>> 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...
'Looks' with what? Scientist has no vision system. There are eyes and
optic chiasm, LGN and all that. But no visual scene. The scientist is
blind.
>
>> >> 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.
I say nothing about the 'really realness' of 'reality'. It's irrelevant.
Couldn't care less. _Whatever it is_, its relentlessly consistent to all
of us in regular ways suffient to characterise it scientifically. Our
visual phenomenal scene depicts it well enough to do science. Without that
visual depiction we can't do science.
Yes we have internal imagery. Indeed it is an example supporting what I am
saying! The scenes and the sensing are 2 separate things. You can have one
without the other. You can hallucinate - internal imagery overrides that
of the sensing stimulus. Yes! That is the point. It is a representation
and we cannot do science without it.
>>
>> 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.
I am determined to get this across! :-) On my bike ride I dreamt up a new
thought experiment that I think might do it.
"The Totally Blind Zombie Homunculus Room Experiment" where marvin the
human is methodologically, buit not physically zombied. That ought to do
it.
>
>> 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.
Yep. That's the point. How does the brain make sense of it? By making use
of some property of the natural world which makes a phenomeanl scene.
>
>> 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.
Please see the recent post to Brent re pain and nociception. Pain IS
phenomenal consiouness (a phenomenal scene). How do you think the phantom
limb gets there? It's a brain/phenomenal representation. It IS phenomenal
consiousness. Of a limb that isn't actually there.
>
>> 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.
Yes it can misdirect, be wrong, be pathologically constitutes. But at
least we have it. We could not survive without it. Would could not do
science without it. It situates us in an external world which we would
otherwise find completely invisible.
> And it doesn't have
> access to information that the physical brain doesn't have access
> to.
The physical brain generates it! The fact that it's hard to conceive how
is irrelevant. The fact is that brain material does it.
> 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.
Contextualising nerve signal against nerve signal is one thing.
Contextualising what the nerve signal is saying in respect of the external
world is another. Reflex actions do the former on habituated/safe
behaviour completely without awareness (like your intestines are right
now). Science, however, cannot function without the latter.
>
>> >> 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?
Contextualises it with respect to the world beyong the actual transduction
site where the measurement took place. Think of it as a voltage
measurement. You put the meter on it. You get X volts. That voltage
reading on its own tells you nothing of what it means, where it came from
etc. Additional information is provided by brain material by generating a
phenomenal scene using the measurement. This additional information is
added via 'mystery property Z'/whatever... the solution to the hard
problem...
>
>> (none of which, in themselves, generate
>> any phenomenal consciousness, they trigger it downstream in the
>> cranium/cortex).
>
> In robots?
> 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"
Yes.
>
>> 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.
No. PC contexualises where the photon came from. The neurons use that
contextual information to construct the PC visual scene in which 'red' is
painted.
>
>> 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.
Yes and that construction is the visual scene - phenopmenal consciousness.
Visual qualia in a virtual reality made for you by your brain using
neurons and only neurons.
> 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.
The act of working it out presents it. Is it. The two things are identical.
>
> 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.
Yes there are a bunch of visual pathways, some of which enable basic
processes to function without the visual scene. Hand-placement is about it
for the blindsighted - very importnt though. Note that the hand placement
is possible because the body knows where the hand it - it put it there.
Again a blindsighed person would be intrinsically limited when presented
with novelty.
>
>> 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.
Yes. Certain processes (see blind sight - above). In order that you
construct that you have to know already how to construct it. Chicken and
egg.
>
>> 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.
Yes but we have PC and scientific procedure to minimise problems in
science. The zombie has squat of either.
Maybe wait for the
"The Totally Blind Zombie Homunculus Room Experiment"
:-)
Colin Hales
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Received on Sun Nov 26 2006 - 01:48:38 PST