4 ms·

P-Zombies are a logical impossibility; For p-zombies to be indistinguishable, you would need consciousness to have no effect on behaviour, which is clearly cont

• mikeash 8y ago
  Exactly my thinking. I have no problem with intelligent, thinking, reasoning beings that aren't conscious and don't have qualia. But it's highly contrived that such beings would go around talking about consciousness and qualia.
• asfasgasg 8y ago
  If it were actually as simple as that, don't you think this would have occurred to the greatest philosophical minds of our generation, and don't you think therefore that P-zombies would not be discussed? I'm all for bagging on philosophy as navel-gazing and generally unproductive, but you've taken it a step too far.
  • mannykannot 8y ago
    That is a reasonable response to fdvessen's one-sentence rebuttal, but with regard to the significance of p-zombies in general, an appeal to authority is much more effective when all the authorities agree, but this is not the case here, with Dennett being just the most visible counter-example. From popular articles on the issue of consciousness, you might think that most philosophers are opposed to physicalism or anything like it, but that is apparently not the case. It does not help that these same popular articles exaggerate and simplify - they make claims about the philosophical arguments that cannot be sustained by the arguments themselves. As I mentioned above, it is a misrepresentation to state that Chalmers' highly conditioned claim about the plausibility of p-zombies proves that no machine can have consciousness.