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Decius comments on By Which It May Be Judged - LessWrong
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Is there a reason to suppose that anybody else's maps have phenomenal feels, a way of testing that they do, or a way of telling the difference? Why can't those ways be generalized to Intelligent entities in general?
Yes: naturalism. It would be naturalistcially anomalous if their brains worked very smilarly , but their phenomenology were completely different.
No. So what? Are you saying we are all p-zombies?
I don't know about Decius, but...
I am.
I'm also saying that it doesn't matter. The p-zombies are still conscious. They just don't have any added "conscious" XML tags as per some imaginary, crazy-assed unnecessary definition of "consciousness".
Tangential to that point: I think any morality system which relies on an external supernatural thinghy in order to make moral judgments or to assign any terminal value to something is broken and not worth considering.
I have no idea what you are gettign at. Please clarify.
That has no discernable relationship to anythign I have said. Have you confused me with someone else?
I'm not sure where I implied that I'm getting at anything. We're p-zombies, we have no additional consciousness, and it doesn't matter because we're still here doing things.
The tangent was just an aside remark to clarify my position, and wasn't to target anyone.
We may already agree on the consciousness issue, I haven't actually checked that.
I have no idea whay you mean by "additonal consciousness" -- although, since you are not "getting at anything" you perhaps mean nothing.
That seems a bold and contentious claim to me. OTOH, you say you are not "getting at anything". Who knows?
OK. "Getting at something" doens't mean criticising someone, it means making a point.
In that sense, what I was getting at is that asking the question of whether we are p-zombies is redundant and irrelevant, since there's no reason to want or believe in the existence of non-p-zombies.
The core of my claim is basically that our consciousness is the logic and physics that goes on in our brain, not something else that we cannot see or identify. I obviously don't have conclusive proof or evidence of this, otherwise I'd be writing a paper and/or collecting my worldwide awards for it, but all (yes, all) other possibilities seem orders of magnitude less likely to me with my current priors and model of the world.
TL;DR: Consciousness isn't made of ethereal acausal fluid nor of magic, but of real physics and how those real physics interact in a complicated way.
I believe in the existence of at least onen non-p-zombie, because I have at least indirect evidence of one in the form of my own qualia.
We can see and identify our consciousness from the inside. It's self awareness. If you try to treat consciousness from the outside, you are bound to miss 99% of the point. None of this has antyhing to do with what consciousness is "made of".
I have a question about qualia from your perspective. If Omega hits you with an epiphenomenal anti-qualia hammer that injures your qualia and only your qualia such that you essentially have no qualia (I.E, you are a P-zombie) for an hour until your qualia recovers (When you are no longer a P-Zombie), what, if anything, might that mean?
1: You'd likely notice something, because you have evidence that qualia exist. That implies you would notice if they vanished for about an hour, since you would no longer be getting that evidence for that hour
2: You'd likely not notice anything, because if you did, a P-Zombie would not be just like you.
3: Epiphenomenal anti-qualia hammers can't exist. For instance, it might be impossible to affect your qualia and only your qualia, or perhaps it is impossible to make any reversible changes to qualia.
4: Something else?
Dunno, but try looking at this
I must not be working with the right / same conception of p-zombies then, because to me qualia experience provides exactly zero bayesian evidence for or against p-zombies on its own.
"A philosophical zombie or p-zombie in the philosophy of mind and perception is a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except in that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience.[1] "--WP
I am of course taking a p-zombie to be lacking in qualia. I am not sure that alternatives are even coherent, since I don't see how other aspects of consciousness could go missing without affecting behaviour.
You appear to be making an unfortunate assumption that what Chalmers and Peterdjones are talking about is crazy-assed unnecessary XML tags, as opposed to, y'know, regular old consciousness.
I'm not sure where my conception of p-zombies went wrong, then. P-zombies are assumed by the premise, if my understanding is correct, to behave physically exactly the same, down to the quantum level (and beyond if any exists), but to simply not have something being referred to as "qualia". This seems to directly imply that the "qualia" is generated neither by the physical matter, nor by the manner in which it interacts.
Like Eliezer, I believe physics and logic are sufficient to describe eventually everything, and so qualia and consciousness must be made of this physical matter and the way it interacts. Therefore, since the p-zombies have the same matter and the same interactions, they have qualia and consciousness.
What, then, is a non-p-zombie? Well, something that has "something more" (implied: Than physics or logic) added into it. Since it's something exceptional that isn't part of anything else so far in the universe to my knowledge, calling it a "crazy-ass unnecessary XML tag" feels very worthy of its plausibility and comparative algorithmic complexity.
The point being that, under this conception of p-zombies and with my current (very strong) priors on the universe, non-p-zombies are either a silly mysterious question with no possible answer, or something supernatural on the same level of silly as atom-fiddling tiny green goblins and white-winged angels of Pure Mercy.
Huh...
That's a funny way of thinking about it.
But anyway, EY's zombies sequences was all about saying that if physics and math is everything, then p-zombies are a silly mysterious question. Because a p-zombie was supposed to be like a normal human to the atomic level, but without qualia. Which is absurd if, as we expect, qualia are within physics and math. Hence there are no p-zombies.
I guess the point is that saying there are no non-p-zombies as a result of this is totally confusing, because it totally looks like saying no-one has consciousness.
(Tangentially, it probably doesn't help that apparently half of the philosophical world use "qualia" to mean some supernatural XML tags, while the other half use the word to mean just the-way-things-feel, aka. consciousness. You seem to get a lot of arguments between those in each of those groups, with the former group arguing that qualia are nonsense, and the latter group rebutting that "obviously we have qualia, or are you all p-zombies?!" resulting in a generally unproductive debate.)
Hah, yes. That seems to be partly a result of my inconsistent way of handling thought experiments that are broken or dissolved in the premises, as opposed to being rejected due to a later contradiction or nonexistent solution.
I'm saying that there is no difference between a p-zombie and the alternative.