If there was a repository of philosophical work along those lines - not concerned with defending basic ideas like anti-zombieism, but with accepting those basic ideas and moving on to challenge more difficult quests of naturalism and cognitive reductionism - then that, I might well be interested in reading. But I don't know who, besides a few heroes, would be able to compile such a repository - who else would see a modal logic as an obvious bounce-off-the-mystery.
One of the facts of modern philosophy is that zombieism has not been resolved in a satisfactory manner. You can't simply claim that one idea is the most accurate one and run with it, because then you're using an intermediate argument of dubious provenance. You could avoid the question altogether, particularly in AI design: If two programs have identical outputs across the entire range of meaningful input, then it cannot be the case that one is self-aware and the other is not.
It certainly has been resolved. At least to the degree that anyone with a lick of sense can look at the pro-zombie arguments and say 'that is blatantly unphysical nonsense.' We can talk about consciousness. The atoms that make up my fingers can interact with the atoms that make up my nervous system, which can in turn, brain, etc, etc, and this unbroken causal chain make me talk about feeling conscious inside, which I do. We may not know how it works computationally, but we do know that it's something in the brain that's doing it. Or, at least, somet...
Today's post, Against Modal Logics was originally published on 27 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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