Le 07-juil.-05, à 04:55, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :
How does a quasi-zombie differ from a full zombie?
Well a full zombie is not conscious at all. By a quasi-zombie I was meaning someone with some consciousness pathologies.
And how could his descendants ever realise this, even after centuries - wouldn't this require a foolproof 3rd person method of determining 1st person experience?
After centuries of "immortality" people can have better theories on correlations between some experience and some third person features of their brain.
I have myself once believed that synesthesia (hearing color, seeing sound) was sort of poetical stuff until I read people have discovered specific neuronal channels corresponding to it.
But here with "immortal zombie" I was just alluding on the fact that we can't known for sure the level of substitution. We must bet on theories, and in practice we let the doctor make the bet. Logician use "model" for testing the validity of an argument, and I can *conceive* (not believe!) something like
1- Hameroff is right and consciousness is produced by information processing in the microtubule in interaction with gravitation (say, this does not contradict comp)
2- Without it, the neurons can manage very high level information processing so that without the microtubule working someone can still pass a (long) Turing test
3- Yet, they could not pass a much longer Turing test. So that ultimately people discovered they are in a sort of loop, etc.
OK, this could contradict Darwin, and I could search a better example, but my point was just that nobody can give garantees on that matter (actually it is the same with taking a plane, or just a cup of tea).
Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
