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You make a strong claim without anything to back it up. I don’t understand why it’s become trendy to deny that consciousness exists; to me it’s isomorphic to sa
by throwaway713 7y ago
You make a strong claim without anything to back it up. I don’t understand why it’s become trendy to deny that consciousness exists; to me it’s isomorphic to saying “We don’t actually exist at all. Prove me wrong.” It’s a vacuous statement, meant to sound evocative, but difficult to respond to in any meaningful way.
If I made a list of everything in order of how certain I am that the item on the list exists, consciousness would be at the top by far. Everything else could just be a nice illusion.
- mattmcknight 7y agoYou falsely imply that the parent comment attempts "to deny that consciousness exists". What the parent comment actually says is "consciousness is nothing special" and "consciousness is a sliding scale rather than a binary property". These are different from non-existence.
- arbsn 7y agop-zombies are not conscious, by definition.
- missosoup 7y agop-zombies can believe that they are though. Which circles back to 'consciousness is nothing special' rather than 'consciousness doesn't exist'. To put it another way, if AGI is computable, then we are all p-zombies. And evidence is starting to strongly hint that AGI is computable.
- bermanoid 7y agoClaiming that some mysterious and hard to define property that we can't measure even in principle "exists" in some meaningful way strikes me as the stronger claim than the skeptical take does. Why do you think the burden of proof should be inverted? The mere fact that most humans intuitively feel "something" doesn't count for much of anything, especially once you stipulate that p-zombies would vote the same way.