anonymous7 comments on Zombies! Zombies? - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: anonymous7 04 April 2008 04:14:14PM 0 points [-]

"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 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."

Does your brain assume/think it creates sensory experiences (or what people often call consciousness)?