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Caledonian2 comments on Zombies! Zombies? - Less Wrong
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You seem to be missing the point, Richard. Eliezer isn't concerned with the "zombie world" so much as the very idea of "consciousness" that the zombie thought experiment presupposes.
Let's make this really, really simple:
Various entities have asserted the existence of a phenomenon that cannot be examined by any physical test and that has no effect on any physical process; they claim to have direct experience of this phenomenon.
However, the entities making the proclamation are physical, as are the means by which they make the proclamation. If the asserted phenomenon really couldn't affect physical systems, they could have no experience of it at all.
By their own claims, they can possess no knowledge about the thing they're making the claims about. Whatever experiences they may be experiencing, they are necessarily wrong about the specific assertions they're making about them.
The contradiction is that Chalmers is a physical being claiming to possess knowledge that he claims cannot be derived by physical beings.
To put it even more simply:
In Eliezer's zombie world, the zombies have consciousness (and therefore are not zombies), because they are in no physical way different from us.
The assumed priors make zombies impossible for Eliezer, and give Chalmers and Richard no way of actually knowing if the zombies in Zombie World are really zombies, other than that Chalmers and Richard both say that they are zombies.
My question to Richard (should he ever come back, I'm two years late after all) is this: how do you know you aren't a zombie?