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.
Well, adaptive behaviour -- dealing with novelty --- is functioning.
> 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.
That isn't zombification. A zombie is not an entity
which cannot see at all. A zombie will stop its car when the lights
turn red. It is just that red does not "seem like" anything to the
zombie.
A zombies has a kind of efficient blindsight.
> 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.
I see nothing to support it.
> >
> >>- 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..
They need to be interpreted an contextualised against other
other information. How does that lead to the conclusion
that zombies can't do science?
> None of it says anything about WHY the input did what it did. The
> causality outside the zombie is MISSING from these signals.
It's missing from the individual signals. But we must
be able to build up a picture of the external causes on
the basis of the combined information. We
don't have anything else to go on. Pheneomenality is
not an extra source of information that clairvoyantly tells
you where each photon originated.
> 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.
It creates it out of information that is also available to the
zombie. It doesn't create new information ex nihilo. So
what the zombie has to do is contextualise and interpret information
non-phenomenally.
Is that impossible?
> >
> >> 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 ?
> (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.
It can interact with its environment: you have already conceded that.
"No confusion at all. The zombie is behaving. 'Wide awake' in the sense
that it is fully functional".
> 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...
The fact that it has sensors mean it does not *necessarily* have
*phenomenal*
consciousness. However, the sensors in one's gut have an effect on
one's behaviour. Scientific behaviour is behaviour. If non-phenomenal
sensors can
influence behaviour, why can't they implement scientific behaviour?
> 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.
A zombie has sensors which can alter its behaviour in response to
changes in
the environment.
>It's
> doesn't even know there is a world to do science on.
Why not? Because it can't paint a causal picture of where
its signals came form? Why not?
> 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.
Why not? Surely it only takes a kind
for information analysis to tell that a set of signals probably came
form a cubic object, or whatever.
> 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
I am not sure you grasp the standard meaning of "philosophical
Zombie" at all.
> - 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 Sun Nov 26 2006 - 09:45:27 PST