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The other day a piece fell off of one side of my glasses (the part that touches the nose.)
The glasses stay on, but I've noticed a weird feeling of imbalance at times. I could be imagining it, I'm able to function apparently regularly. But I was thinking that the obvious analogy is to filmography: directors consciously adjust camera angles and framings in order to induce certain emotions or reactions to a scene. It's plausible that even a very slight asymmetry in your vision can affect you.
If this is true, might there be other low hanging fruit for adjusting your perception to increase focus?
Does the anti-p-zombie argument imply you can't simulate humans past some level of fidelity without producing qualia/consciousness?
Or is there a coherent position whereby p-zombies are impossible but arbitrarily accurate simulations that aren't conscious are possible?
Yes, it implies that. The exact level of fidelity required is less straightforward; it's clear that a perfect simulation must have qualia/consciousness, but small imperfections make the argument not hold, so to determine whether an imperfect simulation is conscious we'd have to grapple with the even-harder problem of neuroscience.
How does it imply that?
I have intuitions on both sides. The intuition against is that predicting the outcome of a process can be done without having anything isomorphic to individual steps in that process - it seems plausible (or at the very least, possible and coherent) for humans to be predictable, even perfectly, without having something isomorphic to a human. But a perfect predictor would count as an arbitrarily accurate simulation.
The argument might have been "if qualia it exists, then it probably has observable effects - you without qualia would be different from you with qualia".
But obviously you as a simulation is different in some aspects from you in reality. It's not obvious that the argument caries over.
Causality is different, for one. You in reality has a causal structure where future actions are caused by the state of you in the present + some inputs. You in the simulation has a causal structure where actions are caused by the simulator, to some extent.
I'm not really assuming that. My question is if there's a coherent position where humans are conscious, p-zombie humans are impossible, but simulations can be high fidelity yet not conscious.
I'm not asking if it's true, just whether the standard argument against p-zombies rules this out as well.
Well if qualia aren’t epiphenomenal then an accurate simulation must include them or deviate into errancy. Claiming that you could accuracy simulate a human but leave out consciousness is just the p-zombie argument in different robes