On 19 Jan 2014, at 20:35, Jason Resch wrote:
On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 11:38 AM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 19 Jan 2014, at 03:39, LizR wrote:
It would seem that "sufficiently advanced technology" will
eventually be able to detect all the neural correlates of
consciousness.
Betting on some theory. Betting on some substitution level. Beware
the charlatan.
Maybe a p-zombie should be defined as something that has the neural
correlates of consciousness but is still somehow not conscious.
Yes. Good idea.
Or that there ain't no such animal.
We can logically conceive them. Imagine a dead corpse. You can
easily conceive that he is not conscious. Now, animate the dead
corpse so that it behaves like he was alive, but keep conceiving
that it is unconscious, a bit like an actor in a movie, except it
interacts "relevantly" with you.
There is no flagrant contradiction. And that is all you need to
conceive them logically, without choosing any theory in particular.
Now, in some theory, that can become contradictory, or having an
infinitesimal plausiblity.
You can conceive zombie, like you can conceive Santa Klaus.
No need to believe in them, nor even in their plausibility to be
conceivable.
My problem with this though is if a zombie is physically
indistinguishable, then all the same information content exists in
the zombie brain as the non-zombie brain. So is it not correct to
say the zombie knows something when it possesses all the right
information in its brain? If it knows it sees colors, knows it has
beliefs, knows it is conscious, but somehow is not conscious, this,
to me, seems like a contradiction.
I would say that this argument is a good argument for accepting the
comp link between knowledge and consciousness. I agree with you point,
as an argument that with comp (or weaker functionalism) the zombie
notion is close to non-sense.
But again, a priori, comp might be false, and a non comp believer
might conceive a knowing machine (in the sense of Theaetetus) being
unconscious. He would see that the machine believes p, and that p is
true, but still believe that the machine has no consciousness related
to that knowledge.
It makes no sense with comp, or weaker, but it makes sense in any
theory of mind which would posit an external factor as being needed
for consciousness (like matter for a materialist à-la Peter Jones, a
small primitive reality for someone stopping at step 7 in the UDA, or
a fairy tale notion of God, like the belief that everyone might be a
zombie until you are baptized, or something).
With logic alone, zombie are conceivable. With logic + arithmetic, it
is already more hard, with logic + arithmetic + comp (or perhaps just
rationalism), it becomes even harder. I agree.
Bruno
Jason
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