quote:And if you have no name for such a person... do you agree with me that such a person would be just as interesting as a philosophical zombie if a philosophical zombie were possible for exactly the same reasons? And if you do agree with that... can you understand why I am tempted to call that sort of person a kind of philosophical zombie?Not really, because a p-zombie is explicitly proposed to be identical in every physical regard for a very specific reason. It's meant as a possible demonstration of the weakness of a functional definition of consciousness derived from physical systems. The reason that the p-zombie has the same brain we do is to -remove- any possibility that a neurological or mechanical difference could distinguish something between the two, or in fact b the reason that one was functionally different from the other even if it could evade a test. The whole point of the proposition or the hypothetical zombie is to communicate that position.
What you're talking about is two people who have a physical difference, being somehow different..despite seeming the same. Well, sure, we're aware of people we might call high functioning in the sets of the impaired or damaged. They routinely cause us to rethink what is required for a range of mental operation that could pass as average or unremarkable among their unimpaired and un-damaged peers. It may be that a person could go full on, or at least very nearly full on bio-automaton. It may even be that we are full on bio-automata that has fundamentally underestimated the capabilities of automatons...ourselves.
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