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, something is making us talk about consciousness. It is possible, I suppose, that the thing that makes us conscious is different from the thing that makes us talk about consciousness -- but there's certainly no evidence for it, and it's a damned silly idea in any case. So, as far as the naive 'zombies physically identical to humans' goes, if you don't consider the idea shot down, decapitated, plucked, gutted, and served for Christmas dinner, then that tells you more about the flaws in your criteria for drawing a conclusion than anything else.
There are some related questions worth exploring - like, for instance, once we figure out how consciousness works on a mechanical level, we can answer the question of whether or not it's possible to build a piece of software that reasonably impersonates a human being without having subjective experience. That's an interesting question. But the classical philosophical zombies are, frankly, stupid.
It is possible, I suppose, that the thing that makes us conscious is different from the thing that makes us talk about consciousness -- but there's certainly no evidence for it, and it's a damned silly idea in any case.
True, but it seems to me almost trivially true that explaining why we talk about consciousness makes a theory positing that we "are conscious" otiose. What other evidence is there? What other evidence could there be? The profession of belief in mysterious "raw experience" merely expresses a cognitive bias, the acceptan...
Today's post, Against Modal Logics was originally published on 27 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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