Philosophical zombies

[The Grand Nudger]

There are a lot of differences between me and between an Android. 

Sure, but the p-zombie proposition is explicitly designed to refer to just one, regardless of it;s ability to cogently comment upon it.  I propose that there are alot of differences between you and I as well.  Between both of us and an android, and between both of us, an android, and some other species of biological intelligence.  We likely agree on each item.  Different things are, well..different.  That's part of what makes the p zombie prop a cognitive trap.  It proposes a difference...with no difference.

I cannot know if an Android really feels, or just uses complex programming and AI algorithms to make it appear that it does.

You can either know that or not..but if you cannot know that, then you cannot know that your own consciousness isn't "just complex programming" to make so and so appear so and so..either.  Because it;s a problem for your criteria of knowledge, it is a problem for all relevant categories of knowledge equally, or none equally.  I can appreciate where you'rte coming from, but, I extend a certain criteria to human beings day in and day out. It wopuld make very little sense for me to come up with some other criteria for extension just because the hand I'm shaking is made of carbon fiber. I doubt I'll see it in my lifetime, I hope my children do. It's a lonely universe, after all, eh?

Will you allow sufficiently human-seeming Androids full legal protections? 

Sure, and I'd also shoot at them.  

Allow them to take jobs instead of your children? 

People will already do this, but sure..and also shoot at them.

Allow them to "declare as human" and run for president?

I wouldn't require that they "declare as human"...but I would also shoot at them.

All of this, to me, is incidental. I do not extend courtesies or acknowledge rights for humans based upon the fact that we have hands or a carbon based biology. I do not extend or provide my support for either because human beings have lumps of meat in their heads. These may, someday, be huge issues for humanity..and I;d propose they;d be huge issues for the same people who now wonder whether or not homosexuals are people who deserve equal rights..whether migrants are people who deserve due process, or whether undesirables are people who deserve to live. That it strikes some of us -as- an issue just might be a condemnation of the human psyche.

[polymath257]

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.

On the contrary, the 'duck' theory is about the only possible theory of consciousness we can have. We look at things that are 'unquestionably' conscious, like human beings and see whether or not other things have the correlated properties. Those that do are conscious. That is an operational definition that seems perfectly good and consistent.

And I'm not saying that we currently have a description of consciousness at the level of neural activity. But I see no fundamental reason why it should be impossible. In fact, given enough time and energy, I think we can find the relevant correlates and solve the problem. And yes, those correlates would *be* an expplantion of consciousness and how 'dead' matter becomes conscious.

In a very similar way, we have the main answers for how 'dead matter' becomes alive: life is a complex collection of chemical reactions that allow homeostasis, reproduction, grown, etc.

Yes, when androids become conscious (by this definition), then they should be allowed all 'human' rights.  To do anything else would be, in my mind, immoral.

See, I *do* think our ability to wax eloquent about a sunset is a 'biological robot', i.e, us, taking in information and verbalizing that composition. The only difference I can see is one is silicon based and the other is carbon based.

[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?

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.

We aren’t talking about robots or machines though.  In this hypothetical we’re talking about humans; humans who are biologically identical; indiscernible from any other human walking the earth.  I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that I am able to recognize consciousness in a human being.  If that human tells me about the awe he feels when watching a sunset, or how hot cocoa just isn’t the same with out those tiny, smushy marshmallows, because that’s how his mom used to make it, then that person is conscious.  Yeah, robots can mimic consciousness, but AI is not the subject of the p-zombie thought experiment. Am I missing something here?

[The Grand Nudger]

Yeah, robots can mimic consciousness, but AI is not the subject of the p-zombie thought experiment.  Am I missing something here?

In a roundabout way, it is.  This is due to the fact that it isolates consciousness as an unquantifiable and posits that even though an entity might seem to all the world as though it were a conscious entity, it might be "just programming".  No ai will ever be anything more than "just programming"...ofc, we're "just programming" too.  Apparently, "just programming" can do a hell of alot.

Like the p-zombie contention, the underlying explanation is a subtle cognitive trap.

[Edwardo Piet]

I won't have to, 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. 

Merely asserting that I'm falling into a widespread misconception doesn't make it so. What ISN'T fucking misconception is that Dennett takes the same silly approach with consciousness as he does with free will, and it is analgous with the silliness of pantheism. It ISN'T purifying a concept and stripping it of its folk psychological baggage, it's talking about something else together.

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 doesn't explain consciousness, he explains how consciousness works and then pretends that a hard problem doesn't remain. And he pretends it doesn't remain by not fucking addressing the hard problem.

Eliminativism seeks a more accurate definition (and or description) of consciousness.

You don't describe something by eliminating it.

He doesn't just eliminate consciousness, he redefines it altogether. This isn't like an atheist eliminating the silly notion of God, this is like a silliness pantheist eliminating the standard definition and then deciding that since the universe exists let's just call that "God".

Addressing something else altogether is addressing something else altogether. Yes brain states exist but so does the universe. And calling something other than consciousness consciousness just because it exists is as silly as calling the universe God just because the universe exists. 

Current and traditional ones are, in the view of that position, folklore. 

Oh for fuck's sake. How many more times... tradtionial views on how consciousness works is folklore. But that is NOT the same as traditional views on what consciousness is being folklore. The fact that we experience something is what consciousness is. CONSCIOUSNESS IS FUCKING CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE. PERIOD. EXPLAINING THAT CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE DOESN'T WORK HOW WE THINK IT DOES DOESN'T MEAN THAT CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE IS NOT THE CORRECT FUCKING DEFINITION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. IF YOU ADDRESS SOMETHING OTHER THAN CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE YOU'RE NOT FUCKING ADDRESSING CONSCIOUSNESS. PERIOD. NUMBNUTS.

[LadyForCamus]

Whoa. Screaming.

[Angrboda]

Whoa.  Screaming.

His inner-fundamentalist is peeking through.

[Edwardo Piet]

I'm not having a debate with you. 

More horseshit.

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......

And I'm telling you that merely asserting that I'm not understanding him correctly doesn't make it so. I understand his viewpoint 1000 times more clearly than you do, and the fact that I don't agree with it doesn't mean otherwise. It's BECAUSE I understand it that I don't agree with it.

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Whoa.  Screaming.

No lol. Capslock.

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Whoa.  Screaming.

His inner-fundamentalist is peeking through.

Says someone who doesn't understand modal logic. But then, you're in good company... Khem doesn't understand it either.

Just so ya know, hyperbole and capslock doesn't equate fundamentalism. I thought maybe if I make the text real big some of it will actually go into his dense little brain. All he fucking does is strawman people.

[The Grand Nudger]

Merely asserting that I'm falling into a widespread misconception doesn't make it so. What ISN'T fucking misconception is that Dennett takes the same silly approach with consciousness as he does with free will, and it is analgous with the silliness of pantheism. It ISN'T purifying a concept and stripping it of its folk psychological baggage, it's talking about something else together.

He's pretty sure that consciousness -is- "something else" altogether, with respect to the conceptions of both consciousness and the free will he discusses.  

He doesn't explain consciousness, he explains how consciousness works and then pretends that a hard problem doesn't remain. And he pretends it doesn't remain by not fucking addressing the hard problem.

If someone explains to you how a light bulb works, they have explained light bulbs to you.  Now, you could posit that the light doesn't actually come from any of the described workings..but you'll still have had light bulbs explained to you all the same. You could, conversely, posit that it works some other way (that would be the less petulant option, I think we'd both agree)..but even there your objection would be to the description of operation, not to the fact that they didn;t even make the attempt.

He doesn't think there's a hard problem. Why do you think that there's a hard problem?    What do you think the hard problem is, or is supposed to be?  As a point of interest, he considers the hard problem folklore, a problem that existed only because of an inability to reconcile the operation of the body with it's interface with the spirit who was that singular little man in the head experiencing things, and of not fully considering what was being proposed in positing that such a hard question existed. In the view of people who share his broad position on this issue, consciousness is just as functionally definable as any other aspect -of- consciousness. It is, in their view, the aggregate of all of the other functinally definable explanations that will provide the explanation for the combined function (or even side effect) that we call consciousness.

You don't describe something by eliminating it.

If some x in the description isn't actually in the thing being described, it's probably best to remove it from the description.  

Says someone who doesn't understand modal logic. But then, you're in good company... Khem doesn't understand it either.

I drink milk straight from the jug, with my mouth, at midnight...... too.  You're really just missing all the worst things about me here, Ham.

[robvalue]

I don't subscribe to the idea that "robots can't be conscious". I think that any scientific definition for what it means for an entity to be conscious could apply to a robot, in theory. The only way it couldn't is to insist that it's some purely organic phenomenon. I don't know why there is a need to do that, but if you do so, then of course robots "can't be conscious"; but you haven't actually said anything.

I think it's more of an emotional reaction/argument, personally.