On 14 February 2015 at 18:27, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2/13/2015 10:05 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>> You mean a conscious being cannot have a zombie equivalent, i.e. a being >> that behaves the same but is not conscious. In other words the >> philosophical zombie is impossible: if a being is conscious then there can >> be no other being that behaves the same but is not conscious. Consciousness >> (nomologically?) entails some difference in behavior. Right? > > > Yes; but although this means there is a difference in behaviour between > conscious and non-conscious beings, it does not provide a test for > consciousness. > > > But why not? Because we can't know what the difference is? We can guess that someone who behaves like us is conscious if we know zombies are impossible, but we probably guessed that anyway even if we thought zombies were possible. Faced with a more alien system, such as a bacterium, the question is whether it is conscious or not, not whether it is a zombie. For to claim that a bacterium is a zombie is to claim that there are (or possibly are) conscious bacteria and other bacteria that act just like the conscious bacteria but are not conscious. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
