Colin Geoffrey Hales wrote:
> >>
> >> 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.
> >
> > You're being unfair to the poor zombie robots. How could they
> > possibly tell if they were in the factory or on the benchtop
> > when the benchtop (presumably) exactly replicates the sensory
> > feeds they would receive in the factory?
> > Neither humans nor robots, zombie or otherwise, should be
> > expected to have ESP.
>
> Absolutely! But the humans have phenomenal consciousness in lieu of ESP,
> which the zombies do not.
PC doesn't magically solve the problem.It just involves a more
sophisticated form of guesswork. It can be fooled.
> To bench test "a human" I could not merely
> replicate sensoiry feeds. I'd have to replicate the factory!
As in brain-in-vat scenarios. Do you have a way of shwoing
that BIV would be able to detect its status?
> The human is
> connected to the external world (as mysterious as that may be and it's not
> ESP!). The zombie isn't, so faking it is easy.
No. They both have exactly the same causal connections. The zombie's
lack of phenomenality is the *only* difference. By definition.
And every nerve that a human has is a sensory feed You just have to
feed
data into all of them to fool PC. As in a BIV scenario.
> >
> >>
> >> 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.
> >
> > But it is impossible to differentiate between different sources
> > of a sensation unless the different sources generate a different
> > sensation. If you close your eyes and the touch of a feather
> > and a cloth feel the same, you can't tell which it was.
> > If you open your eyes, you can tell a difference because
> > the combined sensation (touch + vision) is different in the
> > two cases. A machine that has touch receptors alone might not
> > be able to distinguish between them, but a machine that has
> > touch + vision receptors would be able to.
> >
>
> Phenomenal scenes can combine to produce masterful, amazing
> discriminations. But how does the machine, without being told already by a
> human, know one from the other?
How do humans know without being told by God?
> Having done that how can it combine and
> contextualise that joint knowledge? You have to tell it how to learn.
> Again a-priori knowledge ...
Where did we get our apriori knowledge from? If it wasn't
a gift from God, it mus have been a natural process.
(And what has this to do with zombies? Zombies
lack phenomenality, not apriori knowledge).
> >>
> >> 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).
> >
> > That's all we ever do: correlate one type of signal with another.
> > The correlations get called various things such
> > as "red", "circular", "salty", or perhaps "a weird taste"
> > I have never encountered before, somewhere between salty
> > and sweet, which also spills over into a sparkly purple
> > visual sensation".
>
> See the above. Synesthetes corrlate in weird ways. Sharp chees and purple
> 5. That is what humans do naturally. Associative memory. Sometimes it can
> go wrong (or very right!). Words can tast bitter.
> >> 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.
> >
> > I don't think that's correct. It is impossible for a human to tell where
> > the photon came from if it makes no sensory difference.
> > That difference may have to involve other sensations, eg. if the
> > red sensation occurs simultaneously with a loud bang
> > it may have come from an explosion, while the same red sensation
> > associated with a 1 KHz tone may have come from a warning beacon.
>
> You're talking about cross-correlating sensations, not sensory
> measurement. The human as an extra bit of physics in the generation of the
> phenomenal scenes which allows such contextualisations.
Why does it need new physics? Is that something you
are assuming or something you are proving?
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Received on Sun Nov 26 2006 - 11:20:47 PST