Riothamus comments on Zombies Redacted - Less Wrong

33 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 July 2016 08:16PM

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Comment author: Riothamus 08 July 2016 08:21:33PM 0 points [-]

What do people in Chalmer's vein of belief think of the simulation argument?

If a person is plugged into an otherwise simulated reality, do all the simulations count as p-zombies, since they match all the input-output and lack-of-qualia criteria?

Comment author: gjm 08 July 2016 08:56:49PM -2 points [-]

Do they lack qualia? How accurate are these simulations meant to be?

Comment author: Riothamus 12 July 2016 03:23:59PM 0 points [-]

They are meant to be arbitrarily accurate, and so we would expect them to include qualia.

However, in the Chalmers vein consciousness is non-physical, which suggests it cannot be simulated through physical means. This yields a scenario very similar to the identical-yet-not-conscious p-zombie.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 14 July 2016 03:43:08PM *  -1 points [-]

They are meant to be arbitrarily accurate, and so we would expect them to include qualia.

Whose "we"? They are only mean to be functional (input-output) duplicates, and a large chunk of the problem of qualiia is that qualia are not in any remotely obvious way functions.

However, in the Chalmers vein consciousness is non-physical, which suggests it cannot be simulated through physical means.

If you think consciousness is non physical , you would think the sims are probably zombies. You would also think that if you are a physicalist but not a computationalist. Physicalism does not guarantee anything about the nature of computational simulations.

Chalmers actual position is that consciousness supervenes on certain kinds of information processing, so that a sufficiently detailed simulation would be conscious: he's one of the "we".

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 14 July 2016 03:35:26PM -1 points [-]

They don't exactly count as p-zombie, since they are functional simulations, not atom-by-atom duplicates. I call such zombies c-zombies, for computational zombies.