Hi LZ!
<snip>
>> and the perfect benchmark behaviour to contrast the zombie
>> and the human.So, I have my zombie scientist and my human
>> scientist and I ask them to do science on exquisite novelty.
>> What happens? The novelty is invisible to the zombie, who
>> has the internal life of a dreamless sleep.
>
> I think you are confusing lack of phenomenality with lack of
> response to the environment. Simple sensors
> can respond without (presumably) phenomenality.
> So can humans with blindsight (but not very efficiently).
>
No confusion at all. The zombie is behaving. 'Wide awake' in the sense
that it is fully functional. Doing stuff. I said it has the _internal
life_ of a dreamless sleep, not that it was asleep. This means that the
life you 'experience that is the state of a dreamless sleep - the nothing
of it - that is the entire life of the awake zombie.
Want to partially 'zombie' yourself? close your eyes. block your ears. I
know seeing black/hearing nothing is not blindess/deafness, but you get
the idea.
Scientific behaviour demanded of the zombie condition is a clearly
identifiable behavioural benchmark where we can definitely claim that
phenomenality is necessary...see below...
>> The reason it is invisible is because there is no phenomenal
>> consciousness. The zombie has only sensory data to use to do
>> science. There are an infinite number of ways that same
>> sensory data could arrive from an infinity of external
>> natural world situtations. The sensory data is ambiguous
>
> That doesn't follow. The Zombie can produce different responses
> on the basis of physical differences in its input, just as
> a machine can.
I spent tens of thousands of hours designing, building, benchtesting and
commissioning zombies. On the benchtop I have pretended to be their
environment and they had no 'awareness' they weren't in their real
environment. It's what makes bench testing possible. The universe of the
zombies was the universe of my programming. The zombies could not tell if
they were in the factory or on the benchtop. That's why I can empathise so
well with zombie life. I have been literally swatted by zombies
(robot/cranes and other machines) like I wasn't there....scares the hell
out of you! Some even had 'vision systems' but were still blind.
so....yes the zombie can 'behave'. What I am claiming is they cannot do
_science_ i.e. they cannot behave scientifically. This is a very specific
claim, not a general claim.
>
>>- it's all the
>> same - action potential pulse trains traveling from sensors to brain.
>
> No, it's not all the same. Its coded in a very complex way. It's like
saying the information in you computer is "all the same -- its all ones
and zeros"
yes you got it - all coded....I am talking about action potential pulse
trains. They are all the same general class. Burst mode/Continuous mode,
all the same basic voltage waveform, overshoot, refratory period...LTP,
LTD, afterhyperpolarisation.... all the same class for sight, sound,
taste, imagination, touch, thirst, orgasm etc etc... coded messages
travelling all the way from the periphery and into the brain. They are all
the same...and..
None of it says anything about WHY the input did what it did. The
causality outside the zombie is MISSING from these signals. They have no
intrinsic sensation to them either. The only useful information is the
body knows implicitly where they came from..which still is not enough
because:
Try swapping the touch nerves for 2 fingers. You 'touch' with one and feel
the touch happen on the other. The touch sensation is created as
phenomenal consciousness in the brain using the measurement, not the
signal measurement itself.
Now think about the touch..the same sensation of touch could have been
generated by a feather or a cloth or another finger or a passing car. That
context is what phenomenal consciousness provides.
>
>> The zombie cannot possibly distinguish the novelty from the sensory
data
>> and has no awareness of the external world or even its own boundary.
>
> Huh? It's perfectly possible to build a robot
> that produces a special signal when it encounters input it has
> not encountered before.
Yes but how is it to do anything to contextualise the input other than
correlate it with other signals? (none of which, in themselves, generate
any phenomenal consciousness, they trigger it downstream in the
cranium/cortex).
re robot...now do science on a signal and use the signal to make a
statement about the natural world that generated/caused the signal
elsewhere away from/outside the robot. It can't. It's blind, deaf, can't
taste or smell or touch. Having the sensor transduction does not give it
sight... that is scientifically proven fact. EG There is a HUGE neural
sensory transduction/actuation system along the wall of your intestines,
of which you have no awareness at all, but is hammering away like a
factory squeezing and pushing all day...
Put it this way.... a 'red photon' arrives and hits a retina cone and
isomerises a protein, causing a cascade that results in an action
potential pulse train. That photon could have come from alpha-centuri,
bounced off a dog collar or come from a disco light. The receptor has no
clue. Isomerisation of a protein has nothing to do with 'seeing'. In the
human the perception (sensation) of a red photon happens in the visual
cortex as an experience of redness and is 'projected' mentally into the
phenomenal scene. That way the human can tell where it came from. The
mystery of how that happens is another story. That it happens and is
necessary for science is what matters here.
The main fact is that the zombie does not have sensation at all and that
as a result it cannot do science on the world outside the zombie. It's
doesn't even know there is a world to do science on. All it can do is
correlate measurements with each other, measurements that could have come
from anywhere and the zombie can never tell from where.
I have great empathy for the poor zombie! Indeed I am starting to realise
that it may be my practical training which has enabled me to better
understand the zombie - more so than the norm... it seems to have made
certain things rather more plain to me than others.
cheers
Colin
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Received on Fri Nov 24 2006 - 20:39:06 PST