Caledonian2 comments on The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 April 2008 11:16PM

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Comment author: Caledonian2 06 April 2008 04:39:43PM -1 points [-]

but its far from clear to me how to fix it.

Well, the first thing we have to do is stop talking about the argument as though it were a matter of possibilities and probabilities: "it seems unlikely that", "I suspect that", "this is unlike what we would probably expect", et cetera, need to be abolished. The argument must be logically resolved, not merely trail off with stated positions that one side feels are "reasonable".

The p-zombie advocates are confusing physics-as-it-is and physics-as-we-understand. It is entirely possible that there are phenomena that our current understanding of physics and limited powers of observation might not include. But those hypothetical new things would be detected IF AND ONLY IF we noticed that the world did not act as our model said it should, given the available conditions. That would be the evidence we'd need to conclude that our model was missing some parts - perhaps our representation of the conditions were wrong and our rules were right, or perhaps our rules were inadequate.

If we had 'souls', 'consciousness', 'experiences', 'qualia', whatever we wish to call the hypothesized "new things", they would bring about changes in the world that the models that did not include them could not account for. The p-zombie advocates explicitly rule out this possibility: the p-zombie world acts precisely as ours does in all respects, not just the ways we can currently see.

Ergo, the properties that they postulate, that make p-zombies different from non-p-zombies, do not exist. Imagining a p-zombie as distinct from a 'conscious entity' is not possible, because the two things are the same. They have precisely the same properties, it's just that the labels that point to them are different.

Eliezer doesn't go far enough. Chalmers' idea of consciousness isn't just unnecessary, it's incoherent. It's not merely improbable, it is wrong. The people postulating effective epiphenomena aren't fiddling with trivia, they are logically contradictory.

If we cannot perceive a logical contradiction of this simplicity and directness, how do we expect to resolve subtler questions?