Colin
>That is the invisibility I claim at the center of
> the zombie's difficulty.
Brent
But it will also present the same difficulty to the human scientist. An
in fact it is easy to build a robot that detects and responds to radio
waves that are completely invisible to a human scientist.
Colin
I'm not talking about invisibility of within a perceptual field. That is
an invisibility humans can deal with to some extent using instruments. We
inherit the limits of that process, but at least we have something
presented to us from the outside world. The invisibility I speak of is the
invisibility of novel behaviour in the natural world within a perceptual
field. Without a phenomenal representation of the external world we cannot
use existing knowledge to predict anything 'out there' that we can
reliably be surprised about. There is no 'out there' without phenomenal
representation.
Brent:
Are you saying that a computer cannot have any pre-programmed rules for
dealing with sensory inputs, or if it does it's not a zombie.
Colin:
I would say that a computer can have any amount of pre-programmed rules
for dealing with sensory inputs. Those rules are created by humans and
grounded in the perceptual experiences of humans. That would be a-priori
knowledge. The machine itself has no experiences related to the rules or
its sensing, hence it is a zombie. The possession of behavioural rules
does not entail zombie-ness. The lack of possession of perceptual fields
does.
Brent:
Or are you claiming that humans have some pre-scientific knowledge that
cannot be implemented in a computer.
Colin:
Yes! Humans have a genetically bestowed capacity to make cellular material
which takes advantage of (as yet un-described) attributes of the natural
world that enable sensory feeds to create phenomenal fields, thus
connecting the human with the external natural world. This is before any
derived knowledge (scientific or not). So I suppose 'pre-scientific' is a
good term for it. Innate a-priori knowledge (not learned or 'learned'
during construction).
I am saying that it cannot be computed. The experiences must be had. This
does not preclude a different sort of chip that does have experiences
because it replicates (not models) the actual physics of the phenomenal
fields. This physics could be mixed into a computational substrate.
So I'm saying that 'computing' grounded in perceptual fields is non-zombie.
But we don't have that form of computing. We have numerical/symbolic
models based on/grounded in human perception.
cheers,
Colin
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Received on Sat Nov 25 2006 - 01:36:35 PST