MarsColony_in10years comments on Zombies! Zombies? - Less Wrong

47 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 April 2008 09:55AM

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Comment author: MarsColony_in10years 22 March 2015 01:24:44PM 0 points [-]

I am asking about a situation in which we cannot ever distinguish the physical state of a lying human brain and a truthtelling human brain, but where we nevertheless had privileged access to our own mental states, and knew for sure that sometimes we lied when we made a genuine protest of innocence.

So, if we have knowledge that cannot possibly be observed in the physical world, then that proves that there is something else going on? Are you saying, for example, that we somehow know both the position and momentum of a particle with a precision greater than that allowed by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and that this gives rise to us either knowing that we are lying or knowing the we are telling the truth?

Well sure, if you start out with the given premise that breaks the laws of physics as we know them, of course you are going to conclude that there is something beyond "mere atoms". Suppose we know that the sky is actually green, even though all of physics says it should be blue. Clearly our map (aka the laws of physics as we currently know them) doesn't match the territory (the stuff that's causing our observations). But it doesn't seem to be necessary to resort to such wild hypotheses, because it is still quite plausible that consciousness emerges from "mere atoms". We just don't know the details of how yet, but we're working on it. If someday we have a full understanding of the brain, and there doesn't seem to be anything there to give rise to consciousness, then such wild speculation will be warranted. Today though, the substance dualism argument has no evidence behind it, and therefore an infinitesimally small probability of being true.