Stephen comments on Zombies! Zombies? - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: Stephen 05 April 2008 02:48:27AM 2 points [-]

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. Because we understand temperature, it is obvious to us that imagining our world exactly as it is except without temperature is nonsensical. To make an even starker example, it would be like saying there are two identical universes that contain five things, but in one of the universes they don't have the property of fiveness. Maybe if we understood in what way consciousness is a descriptor of physical systems, we would see that our world exactly as it is except without consciousness is a non-sequitur in the same way.