Colin Geoffrey Hales wrote:
> 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...
It is all to easy to consider scientific behaviour without
phenomenality.
Scientist looks at test-tube -- scientist makes note in lab
journal...
> >> 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.
According to solipsists, humans can't either. You seem
to think PC somehow tells you reality is really real,
but you haven't shown it. Counterargument: we have
PC during dreaming, but dreams aren't real.
> 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..
So the fact that they are coming in on distinct channels is what is
important.
I still don't see why we need to appeal to PC.
> None of it says anything about WHY the input did what it did. The
> causality outside the zombie is MISSING from these signals.
The causality outside the human is missing from the signals.
A photon is a photon, it doesn't come with a biography.
> 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.
The brain attaches meaning to signals according to the channel they
come on on, hence phantom limb pain and so on. We still
don't need PC to explain that.
> 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.
PC doesn't miraculously provide the true context. It can
be fooled by dreams and hallucination. And it doesn't have
access to information that the physical brain doesn't have access
to. A photon is a photon. And the context of one particular
signal is a bunch of other signals, memories and so on.
You haven't shown that the process of contextualising
a signal isn't essentially cognitive.
> >> 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?
Why would it need to do something more? Are you saying PC
is something more? What?
> (none of which, in themselves, generate
> any phenomenal consciousness, they trigger it downstream in the
> cranium/cortex).
In robots?
> 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.
No. But that may be a conceptual deficit. It can't make
much in the way of spontaneous statements anyway, since
natural language hasn't been cracked.
> It's blind, deaf, can't
> taste or smell or touch.
Phenomenally. The two facts are true individually,
but you haven't shown that the one must be explained
by the other.
> Having the sensor transduction does not give it
phenomenal
> 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...
You mean "having the sensor transduction does not necessarily give it
phenomenal
sight"
> 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.
That is equally true with or without PC.
> 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.
Not exactly. We can tell where it came from because it is
combined with a lot of other data to form a 3d reconstruction.
For instance, there is no depth information in the photon
per se. The depth information comes from matching the information
on the two retinas. Phenomenality is just how it is "presented"
once it has been worked out.
You seem to be saying that without the phenomenal
"show", we wouldn't have the information in the first
place. But, blindsight shows we might.
> 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
Does not have phenomenal sensation. Could have sensory
access to the world (as in blindsight). Could have tha bility
to integrate and contextualise it, non-phenomenally.
> 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.
And we do, contra the solipsist. How do we?
> 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.
According to the solipsist, that is all we can do. And we
can be fooled.
> 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 Sat Nov 25 2006 - 09:11:51 PST