Philosophical zombies

[The Grand Nudger]

My point is the user illusion does NOT make consciousness itself an illusion. And he can't tell the difference.

I don't know how many times I'll have to tell you that this is your misconception of his opinion, and to go read his footnotes..until you actually do it?  

No, no NO. He never even fucking addresses consciousness and that's the problem. He makes the exact same mistake with free will, and he's already said he takes the same approach in both cases. And that approach is to try and deal with problems by not even bothering to address them.

The problem is that you refuse to go read the relevant footnote.  Ham..you agree with dennet on exactly what you think you're discussing in his positio, here.

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@ The above...do you really think that your being an epiphenomenalist makes p-zeds possible, Ham...is that how that works, lol? 

No because that's not what I claimed now is it?

I'm starting to realize why Mathilda put you on ignore... it's because you strawman people so much.

And the fact you got voted the best debater is rather hilarious. You're one of the most illogical and unskilled debaters on AF.

I put a winky and everything, lighten up, lol. Yes, it -is- what you claimed, but only by the ambiguity of the grammar in the claim, lol.

[Edwardo Piet]

I don't know how many times I'll have to tell you that this is your misconception of his opinion, and to go read his footnotes..until you actually do it?  

I've read and listened to Dennett repeatedly on the subject. You blurting over and over that I haven't read some particular footnote without bothering to even tell me what footnote you're talking about... doesn't make Dennett any less confused.

He's made it abundantly clear, repeatedly, that his ontology is fucked. He acts like science can trump things it can't trump. If he's unable to test the sense of consciousness that MUST be true, he'll act like that sense of consciousness doesn't exist (because he thinks that anything that can't be tested by science can't be real... which is hilariously ironic considering without consciousness there would be nothing for science to test), and yes he has redefined consciousness and he's made it very clear that he has done that, and he has made it very clear that he takes the same stupid approach with free will... and he DOES take the same stupid approach with free will. And it's all as silly as pantheism.

The problem is that you refuse to go read the relevant footnote.  Ham..you agree with dennet on exactly what you think you're discussing in his positio, here.

No that's not the problem. Your approach to debate is so fully of fallacies it's laughable, and it's sad that so many people can't see through them that they actually think you're a good debater. You blurting over and over "Well you can't have read the footnote I won't specify then!" doesn't score you brownie points, you're talking out of your arse. It's very clear that Dennett is full of shit, so stop playing devil's advocate and trying so hard to defend his terrible arguments.

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I put a winky and everything, lighten up, lol.  Yes, it -is- what you claimed, but only by the ambiguity of the grammar in the claim, lol.

I am lightened up. I'm enjoying myself a lot. That doesn't change the fact that I see you as the atheistic version of William Lane Craig.

No, it isn't what I claimed. I mentioned epiphenomenalism to Polymath during a debate with him, and I made it very clear why I brought it up. You are once again obfuscating in full WLC style. And you bank on the majority of people being too thick to spot your obfuscation.

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't know how many times I'll have to tell you that this is your misconception of his opinion, and to go read his footnotes..until you actually do it?  

I've read and listened to Dennett repeatedly on the subject. You blurting over and over that I haven't read some particular footnote without bothering to even tell me what footnote you're talking about... doesn't make Dennett any less confused.

I won't have too, that's the irony of the convo.   The basis of your misconception is so widespread that it will return on any google search of the comments in question with many hits across the top few pages.  

Responding explicitly to the notion of consciousness as the little man in the head, or the insistence that the difference between a p zombie and a human being was the existence of the little man in the head in one...Dennet characterized this as an illusion, and then commented that we would all be p zombies, if the p zombie where the one without the little man in the head.  

He's made it abundantly clear, repeatedly, that his ontology is fucked. He acts like science can trump things it can't trump. If he's unable to test the sense of consciousness that MUST be true, he'll act like that sense of consciousness doesn't exist (because he thinks that anything that can't be tested by science can't be real... which is hilariously ironic considering without consciousness there would be nothing for science to test), and yes he has redefined consciousness and he's made it very clear that he has done that, and he has made it very clear that he takes the same stupid approach with free will... and he DOES take the same stupid approach with free will. And it's all as silly as pantheism.

Eliminativism seeks a more accurate definition (and or description) of consciousness.  Current and traditional ones are, in the view of that position, folklore.  

No that's not the problem. Your approach to debate is so fully of fallacies it's laughable, and it's sad that so many people can't see through them that they actually think you're a good debater. You blurting over and over "Well you can't have read the footnote I won't specify then!" doesn't score you brownie points, you're talking out of your arse. It's very clear that Dennett is full of shit, so stop playing devil's advocate and trying so hard to defend his terrible arguments.

I'm not having a debate with you.  I;m flat out telling you that you've got dennet wrong in a particular thing, a thing that alot of people got wrong..because of quote mining from his detractors so obvious and so frequent that it deserved a footnote......

I am lightened up. I'm enjoying myself a lot. That doesn't change the fact that I see you as the atheistic version of William Lane Craig.

Good, good, good.  The funbus is important.

No, it isn't what I claimed. I mentioned epiphenomenalism to Polymath during a debate with him, and I made it very clear why I brought it up. You are once again obfuscating in full WLC style. And you bank on the majority of people being too thick to spot your obfuscation.

I kick puppies too.  That's worth mentioning, surely?

[LadyForCamus]

If a Being is capable of clearly, verbally communicating that it is aware of itself, doesn’t it follow that it is self-aware?

[The Grand Nudger]

It would, strongly. The reason that p zombies are an amusing proposition is that they posit something so subtle that it flies right under the radar.  That however that thing might be aware of itself (as, for example..any common machine with self referential data collection - like a machine that knows it's supposed to respond with some relevant information about some part of it's system to a call of "how are you"), it would not be the same, it would be meaningfully different, from us.

The proposition is that the p zombie would be capable of all of our behavior, a carbon copy..with one difference. One answer to that is that it couldn;t, in fact, be a behavioral carbon copy to us without possessing that "x" because that "x" is what drives those behaviors. We can posit that it need not be, and that's the p-zombie prop..but..in humans, it is, and so a mechanically equavalent human would be a functionally equivalent human. Any explanation for some difference would hide many other different things than the sole difference referenced.

P zombies are a congnitive trap, lol.

[LadyForCamus]

Hmmm. I find it almost impossible to conceive of a meaningful difference that wouldn’t be obviously detectable from a third person POV. This is an interesting topic.

[polymath257]

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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.

[The Grand Nudger]

Or, at least as conscious as we take ourselves to be, despite the fiat declaration to the contrary.

[polymath257]

Here is the problem, if you remove the part of the brain that produces consciousness, you, by necessity, affect the behavior of every other part of the brain *because* consciousness is so spread out. So, there would simply be no way to eliminate consciousness and have that removal be *undetectable*. In fact, I would go further, removing that capability would result in severe incapacity, even behaviorally.

The idea of epiphenominalism suggests that consciousness is produced by physical processes but is just an 'extra' that does nothing. My position is that consciousness is quite essential to do even ordinary human tasks. Removal of awareness would immediately lead to severe problems in many aspects of our existence which would be clearly visible to any bystander (sort of like an extreme mental illness, which it would be).

So, again, even a pseudo-P-zombie is an incoherency, as far as I can see. if you pass as conscious, you will *be* conscious.

[bennyboy]

Since I first read Chalmer's book where he introduced the idea of philosophical zombies, I have been convinced his argument is flawed. Consciousness is a matter of processing information in the brain. That means that anything physically identical to a conscious person will also be conscious.

Philosophers like to talk about the 'hard problem of consciousness', but I have to admit I have never grasped the fundamental difficulty. They seem t think that no physical explanation can be enough to explain our consciousness, but I see it as quite the opposite. Hell, we already have a LOT of the details of how consciousness arises in thebrain, from awareness in the brain step, to memory, to planning, etc.

Where is the gap?

Saying "consciousness is" and then saying anything more than "the subjective awareness of what things are like" is fine if you are programming robots, but it's not very solid if you are trying to discuss the philosophy of mind.

Generally, physicalists tend to conflate the subjective experience of mind with the physical correlates of mind: brain function, behaviors, etc.  They say something like "If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck. . . it must think like a duck."  But the fact is that there is not even the beginnings of a good theory of consciousness.  Nobody has the faintest clue how it is that "dead" matter (i.e. unthinking stuff) arrives at a subjective experience of itself or its environment, under any configuration.  Not only that, we cannot even determine whether any given physical system has any subjective experience of the universe.  Is that animated little thing we found in a cave in Mars, that silicon-based "lifeform," really alive in the sense that I am?

This is soon to become a non-trivial issue.  What happens when AI programs (Googlandra or whatever) are so convincingly human that they can elicit emotional responses in humans?  We will have people (idiots in my opinion) believing that Googlandra is a thinking, feeling agent, and there will be movements to grant her rights and protections, and maybe to elect her for president.

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Here is the problem, if you remove the part of the brain that produces consciousness, you, by necessity, affect the behavior of every other part of the brain *because* consciousness is so spread out. So, there would simply be no way to eliminate consciousness and have that removal be *undetectable*. In fact, I would go further,  removing that capability would result in severe incapacity, even behaviorally.

The idea of epiphenominalism suggests that consciousness is produced by physical processes but is just an 'extra' that does nothing. My position is that consciousness is quite essential to do even ordinary human tasks. Removal of awareness would immediately lead to severe problems in many aspects of our existence which would be clearly visible to any bystander (sort of like an extreme mental illness, which it would be).

So, again, even a pseudo-P-zombie is an incoherency, as far as I can see. if you pass as conscious, you will *be* conscious.

There is no such part.  You might just as well talk about removing someone's soul.

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It would, strongly.  The reason that p zombies are an amusing proposition is that they posit something so subtle that it flies right under the radar.  That however that thing might be aware of itself (as, for example..any common machine with self referential data collection - like a machine that knows it's supposed to respond with some relevant information about some part of it's system to a call of "how are you"), it would not be the same, it would be meaningfully different, from us.

The proposition is that the p zombie would be capable of all of our behavior, a carbon copy..with one difference.  One answer to that is that it couldn;t, in fact, be a behavioral carbon copy to us without possessing that "x" because that "x" is what drives those behaviors.  We can posit that it need not be, and that's the p-zombie prop..but..in humans, it is, and so a mechanically equavalent human would be a functionally equivalent human.  Any explanation for some difference would hide many other different things than the sole difference referenced.

P zombies are a congnitive trap, lol.

There are a lot of differences between me and between an Android.  I cannot know if an Android really feels, or just uses complex programming and AI algorithms to make it appear that it does.

Will you allow sufficiently human-seeming Androids full legal protections?  Allow them to take jobs instead of your children?  Allow them to "declare as human" and run for president?

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If a Being is capable of clearly, verbally communicating that it is aware of itself, doesn’t it follow that it is self-aware?

Absolutely not, unless you define "self-aware" in those terms.

But the problem is this: I have a particular type of self-awareness that allows me to know what it feels like to watch a sunset or to drink a cup of hot chocolate.  I do not believe this to be the same as a robot that can determine the chemical composition of fluids it has taken in and then verbalizing that composition.

Unless, that is, the Universe is panpsychic.  Then it's all bets off.