<<SNIP>>
>> 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.
Yes - but I'm not talking about merely functioning. I am talking about the
specialised function called scientific behaviour in respect of the natural
world outside. The adaptive behaviour you speak of is adaptivity in
respect of adherence or otherwise to an internal rule set, not adaptation
in respect of the natural world outside.
BTW 'Adaptive' means change, change means novelty has occurred. If you
have no phenopmenality you must already have a rule as to how to adapt to
all change - ergo you know everything already.
>
>> 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.
I said 'partially', so you'd get the idea of it. It seems you are.
>
>> 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.
I have already showed you conclusive empirical evidence you can
demonstrate on yourself. Perhaps the 'zombie room' will do 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?
>
They can do science on their sensory data only. They have no a-priori
method for applying any interpretation as to its context in the natural
world that originated the sensory feeds. If you like: it can do the
science of its boundary. Even that is a stretch - for it has no idea it
has a body or any boundary.
They cannot contextualise NOVELTY with respect to the external world,
merely against the non-phenomenal rule-set they have concted. They cannot
do science on the natural world - but they can do science on zombie sense
data and internal rule-sets, whose correpondence with any sort of external
world is a complete mystery. If any of the rules they concoct happen to
correpond to the a natural world law it'd be an accident and they'd never
know it.
>
>> 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.
>
Yes it is an extra source. That is the whole point. The fact that you call
it 'clairvoyance' merely means that it is unknown. Why is it so impossoble
to think that your current understanding of the universe may be
incomplete?
There is nothing supernatural going on. The reality of phenomenality is
stark. Your neurons have a way of access enough information to constrcut
phenomenal scenes. They do it. They are real. There is far more
information inthe phenopmenal scenes than arises from the sensing. Your
inability to see how that may be does not negate it as a reality.
In the mathematical proof I gave the extra information is built into P(.),
which the zombie does not have.
>> 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.
No it doesn't. The information the zombie has is "neurons a,b,c,d, fired
in finger tip'. That's it. The zombie and the human both have that.
> It doesn't create new information ex nihilo.
Of course not. It creates new information by a mechaniusm you don;t
understand that is perfectly natural. "ex nihilo" actually means it can;t
do it based on what I know...not that it is impossible.
>> Yes but how is it to do anything to contextualise the input other than
correlate it with other signals?
>
> Why would it need to ?
What's the difference between "neurons z,x,x,c,v,f,r,we,w, in my retina
correlate like this" and "here comes an elephant"? That is why.
>
>> (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. It's body boundary (which it has no means to intuit) can interact with
whatever impacts with it. That's it. Beyond the boundary? Multiple
external worlds could present the same stimulus and the zombie would never
know.
>> 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 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?
Where does this notion of 'causality' come from? You. Not it. You are
projecting your internal life into the numbers the zombie has. Stop it!
>
>> 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.
Where has the zombie got any idea of 'cube', space, distance?
You! Stop doing that. You keep grounding the zombie in your own
experiences and assuming it can do what you can. It has no idea of space,
time ,matter, causality, the natural world itself....NOTHING.
>> 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.
I couldn't care less about the philosopghical zombie. Who ever said
philosophy had a patent on the concept! If you like dump the whole label
and replace every occurrence of the word zombie with "a human but with a
brain not capable of phenomenal consciousness".
What point is there in bothering with it. The philosophical zombie is
ASSUMED to be equivalent! This is failure before you even start! It's
wrong and it's proven wrong because there is a conclusively logically and
empirically provable function that the zombie cannot possibly do without
phenomenality: SCIENCE. The philosophical zombie would have to know
everything a-priori, which makes science meaningless. There is no novelty
to a philosophical zombie. It would have to anticipate all forms of
randomness or chaotic behaviour.... NUTS.
I am only intersted in the state where there is no phenomenal
consciousness and the role it has in science. You can have the
philosophical zombie - it's an oxymoron and you're welcome to it. You can
let it define your world if you like - I'd prefer to let the natural world
be my guide.
Colin Hales
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Received on Sun Nov 26 2006 - 17:10:29 PST