What is it that you feel/see/touch/taste/think/etc. instead of simply acting?
Why do you group together sense perceptions (which I have) with thoughts (which I have), and call them qualia (which I don't have)?
Why is there a "you" you experience, instead of mere rote action?
How are these different?
We label these sorts of things that we use to distinguish between empty existence and our own subjective (personally observed/felt) experience.
How can existence be "empty"? Is subjective experience just sense perception? Because sense perception doesn't seem like it warrants all this mysteriousness.
The thing about humans that distinguish them from P-zombies.
That's odd. I thought the sequence on P-zombies made it pretty clear that they don't exist. Why do we need to be distinguished from confused, impossible thought experiments?
Perhaps you simply do not have qualia or subjective experience. Some people do not have visual mental imagery, strange though that may seem to those of us who do. Similarly, maybe some people do not have anything they are moved to describe as subjective experience. Such people, if they exist, are the opposite of the logically absurd p-zombies. P-zombies falsely claim that they do have these things; people without them truthfully claim that they do not.
You might just be Socratically role-playing, but even so, there may be other people who actually do not ha...
This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.