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hairyfigment comments on Zombies! Zombies? - Less Wrong
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But isn't it the point that Science specifically IS actually going around saying things about subjective consciousness? Namely that apparently it is a causal result of the way your cerebral neurons interact, to paraphrase Yudkowsky "Consciousness is made of atoms." You cannot take away consciousness and still have the same thing. Consciousness-testing is a one place function.
Quine's view of philosophy, which appears to be generally accepted here on LW, says that ultimately all philosophy is psychology, so is it not a better and more productive idea to ask "Why do we talk so passionately of this strange property called consciousness?"
This is not correct. Science is not making any claims about subjective consciousness. It makes claims about other meanings of the term "consciousness", but about subjective phenomenology it is silent or incoherent. For example, the claim "Consciousness is made of atoms" is just silliness. What type of atoms? Boron? Carbon? Hydrogen? And in virtue of what feature of atoms, is red the way it is?
If you read this mini-sequence and say you can imagine a Zombie Mary in this kind of detail, then I declare your intuition broken. By which I mean, we'd have to drop the topic or ask if one type of intuition has more reason to work (given what science tells us).