All pretty much in prior agreement here (though no, I haven't stated "the listener caught in the act of listening" quite so eloquently either).

Personally I just go by the priori that zombies are simply not logically possible. Postulating that they are "seems" to lead to quite contrived and/or internally inconsistent scenarios, as you lay out.

Heterophenomenology!

Sorry, I thought it needed saying.

A lesser mortal would simply fail to see the implications, or refuse to face them, or rationalize a reason it wasn't so.

But that's precisely what he's done, not with the implications, but the implications of the implications. He's simply denied them.

But, yes, on a core level, the sane thing to do when you see the conclusion of the zombie argument, is to say "That can't possibly be right" and start looking for a flaw.

No, what we say is "That argument is wrong". We've already found the flaw. Our emotional response is irrelevant - ... (read more)

To put it even more simply:

When we find a logical contradiction in an argument, we first check to make sure that we haven't made any errors in derivation. If not, then we conclude that there is a problem with the assumptions we started the argument with, and begin trying to generate ways to test those assumptions.

People like Chalmers are psychologically incapable of rejecting the idea that there is something 'special' amount minds. They cannot doubt that assumption! And so they do not look for ways to test it, because bringing an assertion into question... (read more)

Your brain assumes that you have qualia Actually, currently my brain isn't particularly interested in the concepts some people call "qualia"; it certainly doesn't assume it has them. If you got the idea that it did because of discussions it participated in in the past, please update your cache: This doesn't hold for my present-brain.

If qualia-concepts are shown in some point in the future to be useful in understanding the real world, i.e. specify a compact border around a high-density region of thingspace, my brain will likely become interested i... (read more)

People might find this site interesting:

http://www.macrovu.com/CCTGeneralInfo.html

Whenever I come across this subject, I tend to leave it with a feeling of, "not enough information". It is a good thing AI designers only need to worry about creating physical properties.

Hmm. So, on the Chalmers view, when the AI concludes that it has no way of knowing whether it is epiphenomenally conscious and abandons the belief that it is mysteriously so, would the consciousness 'evaporate,' or are there qualia of not being aware of any qualia? It seems that Chalmers might say that in non-zombie worlds the epiphenomenal-AI would still be conscious of various things (like the 'redness' of red) but just not conscious of its consciousness. [Given our 'bridging laws' the epiphenomenal self can only think "cogito ergo sum" when the physical self does.]

A sidepoint, this, but I believe your etymology for "n'shama" is wrong. It is related to the word for "breath", not "hear". The root for "hear" contains an ayin, which n'shama does not.

Richard,

So what, in our world, would be the subjective experience of the AI in Eliezer's example when it corrects its internal make-up such that it no longer performs computations and makes utterances as though it was aware of qualia?

That is, Zombie (or 'Outer') Chalmers doesn't actually conclude anything, because his utterances are meaningless.

You have a curious definition of "conclude" and "meaningless"... or possibly "actually conclude" and "actually meaningless". If Outer/Zombie Chalmers convinces me, Conscious Cyan (haha), that property dualism is correct (something no chirping bird could manage), whence came the meaning?

"However, this will necessarily mean that they're shown to refer to things that are actually measurable."

Things that cannot be measured can still be very important, especially in regard to ethics. One may claim for example that it is ok to torture philosophical zombies, since after all they aren't "really" experiencing any pain. If it could be shown that I'm the only conscious person in this world and everybody else are p-zombies, then I could morally kill and torture people for my own pleasure.

"Actually, currently my brain isn't p... (read more)

mtraven, I don't think that really counts as an alternative to reductionism. We just say "Squareness is in the map, not the ..." &c.

I think that Leibnitz's monadology holds that this world actually contains a zombie master, which we call god, who does his manipulation through careful set-up of the initial conditions. This view doesn't seem to be very compelling to most contemporary philosophers. I'm also of the impression that it wasn't considered plausible in his time and that many people doubt that he really believed it.

With respect to "argument from career impact", it seems highly plausible to me that within many academic circles one best advances a career precisely by making outlandish claims, the more outlandish the better, and then by defending them as well as one can.

It seems to me that Chalmers does not just believe in epiphenomenal consciousness. Chalmers posits a non-physical concept of "direct access" and a non-physical notion of "having an experience." I can't see how one can give an account of "direct access" and "having an experience" as dual properties. But if "direct access" and "having an experience" are given physical accounts then the whole argument for epiphenomenalism falls apart; a physical system cannot gain "direct access" because ph... (read more)

Cyan - think of the million monkeys at typewriters eventually outputting a replica of Chalmers' book. The monkeys obviously haven't given an argument. There's just an item there that you are capable of projecting a meaningful interpretation onto. But the meaning obviously comes from you, not the monkeys.

Credulous - I'm not entirely sure what you're asking. I think an agent could still have qualia without believing that this is so on a theoretical level. (Dennett springs to mind!) But I guess if you tinkered with the internal computational processes enough,... (read more)

Richard - Question: If consciousness is necessary for meaning, and I am a zombie, can I finally be free of asserting philosophical statements when I don't intend to? Can a zombie be a non-self-defeating scientismist?

Things that cannot be measured can still be very important, especially in regard to ethics. One may claim for example that it is ok to torture philosophical zombies, since after all they aren't "really" experiencing any pain. If it could be shown that I'm the only conscious person in this world and everybody else are p-zombies, then I could morally kill and torture people for my own pleasure. For there to be a possibility that this "could be shown", even in principle, there would have to be some kind of measurable difference between a p... (read more)

Eliezer's argument could have been made in a much simpler way; there is no difference between pointing to a human being and a zombie each saying, "I am conscious," and pointing to a human being and a zombie each saying, "I see the color red," or "I plan to post this comment on the blog to see how people respond."

In other words, the causally closed process that results in the words "I see the color red," is not based in any way on the color red, just as it is not based on consciousness. And the causally closed process... (read more)

Sebastian, I'll try. Is there some property E such that: (1) an entity without E can have identical outward behavior to an entity with E (but possibly different physical structure); and (2) you assign intrinsic value to at least some entities with E, but none without it? If so, do you have property E?

Bstark: seconded

Sebastian Hagen: You don't need a measurable difference between a p-zombie and a "conscious" entity. At least in principle you can also start from priors, not update except regarding your own consciousness, and estimate the probabilities, given that you are conscious, that you inhabit a world where a given entity is a zombie. In Chalmers' framework you ask "given that there exist bridging laws between this experience here now and this configuration of atoms, what is the probability that there are more general bridging law... (read more)

"For there to be a possibility that this "could be shown", even in principle, there would have to be some kind of measurable difference between a p-zombie and a "conscious" entity. In worlds where it is impossible to measure a difference in principle, it shouldn't have any impact on what's the correct action to take, for any sane utility function."

Thank you. It doesn't seem to me that zombies are impossible. But I'm rather confused as to why anyone should care at a practical level, even if whatever "consciousness" is supposed to mean in this discussion is supposed to be morally salient.

If the above comment doesn't clarify it, I think that our basic problem here is still that we don't know how to properly use Aumann Agreement without falling into Majoritarianism. No-one would, after thinking through the arguments, take seriously zombies, or it seems to me most recent claims of eminent philosophers, without an argument from authority behind them, but given the argument from authority its natural to try to strengthen the argument with "he could have meant" claims or simply accept it as "profound". Because some people w... (read more)

"In worlds where it is impossible to measure a difference in principle, it shouldn't have any impact on what's the correct action to take, for any sane utility function."

Wrong, since it may be possible to estimate the probability of being in a p-zombie world, or more generally the probability that such a difference exists.

This whole argument will dissolve into air once the brain is really understood. It's like the phlogiston issue and all the other weird stuff readers of this site know about.

Z M Davis - my point is that there are versions of non-reductionism or weak reductionism that do not depend on or imply supernatural forces. That's the sort I'm interested in, anyway. The zombie argument is a paradigm of how not to explore the conceptual space between strict reductionism and outright religious dualism.

I'll say again that the zombie argument is inane...and the fact that people who expound it have fame and tenure indicates that the quarks are cruel, arbitrary, and capricious.

I'd come at it from a different direction. Reality is defined by interaction. A real something that doesn't interact at all, ever, is a straightforward contradiction in terms.

From reading your article, it seems that the flaw of epiphenomenalism goes beyond what you have stated, Eliezer. The epiphenomenalist position is that, say, a zombie sensation ZS can cause a zombie belief, ZB, while ZS causes MS, the mental sensation, and ZB causes MB, the mental belief. There is supposed to be no relation between MS and MB. Surely then, this means that all beliefs, language and logic in the mental universe, or whatever it is, are both unjustified and unjustifiable. The connection normally assumed in justifying things is necessarily absent... (read more)

While I don't necessarily endorse epiphenomenalism, I think there may exist an argument in favor of it that has not yet been discussed in this thread. Namely, if we don't understand consciousness and consciousness affects behavior then we should not be able to predict behavior. So it seems like we're forced to choose between:

a) consciousness has no effect on behavior (epiphenomenalism)

or

b) a completely detailed simulation of a person based on currently known physics would fail to behave the same as the actual person

Both seem at least somewhat surprising. (... (read more)

I haven't read Chalmers book, so I am just going by what I read here, but at the beginning of the post you promise to show the zombie world as logically impossible, but never deliver; you show that it is improbable enough to be perhaps be considered practically impossible, but since we are just dealing with a "thought experiment," that is irrelevant. For example, I do not think that everyone around me is a zombie. In fact, I'd bet all the money I have that they aren't. But I still don't KNOW they aren't, the way I KNOW that I am not.

On another no... (read more)

Imagine a minimally complete physical duplicate of our cosmos. (So, e.g., the earth travels round the sun consistent with Keplar's laws, etc.) But: There's no gravity.

* That-which-we-name "consciousness" happens within physics, in a way not yet understood, just like what happened the last three thousand times humanity ran into something mysterious.

not yet understood? Is your position that there's a mathematical or physical discovery waiting out there, that will cause you, me, Chalmers, and everyone else to slap our heads and say, "of course, that's what the answer is! We should have realized it all along!"

Question for all: How do you apply Occam's Razor to cases where there are two competing hypo... (read more)

"You said this is a physical law without material consequences, but I define physical laws as things that have material consequences!

If the law has no material consequences, it doesn't matter whether we assert it to be true or false. The two states are identical in every way. Asserting that the law is true, or false, is therefore incorrect. It is neither; it is incoherent and thus can not be true or false.

This is not a matter of personal definition.

"not yet understood? Is your position that there's a mathematical or physical discovery waiting out there, that will cause you, me, Chalmers, and everyone else to slap our heads and say, 'of course, that's what the answer is! We should have realized it all along!'"

I would actually suppose something like this. I found this post to be a compelling knockdown of property dualism, and substance dualism is untenable until we (say) observe the pineal gland disobeying the laws of physics because it's being pushed on by the soul. Practically the only alte... (read more)

I must say I found this rather convincing (but I might just be confirmation biased). Also, I have a question on the topic: The zombiists assume that the universe U of existing things is split into two exclusive parts, physical things P and epiphenomenal things E. The physical things P probably develop something like P(t+1)=f(P(t),noise), as we have defined that E does not influence P. But what does E develop like? Is it E(t+1)=f(P(t)[,noise]), or is it E(t+1)=f(P(t),E(t)[,noise])? I have somehow always assumed the first, but I do not remember having read it spellt out so unmistakeably.

Stephen:

So it seems like we're forced to choose between: a) consciousness has no effect on behavior (epiphenomenalism) or b) a completely detailed simulation of a person based on currently known physics would fail to behave the same as the actual person

c) a completely detailed simulation of a person would behave like the actual person, and have "consciousness", which actually refers to some complex physical property.

Cyan - think of the million monkeys at typewriters eventually outputting a replica of Chalmers' book. The monkeys obviously haven't given an argument. There's just an item there that you are capable of projecting a meaningful interpretation onto. But the meaning obviously comes from you, not the monkeys.

Suppose I expend the energy to search through the monkeys' output, discarding random strings and the large set of near-copies of Chalmers' book that degenerate into gibberish or have Shakespeare spliced into to the middle. I decide that the string that is... (read more)

Nick,

Thanks for your comment. If I understand correctly, by c) you are suggesting that consciousness is something like temperature or pressure, a property of physical systems, but one which you don't need to know about if you are doing a completely detailed simulation. I was lumping this in with epiphenomenalism, since in that case, consciousness does not affect physical systems, it is a descriptor of them. However, I guess the key point is that one can subscribe to epiphenomenalism in this sense without concluding that zombies are logically possible. Beca... (read more)

Apart from Occams Razor (multiplying entities beyond necessity) and Bayesianism (arguably low prior and no observation possible), how about the identity of indiscernibles:
Anything inconsequential is indiscernible from anything that does not exist at all, therefore inconsequental equals nonexistent.

Admittedly, zombiism is not really irresistibly falsifiable... but that's only yet another reason to be sceptical about it! There are gazillions of that kind of theory floating around in the observational vacuum. You can pick any one of those, if you want to ind... (read more)

I happened to write an article about this the other day (click my name to read it), but from a different vantage point. I am enjoying your article(still reading it!)

Mitchell: Very interesting. But, in what sense is the brain not already a distributed simulation?

Nick, that final step leads to a quantum-mind theory in which the Cartesian theater of consciousness is a single irreducible tensor factor of very high dimension. The notion may make more sense if you look at a paper like this. Physical reality is modelled as a "quantum causal history" in which one has a partially ordered set of events, each event being characterized by a Hilbert space and a state therein. The partial order gives you causality, but if you take a spacelike cross-section of the history, it need not reduce to a set of spatially loca... (read more)

Richard,
is he burden of proof always upon the person proposing that something is impossible when it looks like it might be possible? You are after all trying to use this item to prove something and it is a scenario constructed carefully by your own side of the argument to be almost impossible to disprove. I would think you carry the burden of showing that it is extremely likely to be ideally conceivable - something I think you are very far from doing because of more or less the sort of argument made in the main article above.

2) That is, it's "miracul... (read more)

What bothers me is that from reading the Chalmers quotes, it seems like he assumes that this world is the world with the listener, the conscious people. Because 'this' world and the zombie world are physically indistinguishable from one another, then this world could be equally likely to be the zombie world and the other world is full of conscious people.

Or better yet of course, the argument is absurd and there is no external part that is what we call 'consciousness'.

that would seem to imply that if I don't believe in qualia that I can kill and torture people... cripes.... sounds a bit like the "if there was no god we could all do anything" argument.

Not really. If something doesn't feel pain, or pleasure, or anything else, it's not a moral object.

To put it much more briefly, under the Wesley Salmon definition of "explanation" the epiphenomenal picture is simply not an explanation of consciousness.

There, pretty as a picture.

Someone e-mailed me a pointer to these discussions. I'm in the middle of four weeks on the road at conferences, so just a quick comment. It seems to me that although you present your arguments as arguments against the thesis (Z) that zombies are logically possible, they're really arguments against the thesis (E) that consciousness plays no causal role. Of course thesis E, epiphenomenalism, is a much easier target. This would be a legitimate strategy if thesis Z entails thesis E, as you appear to assume, but this is incorrect. I endorse Z, but I don't endorse E: see my discussion in "Consciousness and its Place in Nature", especially the discussion of interactionism (type-D dualism) and Russellian monism (type-F monism). I think that the correct conclusion of zombie-style arguments is the disjunction of the type-D, type-E, and type-F views, and I certainly don't favor the type-E view (epiphenomenalism) over the others. Unlike you, I don't think there are any watertight arguments against it, but if you're right that there are, then that just means that the conclusion of the argument should be narrowed to the other two views. Of course there's a lot more to be said about these issues, and the project of finding good arguments against Z is a worthwhile one, but I think that such an argument requires more than you've given us here.

It seems to me that although you present your arguments as arguments against the thesis (Z) that zombies are logically possible, they're really arguments against the thesis (E) that consciousness plays no causal role. Of course thesis E, epiphenomenalism, is a much easier target. This would be a legitimate strategy if thesis Z entails thesis E, as you appear to assume, but this is incorrect.

If 'consciousness' plays a causal role, then we cannot imagine a world in which it is removed, yet everything behaves precisely as it did when it was present.

In that ... (read more)

The link under "Bayesian" is wrong: it points to yudowsky.net instead of yudkowsky.net

Thanks for removing my post from earlier. It was pure spill over from a debate in the ImmInst forums: I linked to this post ready to brawl and spoke crassly, vulgarly and abominably.
Me sorry.
:-(

Wait! It's still there. Thought it was deleted. Guess there are 2 pages of comments.
For the love of all that is good in the world, please expunge it forever! :-)

Paul

Hi. Eliezer, very interesting post - I have been thinking along the same lines against epiphenomenalism, though I don't think the point is as clear as you thought.

Richard wrote:
"(2) It's misleading to say it's "miraculous" (on the property dualist view) that our qualia line up so neatly with the physical world. There's a natural law which guarantees this, after all. So it's no more miraculous than any other logically contingent nomic necessity (e.g. the constants in our physical laws). That is, it's "miraculous" in the same sense... (read more)

Eliezer, why do you give more attention to Chalmers than to Professor Koch of Caltech?

Chalmers is an enormously more adept philosopher than Koch. I don't even understand this question.

Well, a lot of what you're doing here regarding consciousness and "zombies" seems to me like philosophy-of-the-gaps. If I'm not mistaken, Prof. Koch and his peers are the most literate (and adept) on where and how empirically derived evidence is filling in these gaps. I confess I'm not reading these ginormous posts from you carefully -but I'm curious why (as far as I can tell) you're not mucking around with cutting edge empiricism on consciousness with the same glee Robin's mucking around with cutting edge empiricism on behavioral economics, decision theory, etc.

To which I say: Given the two worlds and the otherwise identical twins populating them, what makes you think they are the zombies?

Well, I just can't comprehend why this zombie fuss might have any practical consequences for AGI (other that supporting/disproving "soulless machine" cliche). Either it's epiphenomenal, or not - there will be neuronal correlates of "mysterious listener". Let philosophers think should it always listen, or not, and just act as it should.

Huh. I guess I got lucky then.

Last year, I had a very strange dream, whose details I have unfortunately forgotten. It had a plot which involved some mysteries needing explanations, and I remember feeling tension as details about whatever was happening accumulated and the resolution to the various questions the plot had posed seemed to be about to be resolved.

But then, the story tried to execute a twist. It failed miserably; I only remember vaguely, something incredibly lazy along the lines of some characters having had psychic powers all along or the such.... (read more)

Late note, and apologies if this is obvious: could Chalmers' missing piece be that his epiphenomenal-Chalmers is actually the model Chalmers has of himself? Ie. not that dual-Chalmers causes a physical effect, or that they're causally distinct, but that the physics of physical-Chalmers' cognition cause the epiphenomenal-Chalmers-model to be created in Chalmers' physical head? And that that's the reason physical-Chalmers talks about consciousness? (Which would make zombieChalmers correct, of course) And that it looks like there'd be an epiChalmers because C... (read more)

Minor nitpick - נְשָׁמָה (soul) is not related to לִשְׁמוֹעַ (to hear) - note the difference in the last (left-most) characters.

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/47

If I understand correctly, Yudkowsky finds philosophical zombies to be implausible, as it would require consciousness to have no causal influence on reality, which Yudkowsky seems to believe entails that if there are philosophical zombies, it’s purely coincidental that accurate discussions of consciousness are done by those who are conscious, which is very improbable and thus philosophical zombies are very implausible. This reasoning seems flawed, as discussing and thinking about consciousness could cause consciousness to exist, but this consciousness would have no effect on anything else. For philosophical zombies to exist, thinking about consciousness could only bring about consciousness in certain substrates.

The said Chalmersian theory postulates multiple unexplained complex miracles. This drives down its prior probability, by the conjunction rule of probability and Occam's Razor. It is therefore dominated by at least two theories which postulate fewer miracles, namely:

Substance dualism: There is a stuff of consciousness which is not yet understood, an extraordinary super-physical stuff that visibly affects our world; and this stuff is what makes us talk about consciousness.

Not-quite-faith-based reductionism: That-which-we-nam

I think of consciousness more like the heat extruded from the motor. The motor does the work and consciousness is a product of the motor. If the motor accelerates then the consciousness will think it has caused the acceleration, even if it did not. Modern neuroscience hints at the fact that decisions are made before we are conscious of them.

I find it likely you will never read this, or probably anyone else on this very old thread, but I will give a statement that you may like, since I believe you are actually correct at framing this issue:

Firstly, I think zombies are unavoidable unless you are a flat-out dualist. And that Chalmers framing this thing called the Hard Problem, was a way of his own question being answered. That also means you can't really say the Hard Problem is answerable from his framing either with zombies being the true point in it. It's already set up for failure via a categ... (read more)