On 17 Mar 2010, at 13:47, HZ wrote:
I'm quite confused about the state of zombieness. If the requirement
for zombiehood is that it doesn't understand anything at all but it
behaves as if it does what makes us not zombies? How do we not we are
not? But more importantly, are there known cases of zombies? Perhaps a
silly question because it might be just a thought experiment but if
so, I wonder on what evidence one is so freely speaking about,
specially when connected to cognition for which we now (should) know
more. The questions seem related because either we don't know whether
we are zombies or one can solve the problem of zombie identification.
I guess I'm new in the zombieness business.
I know I am conscious, and I can doubt all content of my
consciousness, except this one, that I am conscious.
I cannot prove that I am conscious, neither to some others.
Dolls and sculptures are, with respect to what they represent, if
human in appearance sort of zombie.
Tomorrow, we may be able to put in a museum an artificial machine
imitating a humans which is sleeping, in a way that we may be confused
and believe it is a dreaming human being ...
The notion of zombie makes sense (logical sense). Its existence may
depend on the choice of theory.
With the axiom of comp, a counterfactually correct relation between
numbers define the channel through which consciousness flows (select
the consistent extensions). So with comp we could argue that as far as
we are bodies, we are zombies, but from our first person perspective
we never are.
But leaving the zombie definition and identification apart, I think
current science would/should see no difference between consciousness
and cognition, the former is an emergent property of the latter,
I would have said the contrary:
consciousness -> sensibility -> emotion -> cognition -> language ->
recognition -> self-consciousness -> ...
(and: number -> universal number -> consciousness -> ...)
Something like that, follows, I argue, from the assumption that we are
Turing emulable at some (necessarily unknown) level of description.
and
just as there are levels of cognition there are levels of
consciousness. Between the human being and other animals there is a
wide gradation of levels, it is not that any other animal lacks of
'qualia'. Perhaps there is an upper level defined by computational
limits and as such once reached that limit one just remains there, but
consciousness seems to depend on the complexity of the brain (size,
convolutions or whatever provides the full power) but not disconnected
to cognition. In this view only damaging the cognitive capacities of a
person would damage its 'qualia', while its 'qualia' could not get
damaged but by damaging the brain which will likewise damage the
cognitive capabilities. In other words, there seems to be no
cognition/consciousness duality as long as there is no brain/mind one.
The use of the term 'qualia' here looks like a remake of the mind/body
problem.
Qualia is the part of the mind consisting in the directly
apprehensible subjective experience. Typical examples are pain, seeing
red, smell, feeling something, ... It is roughly the non transitive
part of cognition.
The question here is not the question of the existence of degrees of
consciousness, but the existence of a link between a possible
variation of consciousness in presence of non causal perturbation
during a particular run of a brain or a machine.
If big blue wins a chess tournament without having used the register
344, no doubt big blue would have win in case the register 344 would
have been broken. Some people seems to believe that if big blue was
conscious in the first case, it could loose consciousness in the
second case. I don't think this is tenable when we assume that we are
Turing emulable.
The reason is that consciousness is not ascribable to any particular
implementation, but only to an abstract but precise infinity of
computations, already 'realized' in elementary arithmetic.
Bruno
On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 11:34 AM, Stathis Papaioannou
<stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
On 17 March 2010 05:29, Brent Meeker <meeke...@dslextreme.com> wrote:
I think this is a dubious argument based on our lack of
understanding of
qualia. Presumably one has many thoughts that do not result in
any overt
action. So if I lost a few neurons (which I do continuously) it
might mean
that there are some thoughts I don't have or some associations I
don't make,
so eventually I may "fade" to the level of consciousness of my
dog. Is my
dog a "partial zombie"?
It's certainly possible that qualia can fade without the subject
noticing, either because the change is slow and gradual or because
the
change fortuitously causes a cognitive deficit as well. But this not
what the fading qualia argument is about. The argument requires
consideration of a brain change which would cause an unequivocal
change in consciousness, such as a removal of the subject's occipital
lobes. If this happened, the subject would go completely blind: he
would be unable to describe anything placed in front of his eyes, and
he would report that he could not see anything at all. That's what it
means to go blind. But now consider the case where the occipital
lobes
are replaced with a black box that reproduces the I/O behaviour of
the
occipital lobes, but which is postulated to lack visual qualia. The
rest of the subject's brain is intact and is forced to behave exactly
as it would if the change had not been made, since it is receiving
normal inputs from the black box. So the subject will correctly
describe anything placed in front of him, and he will report that
everything looks perfectly normal. More than that, he will have an
appropriate emotional response to what he sees, be able to paint it
or
write poetry about it, make a working model of it from an image he
retains in his mind: whatever he would normally do if he saw
something. And yet, he would be a partial zombie: he would behave
exactly as if he had normal visual qualia while completely lacking
visual qualia. Now it is part of the definition of a full zombie that
it doesn't understand that it is blind, since a requirement for
zombiehood is that it doesn't understand anything at all, it just
behaves as if it does. But if the idea of qualia is meaningful at
all,
you would think that a sudden drastic change like going blind should
produce some realisation in a cognitively intact subject; otherwise
how do we know that we aren't blind now, and what reason would we
have
to prefer normal vision to zombie vision? The conclusion is that it
isn't possible to make a device that replicates brain function but
lacks qualia: either it is not possible to make such a device at all
because the brain is not computable, or if such a device could be
made
(even a magical one) then it would necessarily reproduce the qualia
as
well.
I think the question of whether there could be a philosophical
zombie is ill
posed because we don't know what is responsible for qualia. I
speculate
that they are tags of importance or value that get attached to
perceptions
so that they are stored in short term memory. Then, because
evolution
cannot redesign things, the same tags are used for internal
thoughts that
seem important enough to put in memory. If this is the case then
it might
be possible to design a robot which used a different method of
evaluating
experience for storage and it would not have qualia like humans -
but would
it have some other kind of qualia? Since we don't know what
qualia are in a
third person sense there seems to be no way to answer that.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
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