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Philosophical Zombies are not falsifiable, as they are necessarily completely indistinguishable from conscious beings in any way we could test or measure. Falsi

Philosophical Zombies are not falsifiable, as they are necessarily completely indistinguishable from conscious beings in any way we could test or measure. Falsifiability is one of the pillars of modern scientific thought and crucial to drawing useful conclusions about the world. If there is no amount of interrogation that could possibly convince you that another being (in silico or otherwise) possessed consciousness, your logic can be followed through to solipsism.

new299 14y ago
"Philosophical Zombies are not falsifiable, as they are necessarily completely indistinguishable from conscious beings in any way we could test or measure." You might impose an additional criteria such as complexity limits as I suggested, which could lead you to a definition of concuousness as a near minimal encoding of "human like" responses. And would of course be falsifiable. But you can take it in the other direction for example someone who is completely paralysed, they might be conscious but we'd have no way of knowing. That could bring into play the idea that the ability to interact with the rest of the universe is an integral part of concuousness. The problem is that to most people consciousness is defined by its purely subjective experience. Mind from matter people would possibly say that subjective experience is an illusion. Searle's thought experiments highlight that fact, which is what makes them useful, because they make the division between the two camps clear.