Philosophical zombies

[emjay]

The way I see the Philosophical Zombie problem is that since everything we can notice in consciousness... be it what we deem external to us - 'out there' (objects in the environment) - or what we deem internal/meta - 'in here' (colours themselves, thoughts themselves etc)... is something we can can reference by association, whether that be in the sense of naming/labelling things... in which case we associate a word with something we've noticed... or just implicitly: 'that thing I noticed the other day'... either way requires association. That implies to me that everything we can notice in or about consciousness has to have a 'neurally accessible representation' in order to be associated with other neurally accessible representations. As such, the way I view a philosophical zombie world... as in a world without phenomenal consciousness... is where there is absolutely no physical difference whatsoever between that world and this world; people still argue about consciousness, there is still Facebook, there is still everything we associate with conscious activity... because the same neurally accessible representations are being activated and their consequences physically/behavioural manifested in space. The only difference would be that there was no phenomenal consciousness to perceive any of it or phenomenally give any of it meaning. So it remains the question to me why there is phenomenal consciousness when under this view it has no bearing whatsoever on the physical universe.

And my position is that with all of these things, the phenomenal aspects would be there automatically: that they are part of how the brain functions. I have a first person experience because it is *my* brain that is doing things.

I just can't get to that in my thinking... not saying I think you're wrong or anything... I just can't get there. Maybe I'm just thinking about it wrong... probably... I just can't see anything, at all, that implies the necessity for it. That for instance a PZ would still 'scream' if it was in 'pain'... pain would still be represented neurally and the physical manifestations of it would still be detected and processed by other PZ's... no different physically than with phenomenal consciousness.