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PhilGoetz comments on The Zombie Preacher of Somerset - Less Wrong
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Comments (31)
I think that if this happened, the p-zombie wouldn't claim to be a p-zombie. The p-zombie would claim to be just like you and me. So something different must have happened to Browne. (Also, he wasn't injured.)
I have the article. How can I send it to you?
Send to yvain314@hotmail.com , and thank you much.
Is there a word for a person without consciousness who functions perfectly normally except for correctly admitting he lacks consciousness? I thought p-zombie was broad enough to cover both that and Chalmers-type zombies.
Daniel Dennett
(Well, at least by the ordinary definition of consciousness, not the process he believes consciousness really is)
If such a word existed, what use would it be? The assumptions underlying these two types of zombie seem very different to me. The dualistic explanation of consciousness creates a necessary "observational barrier" between the mind and the brain. If this barrier didn't exist, the proposition wouldn't really be dualism, it would be "some as-yet-undiscovered physical law". So a zombie under this interpretation can't act any differently due to their zombieness, because doing so would violate the duality assumption.
Treating Browne as a zombie, it's clear that his lack of qualia carries over into the observable, empirical world in a systematic way, which seems to imply that we could in theory trace the neurological origin of his behavior and arrive at a purely materialistic explanation of "zombiehood".
The problem being that its unclear that this materialistic notion of zombiehood does any justice to the Chalmerian notion of a zombie.
The notion that this could indeed qualify as a valid form of zombiehood arises if one views the priest's transformation as involving an absence of qualia; but there is no indication that the priest lacks qualia. The priest certainly appears to lack affect, but this is not the same as an absence of qualia. There are phenomenal properties associated with affective (emotional) states; but like all qualia, these would seem epiphenomenal, being neither necessary nor perhaps sufficient for the existence of affective states (which be characterised in (complex) functional terms).
To show that the priest was denuded of qualia, it would be necessary to show that, for example, when viewing a rose, the priest no longer had an occurent experience of phenomenal red. But, as noted by Andrew and Ciphergoth, if we assume a dualistic view of qualia, demonstrating this loss of qualia is just not possible. Zombies claim not to be zombies and therefore have no authority on their zombie-hood. By virtue of the same lack of empirical verifiability for zombie-hood, any claim by the priest to be a zombie would likewise lack authority.
An interesting further consequence is that, on some views (notably not the view taken by Chalmers), non-zombies (presumably, all of us) cannot authoritatively claim that they are actually conscious.
Part of the point I think Browne's case demonstrates is that most p-zombie discussions contains a false dichotomy between the materialist view that qualia are so tightly linked to normal human thought that it's impossible to have one without the other, and the epiphenomenalist view that qualia are so loosely linked to human thought that a human without qualia would be exactly the same.
Eliezer and the other materialists' attack on the epiphenomenalist position is that its assertion that humans would even talk about qualia if they lacked qualia is absurd. This is a good argument.
But Browne suggests a more middle-of-the-line position: that qualia are not necessary for normal human activity, but that it is still possible to notice their absence in exactly the way one would expect. This preserves the intuitive notion that qualia are different from simple processing, and lacks the vulnerability of Chalmers' theory.
Of course, it just makes what qualia actually are more mysterious than ever. But no one ever said that would be easy.
Right.
"Is there a word for a person without consciousness who functions perfectly normally except for correctly admitting he lacks consciousness?"
'Self-contradictory' is the word you're looking for.
I don't think 'Self-contradictory' properly identifies a class of people without consciousness. Its meaning is broader, at least.