Seems that Seth doesn’t understand the Zombie argument at all. Assuming Seth believes in the causal closure of the physical world (I don’t think he believes consciousness is an immaterial force “filling in” the causal gaps of indeterminate physical processes in the brain), he should take Zombies more seriously. The Zombie argument applies to any physical process no matter how “complex” since physical processes can always be conceived to happen exactly the same way “in the dark”, as a zombie. If the physical world is causally closed, all the causal “work” i...
Also, Phi is not at all poorly defined. You can analyze any system, find the spatio-temporal scale at which that system is most integrated, (the scale at which the behavior of the system is more than the sum of its parts and therefore fully analyzable only as a single whole), and then calculate using either the Kullback-Leibler divergence or the Earth Mover’s Distance (Wasserstein’s metric) - (different versions of the theory use different statistical methods) - the exact value of Phi as a measure of the amount of integrated information in a system. The ... (read more)