On Jan 16, 2014, at 8:41 AM, Stephen Paul King <stephe...@provensecure.com
> wrote:
Dear Jason,
Could you be more specific about why you are skeptical of p-
zombies? I have my reasons to disbelieve in them, but I am curious
as to your reasoning.
Ask a zombie if it is conscious, and it will say yes. For some
unexplianed reason it is lying, even though it does not believe itself
to be lying, and even though it has all the same informational
patterns in it's brain at the time.
Throw a ball to a zombie and have it catch it. It caught the ball
without seeing it, even though it saw it by every third person
measurable description of what seeing involves. The information went
into it's brain, spread to other parts of it's brain, was used to
catch the ball, was stored, and when you ask the zombie if he saw the
ball his brain recalls the information that it did, again, for some
reason it is lying, since zombies cannot see.
Finally consider a world where everyone is a zombie. They still have
their Descartes and dennett, their mystics, theories of dualism,
epiphrnominalism, functionalism and so on. They have books on
consciousness and thought experiments like inverted qualia. They have
classes on consciousness and mailing list discussions about zombies.
Yet all this, is supposed to be a product of things that never once
were conscious!
That's why I find them so doubtful.
Jason
On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 9:17 AM, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com>
wrote:
On Jan 16, 2014, at 2:11 AM, Stathis Papaioannou
<stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
On 16 January 2014 16:26, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
The computational metaphor in the sense of the brain works like the
Intel
CPU inside the box on your desk is clearly misleading, but the sense
that a
computer can in theory do everything your brain can do is almost
certainly
correct. It is not that the brain is like a computer, but rather,
that a
computer can be like almost anything, including your brain or body, or
entire planet and all the people on it.
Jason
I think neuroscientists have, over decades, used the computational
metaphor in too literal a way. It is obviously not true that the brain
is a digital computer, just as it is not true that the weather is a
digital computer. But a digital computer can simulate the behaviour of
any physical process in the universe (if physics is computable),
including the behaviour of weather or the human brain. That means
that, at least, it would be possible to make a philosophical zombie
using a computer.
How does this follow? Personally I don't find the notion that
philosophical zombies make logical sense at all.
Jason
The only way to avoid this conclusion would be if
physics, and specifically the physics in the brain, is not computable.
Pointing out where the non-computable physics is in the brain rarely
figures on the agenda of the anti-computationalists. And even if there
is non-computational physics in the brain, that invalidates
computationalism, but not its superset, functionalism.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
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Stephen Paul King
Senior Researcher
Mobile: (864) 567-3099
stephe...@provensecure.com
http://www.provensecure.us/
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