6 ms·

There's no such data, because the zombie problem is complete nonsense. Well, actually, it is complete nonsense precisely because empirical data can't say anyth

by nzp 13y ago

There's no such data, because the zombie problem is complete nonsense. Well, actually, it is complete nonsense precisely because empirical data can't say anything about it.

haberman 13y ago
By that argument, there is no moral argument against inflicting pain on others, because the pain of another is not something we can empirically observe, except by analogy of how we react to the pain we ourselves experience.
- nzp 13y ago
  First, the moral argument against inflicting pain on others doesn't depend on existence of pain. The moral dilemma is: is it acceptable to inflict pain on others or not. This is different, and to a large extend independent, from the question if pain exists in experience of others. In other words, if pain exists in others, it doesn't follow that you have to, by mere logical reasoning, make a moral conclusion that inflicting pain is wrong. There is an uncrossable ontological abyss between the empirical what is and the moral what should be. Second, the case of pain from an empirical side is not at all like what we have in the philosophical zombie "problem". We can empirically observe pain. There are all sorts of physiological and neural manifestations of pain. Of course, now you may say "ah, but how can we know that these empirical manifestations mean the person is experiencing the sensation of pain". Scientifically that dilemma makes little sense, it's simply unproductive, it's scientifically useless. If we were to go by that route, we could inject a similar dilemma into every scientific problem, which inevitably would lead to the problem of solipsism. How can we really, really be certain that anything at all exists? Well, I suppose we can't, but this is a question that science has long ago abandoned because it doesn't get you anywhere, it doesn't yield any useful results. Do note that unlike the question of pain, the zombie problem is defined so that there is in principle absolutely no way to detect, to measure, if someone is a zombie or not. On the other hand, we can in principle measure and detect events correlated with introspective reports on sensations. If we couldn't do that for some phenomenon it would be wise to consider that the phenomenon doesn't exist for the purpose of empirical scientific examination. Frankly, I'm surprised that my previous post (where I say the zombie problem is nonsense) got downvoted because this is the foundation of scientific methodology. If you can not, even in principle, measure/detect something then it makes no sense to discuss it. Of course, you can amuse yourself and speculate on it, but that falls outside of boundaries of scientific inquiry and I hope that's what we're discussing here.
  - haberman 13y ago
    > Of course, now you may say "ah, but how can we know that these empirical manifestations mean the person is experiencing the sensation of pain". Scientifically that dilemma makes little sense, it's simply unproductive, it's scientifically useless. Sure, it's scientifically impossible to evaluate. From a purely scientific perspective pain is just electricity. How would you convince an intelligent being that could not feel pain that it exists at all? The existence of pain falls outside the boundaries of scientific inquiry, I agree. But are you saying that it therefore doesn't exist? Because your earlier argument seems to be that we can explain the mystery of consciousness within a scientific framework, and that is the larger point I disagree with.
    - nzp 13y ago
      > How would you convince an intelligent being that could not feel pain that it exists at all? Assuming the being is "reasonable" (in this context it would mean it's willing to accept that there exist concepts that it may not understand or directly experience, and is willing to trust us), we could just point out the chemical and electrical phenomena correlated with pain and say that it's something that causes a certain kind of feeling of discomfort. We would get in trouble if this being also can not feel general discomfort, but you're probably bound to hit a wall in understanding at some point anyway when communicating with an entity whose experiencing capabilities are wildly different from ours. > The existence of pain falls outside the boundaries of scientific inquiry, I agree. But are you saying that it therefore doesn't exist? Actually, my point about pain was that it does exist, precisely because it can be examined and explained within a scientific framework. If we couldn't do that, then we could say that for all practical purposes, as far as science is concerned, "pain doesn't exist". The same is true for consciousness. What's difficult about it is that it's not a thing, there's no hormone for consciousness, there's no brain centre where it's localized, rather it's a process and a product both phylogenic and ontogenic so it's a lot harder to capture it and identify it, to put it "under the microscope". It's not some secret sauce to intelligence, it's a consequence of intelligence. And the most important part of the process is the dynamics of language acquisition (at least when we're speaking of conscious experience in Homo sapiens). I could go into the details but I'm afraid my posts would explode in length. ATM I don't have time to dig for good online material on this, and I'm under the impression that the theory in time got derailed into developing some practical aspects concerning child cognitive development, verbal learning etc, and away from the hard meaty implications we're discussing here, so I'm reluctant to even attempt to go into that rabbit hole. But they're explicitly there (the books I mentioned discuss the issue at length). Interestingly, about 10 years ago I was doing some work on word-meaning and symbol grounding development and I was both glad and frustrated to see literature on computer modelling in this area full of operationally defined concepts from the theory but people were seemingly unaware that this work has already been treated in depth on the theoretical level because there were no references to it then, I'm not sure if anything has changed, I've since moved on to other things. For example, the Talking Heads model[1][2]. It's not about consciousness per se, and although the authors never reference the socio-cultural theory of cognitive development (a horrible name in this day and age, it tends to evoke associations to post-modern dribble, but nothing could be further from the truth), it can give you a good idea of some aspects of the dynamics explored in the theory because what is happening in the TH model is exactly what the S-C theory describes is happening externally during language acquisition (in broader strokes though). As for the philosophical zombie problem, I'd like to retract what I said about it being nonsense. Actually, it's very useful in showing why worrying about subjective sensation of consciousness is completely useless in AI and is very much like asking how many angels can dance on a tip of a needle. On a very related note I'd add: people are severely underestimating the significance of the Turing test. [1] http://staff.science.uva.nl/~gideon/Steels_Tutorial_PART2.pdf http://staff.science.uva.nl/~gideon/Steels_Tutorial_PART2.pd... [2] http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=talking+heads+experiment&btnG=&as_sdt=1,5&as_sdtp= http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=talking+heads+expe...
trendoid 13y ago
I think its nonsense also due to this : "Many physicalist philosophers argued that this scenario eliminates itself by its description; the basis of physicalist argument is that the world is defined entirely by physicality, thus a world that was physically identical would necessarily contain consciousness, as consciousness would necessarily be generated from any set of physical circumstances identical to our own." Also this : "Artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky sees the argument as circular. The proposition of the possibility of something physically identical to a human but without subjective experience assumes that the physical characteristics of humans are not what produces those experiences, which is exactly what the argument was claiming to prove." from the wiki of p-zombie.

by nzp 13y ago

There's no such data, because the zombie problem is complete nonsense. Well, actually, it is complete nonsense precisely because empirical data can't say anything about it.

haberman 13y ago

By that argument, there is no moral argument against inflicting pain on others, because the pain of another is not something we can empirically observe, except by analogy of how we react to the pain we ourselves experience.

nzp 13y ago
First, the moral argument against inflicting pain on others doesn't depend on existence of pain. The moral dilemma is: is it acceptable to inflict pain on others or not. This is different, and to a large extend independent, from the question if pain exists in experience of others. In other words, if pain exists in others, it doesn't follow that you have to, by mere logical reasoning, make a moral conclusion that inflicting pain is wrong. There is an uncrossable ontological abyss between the empirical what is and the moral what should be. Second, the case of pain from an empirical side is not at all like what we have in the philosophical zombie "problem". We can empirically observe pain. There are all sorts of physiological and neural manifestations of pain. Of course, now you may say "ah, but how can we know that these empirical manifestations mean the person is experiencing the sensation of pain". Scientifically that dilemma makes little sense, it's simply unproductive, it's scientifically useless. If we were to go by that route, we could inject a similar dilemma into every scientific problem, which inevitably would lead to the problem of solipsism. How can we really, really be certain that anything at all exists? Well, I suppose we can't, but this is a question that science has long ago abandoned because it doesn't get you anywhere, it doesn't yield any useful results. Do note that unlike the question of pain, the zombie problem is defined so that there is in principle absolutely no way to detect, to measure, if someone is a zombie or not. On the other hand, we can in principle measure and detect events correlated with introspective reports on sensations. If we couldn't do that for some phenomenon it would be wise to consider that the phenomenon doesn't exist for the purpose of empirical scientific examination. Frankly, I'm surprised that my previous post (where I say the zombie problem is nonsense) got downvoted because this is the foundation of scientific methodology. If you can not, even in principle, measure/detect something then it makes no sense to discuss it. Of course, you can amuse yourself and speculate on it, but that falls outside of boundaries of scientific inquiry and I hope that's what we're discussing here.
- haberman 13y ago
  > Of course, now you may say "ah, but how can we know that these empirical manifestations mean the person is experiencing the sensation of pain". Scientifically that dilemma makes little sense, it's simply unproductive, it's scientifically useless. Sure, it's scientifically impossible to evaluate. From a purely scientific perspective pain is just electricity. How would you convince an intelligent being that could not feel pain that it exists at all? The existence of pain falls outside the boundaries of scientific inquiry, I agree. But are you saying that it therefore doesn't exist? Because your earlier argument seems to be that we can explain the mystery of consciousness within a scientific framework, and that is the larger point I disagree with.
  - nzp 13y ago
    > How would you convince an intelligent being that could not feel pain that it exists at all? Assuming the being is "reasonable" (in this context it would mean it's willing to accept that there exist concepts that it may not understand or directly experience, and is willing to trust us), we could just point out the chemical and electrical phenomena correlated with pain and say that it's something that causes a certain kind of feeling of discomfort. We would get in trouble if this being also can not feel general discomfort, but you're probably bound to hit a wall in understanding at some point anyway when communicating with an entity whose experiencing capabilities are wildly different from ours. > The existence of pain falls outside the boundaries of scientific inquiry, I agree. But are you saying that it therefore doesn't exist? Actually, my point about pain was that it does exist, precisely because it can be examined and explained within a scientific framework. If we couldn't do that, then we could say that for all practical purposes, as far as science is concerned, "pain doesn't exist". The same is true for consciousness. What's difficult about it is that it's not a thing, there's no hormone for consciousness, there's no brain centre where it's localized, rather it's a process and a product both phylogenic and ontogenic so it's a lot harder to capture it and identify it, to put it "under the microscope". It's not some secret sauce to intelligence, it's a consequence of intelligence. And the most important part of the process is the dynamics of language acquisition (at least when we're speaking of conscious experience in Homo sapiens). I could go into the details but I'm afraid my posts would explode in length. ATM I don't have time to dig for good online material on this, and I'm under the impression that the theory in time got derailed into developing some practical aspects concerning child cognitive development, verbal learning etc, and away from the hard meaty implications we're discussing here, so I'm reluctant to even attempt to go into that rabbit hole. But they're explicitly there (the books I mentioned discuss the issue at length). Interestingly, about 10 years ago I was doing some work on word-meaning and symbol grounding development and I was both glad and frustrated to see literature on computer modelling in this area full of operationally defined concepts from the theory but people were seemingly unaware that this work has already been treated in depth on the theoretical level because there were no references to it then, I'm not sure if anything has changed, I've since moved on to other things. For example, the Talking Heads model[1][2]. It's not about consciousness per se, and although the authors never reference the socio-cultural theory of cognitive development (a horrible name in this day and age, it tends to evoke associations to post-modern dribble, but nothing could be further from the truth), it can give you a good idea of some aspects of the dynamics explored in the theory because what is happening in the TH model is exactly what the S-C theory describes is happening externally during language acquisition (in broader strokes though). As for the philosophical zombie problem, I'd like to retract what I said about it being nonsense. Actually, it's very useful in showing why worrying about subjective sensation of consciousness is completely useless in AI and is very much like asking how many angels can dance on a tip of a needle. On a very related note I'd add: people are severely underestimating the significance of the Turing test. [1] http://staff.science.uva.nl/~gideon/Steels_Tutorial_PART2.pdf http://staff.science.uva.nl/~gideon/Steels_Tutorial_PART2.pd... [2] http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=talking+heads+experiment&btnG=&as_sdt=1,5&as_sdtp= http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=talking+heads+expe...

trendoid 13y ago

I think its nonsense also due to this : "Many physicalist philosophers argued that this scenario eliminates itself by its description; the basis of physicalist argument is that the world is defined entirely by physicality, thus a world that was physically identical would necessarily contain consciousness, as consciousness would necessarily be generated from any set of physical circumstances identical to our own." Also this : "Artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky sees the argument as circular. The proposition of the possibility of something physically identical to a human but without subjective experience assumes that the physical characteristics of humans are not what produces those experiences, which is exactly what the argument was claiming to prove." from the wiki of p-zombie.