Rationality Quotes June 2013

Thomas

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

The theory that there is nothing but zombies runs into the difficulty of explaining why many of them would believe they are non-zombies. The standard p-zombie argument, that you can have qualia-less functional duplicates of non-zombies does not have that problem.

The standard p-zombie argument still has a problem explaining why p-zombies claim to be conscious. It leaves no role for consciousness in explaining why conscious humans talk of being conscious. It's a short road (for a philosopher) to then argue that consciousness plays no role, and we're back with consciousness as either an epiphenomenon or non-existent, and the problem of why -- especially when consciousness is conceded to exist, but cause nothing -- the non-conscious system claims to be conscious.

5Locaha13y

The theory that there is nothing but zombies runs into the much bigger difficulty of explaining to myself why I'm a zombie. When I poke myself with a needle, I sure as hell have the qualia of pain. And don't tell me it's an illusion - any illusion is a qualia by itself.