Cyan2 comments on Zombies! Zombies? - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: Cyan2 05 April 2008 02:18:45AM 1 point [-]

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 Chalmers' book has meaning, and its arguments convince. In this situation, the meaning obviously comes from me. Zombie/Outer Chalmers' book is not the outcome of such a process, so I'm not convinced that the meaning can sensibly be located where you put it.

And "expend the energy" is not just a figure of speech here -- my efforts will increase entropy in a fashion related to the amount of information I incorporate into my brain structure.