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You have to Google and read those thought experiments to see why. You may not be convinced (I'm not), but they give good reasons. We have mechanistic explanatio

You have to Google and read those thought experiments to see why. You may not be convinced (I'm not), but they give good reasons. We have mechanistic explanations for all of those organs, and even if we lack some explanation, we know one is possible in principle. They argue this isn't the case for consciousness.

card_zero 2y ago
OK. Philosophical zombies react to external events in exactly the same way as normal people, including internally, but we are told they lack conscious experience. Thus the thought experiment is set up from the start to find that conscious experience is something non-physical - or else the p-zombies don't really do what they're claimed to do, which is to react identically to everyone else. There's a dubious implication that conscious experience is completely cryptic, with no effect on the outside world (such as a person speaking the words "I consciously experienced that"), or at least that all such effects are shallow enough that they can be perfectly faked. If this is true, we ought to question why it's such a big deal. What's so great about consciousness? Why associate it with rights? The Knowledge Argument is about a scientist who learns "everything" about colors intellectually but doesn't see them until years later, and seeing a red tomato is a revelatory experience even after all that book-learning, so it implies that experiences are beyond knowledge, or beyond physics, or beyond tomatoes or something. But really all it shows is that intellectual learning is dry and dusty and limited. Like with the p-zombies, the premise is wrong. The scientist didn't really learn everything before having the experience, but could have done in principle but for the limits of communication, description, and simulation as we know those things presently. (And then the real experience would not have had any surprising or revelatory quale about it.)
- naasking 2y ago
  > Thus the thought experiment is set up from the start to find that conscious experience is something non-physical The point is that if you accept that p-zombies are possible, then you accept that consciousness is not necessarily physical. If it's not necessarily physical, then physicalism is false. > really all it shows is that intellectual learning is dry and dusty and limited. What it's attempting to show is the limit of factual knowledge. If physicalism is true, then everything that can be observed must reduce to objective third person facts. But, Mary has all of the objective third person facts. So if you find it implausible that Mary would be able to infer the experience of red before actually observing a rose, even with all of those facts, then you're admitting the existence of first person subjective facts, which cannot be reduced to objective third person facts, not even in theory. Daniel Dennett has some great responses to these challenges.
  - anon84873628 2y ago
    >If physicalism is true, then everything that can be observed must reduce to objective third person facts. You are erroneously equating "physicalism" with "reductive physicalism". It's clear to many of us that qualia are something subjective and non-physical yet emerge from physical processes.
    - naasking 2y ago
      Yes, people are capable of convincing themselves of all kinds of nonsense. The kind of ontological emergence you would require in such a model of qualia is still of a completely different kind than any other kind of emergence, and so still requires extending the ontology of basic physicalism. There seems to be very little motivation to do so at this point. Let's not repeat the mistakes of vitalism.
      - anon84873628 2y ago
        That seems to be a value judgement about whether consciousness is a categorically different type of "ontological emergence" compared to others. Of course consciousness seems more mysterious because we don't have the explanation yet. Looking down at the levels we supervene doesn't have the same mystique, though they would be just as inscrutable if trying to look up. Going from quantum field theory to Newtonian mechanics is just as weird a departure as the reverse. And does Newtonian mechanics prepare you for the existence of Bayesian statistics? Biological agents bouncing around randomly? The gestalt of an ecosystem? There's no reason to assert that we can't one day have the math for describing consciousness too.
        naasking 2y ago
        > That seems to be a value judgement about whether consciousness is a categorically different type of "ontological emergence" compared to others. It's not a value judgment to point out that objective third person facts can logically entail other objective third person facts, but cannot logically entail subjective first person facts as with qualia. That's the whole point of the hard problem. All forms of ontological emergence we've actually seen are the first sort of entailment, but to accept and explain qualia with ontological emergence, you need to accept the second kind of emergence, which is a whole new thing we've never seen and we're supposed to accept it only for consciousness because we have such a hard time accepting that our perceptions on this could be flawed. It's simply more plausible that we're mistaken about subjective first person facts IMO.
- nearbuy 2y ago
  > or at least that all such effects are shallow enough that they can be perfectly faked Physicalism implies that things we wouldn't intuitively think of as conscious can perfectly mimic all such effects. Imagine there's a person, John, and you take a precise scan of every neuron of his brain (or every particle if you prefer). You also record all the sensory input signals from his neurons to his brain. You write all this information down in a giant stack of papers. Then you go about simulating the brain with pencil and paper, computing its thoughts and actions (in this thought experiment people have deciphered exactly how neurons work). Maybe it takes you a trillion years to simulate one day of John's life, but you diligently do it. Physicalism tells us that you can simulate John perfectly this way. You could perfectly predict every word is said, and every muscle he moved. You could feed the motor neuron outputs of your simulation into a robot replica of John, and it would act indistinguishably from the original John. Is this pencil and paper simulation of John a p-zombie? We either have to accept that this pencil and paper simulation of John is conscious, or that it's a p-zombie.
  - anon84873628 2y ago
    >Physicalism implies that things we wouldn't intuitively think of as conscious can perfectly mimic all such effects. This is the multiple relizability argument and it only discounts certain types of physicalism that aren't popular anymore. I consider myself a physicalism and answer that the simulation of John is conscious.
    - nearbuy 2y ago
      That's the normal physicalist position as far as I'm aware. Is there a physicalist theory where the simulation isn't conscious? I was replying to a commenter who doubted that a non-conscious entity could mimic a person accurately. I'm pointing out the implication that without p-zombies, just by writing a bunch of stuff on paper, you created a conscious being. I'm not arguing that's false; just that intuitively it's a tough pill to swallow and if you don't want to accept that, p-zombies are the alternative.

card_zero 2y ago

OK. Philosophical zombies react to external events in exactly the same way as normal people, including internally, but we are told they lack conscious experience. Thus the thought experiment is set up from the start to find that conscious experience is something non-physical - or else the p-zombies don't really do what they're claimed to do, which is to react identically to everyone else. There's a dubious implication that conscious experience is completely cryptic, with no effect on the outside world (such as a person speaking the words "I consciously experienced that"), or at least that all such effects are shallow enough that they can be perfectly faked. If this is true, we ought to question why it's such a big deal. What's so great about consciousness? Why associate it with rights? The Knowledge Argument is about a scientist who learns "everything" about colors intellectually but doesn't see them until years later, and seeing a red tomato is a revelatory experience even after all that book-learning, so it implies that experiences are beyond knowledge, or beyond physics, or beyond tomatoes or something. But really all it shows is that intellectual learning is dry and dusty and limited. Like with the p-zombies, the premise is wrong. The scientist didn't really learn everything before having the experience, but could have done in principle but for the limits of communication, description, and simulation as we know those things presently. (And then the real experience would not have had any surprising or revelatory quale about it.)

naasking 2y ago
> Thus the thought experiment is set up from the start to find that conscious experience is something non-physical The point is that if you accept that p-zombies are possible, then you accept that consciousness is not necessarily physical. If it's not necessarily physical, then physicalism is false. > really all it shows is that intellectual learning is dry and dusty and limited. What it's attempting to show is the limit of factual knowledge. If physicalism is true, then everything that can be observed must reduce to objective third person facts. But, Mary has all of the objective third person facts. So if you find it implausible that Mary would be able to infer the experience of red before actually observing a rose, even with all of those facts, then you're admitting the existence of first person subjective facts, which cannot be reduced to objective third person facts, not even in theory. Daniel Dennett has some great responses to these challenges.
- anon84873628 2y ago
  >If physicalism is true, then everything that can be observed must reduce to objective third person facts. You are erroneously equating "physicalism" with "reductive physicalism". It's clear to many of us that qualia are something subjective and non-physical yet emerge from physical processes.
  - naasking 2y ago
    Yes, people are capable of convincing themselves of all kinds of nonsense. The kind of ontological emergence you would require in such a model of qualia is still of a completely different kind than any other kind of emergence, and so still requires extending the ontology of basic physicalism. There seems to be very little motivation to do so at this point. Let's not repeat the mistakes of vitalism.
    - anon84873628 2y ago
      That seems to be a value judgement about whether consciousness is a categorically different type of "ontological emergence" compared to others. Of course consciousness seems more mysterious because we don't have the explanation yet. Looking down at the levels we supervene doesn't have the same mystique, though they would be just as inscrutable if trying to look up. Going from quantum field theory to Newtonian mechanics is just as weird a departure as the reverse. And does Newtonian mechanics prepare you for the existence of Bayesian statistics? Biological agents bouncing around randomly? The gestalt of an ecosystem? There's no reason to assert that we can't one day have the math for describing consciousness too.
      - naasking 2y ago
        > That seems to be a value judgement about whether consciousness is a categorically different type of "ontological emergence" compared to others. It's not a value judgment to point out that objective third person facts can logically entail other objective third person facts, but cannot logically entail subjective first person facts as with qualia. That's the whole point of the hard problem. All forms of ontological emergence we've actually seen are the first sort of entailment, but to accept and explain qualia with ontological emergence, you need to accept the second kind of emergence, which is a whole new thing we've never seen and we're supposed to accept it only for consciousness because we have such a hard time accepting that our perceptions on this could be flawed. It's simply more plausible that we're mistaken about subjective first person facts IMO.
nearbuy 2y ago
> or at least that all such effects are shallow enough that they can be perfectly faked Physicalism implies that things we wouldn't intuitively think of as conscious can perfectly mimic all such effects. Imagine there's a person, John, and you take a precise scan of every neuron of his brain (or every particle if you prefer). You also record all the sensory input signals from his neurons to his brain. You write all this information down in a giant stack of papers. Then you go about simulating the brain with pencil and paper, computing its thoughts and actions (in this thought experiment people have deciphered exactly how neurons work). Maybe it takes you a trillion years to simulate one day of John's life, but you diligently do it. Physicalism tells us that you can simulate John perfectly this way. You could perfectly predict every word is said, and every muscle he moved. You could feed the motor neuron outputs of your simulation into a robot replica of John, and it would act indistinguishably from the original John. Is this pencil and paper simulation of John a p-zombie? We either have to accept that this pencil and paper simulation of John is conscious, or that it's a p-zombie.
- anon84873628 2y ago
  >Physicalism implies that things we wouldn't intuitively think of as conscious can perfectly mimic all such effects. This is the multiple relizability argument and it only discounts certain types of physicalism that aren't popular anymore. I consider myself a physicalism and answer that the simulation of John is conscious.
  - nearbuy 2y ago
    That's the normal physicalist position as far as I'm aware. Is there a physicalist theory where the simulation isn't conscious? I was replying to a commenter who doubted that a non-conscious entity could mimic a person accurately. I'm pointing out the implication that without p-zombies, just by writing a bunch of stuff on paper, you created a conscious being. I'm not arguing that's false; just that intuitively it's a tough pill to swallow and if you don't want to accept that, p-zombies are the alternative.