Colin Geoffrey Hales wrote:
> >> 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?
Eyes, etc.
> Scientist has no vision system.
A Zombie scientist has a complete visual system except for whatever
it is that causes phenomenality.since we don't
know what it is, we can imagine a zombie scientist as having
a complete neural system for processing vision.
> There are eyes and
> optic chiasm, LGN and all that. But no visual scene.
> The scientist is
> blind.
The zombie scientist is a functional duplicate. The zombie scientist
will behave as though it sees. It will also behave the same in novel
situations -- or it would not be a functional duplicate.
> >> 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.
So there are no blind scientists?
>Without that
> visual depiction we can't do science.
Unless we find another way.
But a functional duplicate is a functional duplicate.
> 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.
Unless we find another way. Maybe the zombies could find one.
> >> 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.
The process by which we infer the real-world objects that
caused our sense-data can be treated in information
processing terms, for all that it is presented to us
phenomenally. You haven't demonstrated that
unplugging phenomenality stymies the whole process.
> >> 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).
Pain is presented phenomenally, but neurologists can
identify pain signals without being able to peak into
other people's qualia.
> How do you think the phantom
> limb gets there? It's a brain/phenomenal representation.
Yes.
> It IS phenomenal
> consiousness.
Not all representations are phenomenal.
> 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.
Unless we find another way. Most people move around using
their legs. But legless people can find other ways of moving.
> It situates us in an external world which we would
> otherwise find completely invisible.
Blindsight, remember,
> > 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.
That comment is irrelevant. Phenomenality is not an information-source.
The information by which we hypothesise an external world is
also available tot he zombie.
> > 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.
It's all doe with nerve signals (And what you call "aprirori"
information,
which zombies have too).
> 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.
It happens to be the case in humans that novel behaviour is
correlated to some extent with phenomenality. That does not
make it a universal law applying to everything, any more than
"no legs, no locomotion".
> >> >> 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.
It doesn't do that because it doesn't have any access to the world
beyond its signals, and stored information. Or are you appelaing
to clairvoyance again?
> 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.
Only if phenomenality is magic. It is the "extra information" claim
that is where the miracle happens. Naturalistically, phenomenality
can only re-present information that has already been acquired
through the senses (or the genes).
> This additional information is
> added via 'mystery property Z'/whatever... the solution to the hard
> problem...
I don't believe in it. But at least it is clear that you are appealing
to
magic, now.
> >> (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 contextualisation _has_been_done_ by the time we become
phenomonally aware of something. Whether that is all
the same process as PC, or a separate process preceding PC is the
question.
> 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.
That is the question. Whether it is one process or two.
> Visual qualia in a virtual reality made for you by your brain using
> neurons and only neurons.
VR -- a representation or model -- can exist without phenomenality.
> > 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.
So you say. You have not justified the claim. More importantly,
you have not shown that it *must* be so in non-human entities.
> >
> > 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.
Again, you have shown no connection between PC and the ability to cope
with novelty beyond your say-so.
> >> 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.
If that is true, it is equally true of phemonality. Human scientists
can't handle 11-dimensional spacetime 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.
>
> Yes but we have PC and scientific procedure to minimise problems in
> science. The zombie has squat of either.
It lacks the first by definitions. You have give no reason to suppose
it lacks
the second.
> Maybe wait for the
> "The Totally Blind Zombie Homunculus Room Experiment"
> :-)
> Colin Hales
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Received on Sun Nov 26 2006 - 15:29:19 PST