A p-zombie has some kind of behaviour triggered by a causal chain that starts in the outside world. A sleepy plant closes when touched by something. The plant is not thinking, yet it reacts to the outside world. A p-zombie would receive light, sound, smell input, and react accordingly. — Lionino

Why would the p-zombies of such a world be discussing their consciousness?

Yes, of course we have to pretend that. But the deeper problem is, if person is duplicaten, which 'part' of this person cannot be transferred to the duplicate? — Walter

If you have a duplicate that's a functioning person, indistinguishable from the original, then it seems to me anything that needed to transfer did.

That's why I would never be transported. Yes, the original is destroyed, and a duplicate is created. The duplicate doesn't have any sense of being a duplicate, but that doesn't mean anything. No reason they couldn't just create a duplicate at the destination. Although they'd certainly use it less often, not wanting hundreds of duplicates of everybody.

Might be handy in a war, though. Among other things...

But the show is the show. Roddenberry said he came up with the idea of the transporter because he couldn't figure out how to land the Enterprise. We have to pretend that, somehow, it is the same person, actually transported from A to B.

Because no-one really gets killed? — Walter

How is it you think no-one really gets killed? Is there not a human being standing there? Is it not a human being because of the way it came into existence? Even if one Riker was the original and one a copy (Which was not the case. Both were originals.), like a clone, it's still a person. Thinking, feeling, wanting, acting.

Have you seen the movie The Prestige?

If we create computers, robots, or programs, that are actually conscious, then they are conscious beings. Origin doesn't matter. State of being does.

Because if I get duplicated (no matter how), is it OK to kill one of the two 'me's'? — Walter

Why would that be ok??

*bow*

Thank you, folks. I'll be here all week.

Fiction is just that: Non-evidence, so it doesn't in any way constitute an argument one way or another.
Apparently Kirk was also split by the transporter, but not identical. So the story changes as the plot requires. — noAxioms

No. Kirk wasn't also split. Kirk was split. Riker was not. Two entirely different scenarios.

Kirk was, indeed, split in two. His yin and yang halves were separated.

Riker was duplicated. The transporter beam made the journey from the planet to the Enterprise, AND it was reflected back down to the planet. Two identical Rikers. Both are the original.

Honestly, people. How do you expect to be taken seriously when you can't get the most basic facts straight??

The premise of p-zombies is that they would not ask that. They act exactly the same as us. — Lionino

Yes. My position is that the premise is not conceivable. Yes, we can write the words "I conceive of a p-zombie with such-and-such characteristics." But that's just writing words. I can write any outlandish thing i want, but that doesn't make it conceivable.
A square circle that was shaped like a pyramid and made entirely of chocolate flavored whipped cream flew into a black hole, lived there for a year, changed its mind, and flew back out.

If you train an AI on comments talking about things such as feelings and so on, the AI would talk as if it is conscious. — Lionino

Yes. But if you didn't train it that way, why would it? If you didn't train p-zombies that way, why would they?

If I asked a p-zombie if it was conscious, I would think its brain would prompt it to say something like, "What is 'conscious'?" Why would a computer that had no programming or memory related to consciousness think it was conscious, or come up with the idea on its own? If a p-zombie with no consciousness, nothing but stimulus and response, existed, why would it answer other than the way the computer would?

Right. If physicalism is absolute, then p-zombies - exact physical duplicates of us, down to the smallest detail - without consciousness are not a possibility. Any physical duplicate would be conscious.

If there is something like dualism, panpsychism, or whatever other ideas there are, and we remove that from an exact duplicate, so there is only the physical, and there is no consciousness, then there is no reason they would say Yes if asked if they are conscious, or have words for such concepts in their language.

My turn to not understand. :grin:
How would the p-zombies, which do not possess consciousness, come to be programmed to speak and act as though they did?

The difference is that we can program computers to act like us. But there's no reason to think p-zombies would act like us.
— Patterner

By your own argument, there is. The p-zombie would be biologically wired to act like us. — Lionino

That's not my argument. That's the premise, which i dispute.

Replace p-zombie with a computer that perfectly simulates human personality. Does the computer feel sadness when it cries? That is basically the question. — Lionino

The difference is that we can program computers to act like us. But there's no reason to think p-zombies would act like us.

Why are we assuming language? That seems a conscious ability, whereas we're talking about physically identical, yet non-conscious entities. — AmadeusD

That's the scenario we're given. P-zombies are supposed to act exactly like us. We would have no way of knowing that they have no consciousness. So they talk. And they answer questions the same ways we do.

The op says:

He then gives a thought experiment to show this where a man has his brain put in a vat but it is still connected, so his body is moving with out the brain in it. — Lexa

The brain is still connected. I take it that the reason the body is still moving is because the brain is still receiving and sending with the body, as though still in its natural state. But I may be misinterpreting. Difficulty ti know.

It seems to me that needs accounting for. Why would something that has no subjective experience - something for which there is nothing it is like to be, to itself - ever develop language about these things. If asked "Are you conscious?", why would it say "Yes"?

Like I've told you, I don't subscribe to illusionism, I'm not going to defend the position. — goremand

Yup. Just adding my voice. NotAristotle asked

Why is consciousness not being an illusion important to you? — NotAristotle

I would say a couple reasons. First is the same reason it's important to say 1 + 1 = 2, not 3. Second, because having the wrong idea of consciousness' nature will make it much more difficult to figure out how it comes about.

An illusion in my opinion is a kind of appearance. To say that "consciousness is an illusion" is to say that "there appears to be consciousness, but there actually isn't". — goremand

And the viewer of the illusion is the illusion itself. An illusion is fooled into thinking itself to be real. That's a heck of a magic trick! Reminds me of someone who said, "Look at him, pretending to be awake!"

Coincidentally, i just started listening to Anil Seth's Being You: A New Science of Consciousness on my commute. He says exactly what I think.

Here’s why the zombie idea is supposed to provide an argument against physicalist explanations of consciousness. If you can imagine a zombie, this means you can conceive of a world that is indistinguishable from our world, but in which no consciousness is happening. And if you can conceive of such a world, then consciousness cannot be a physical phenomenon.

And here’s why it doesn’t work. The zombie argument, like many thought experiments that take aim at physicalism, is a conceivability argument, and conceivability arguments are intrinsically weak. Like many such arguments, it has a plausibility that is inversely related to the amount of knowledge one has.

Can you imagine an A380 flying backward? Of course you can. Just imagine a large plane in the air, moving backward. Is such a scenario really conceivable? Well, the more you know about aerodynamics and aeronautical engineering, the less conceivable it becomes. In this case, even a minimal knowledge of these topics makes it clear that planes cannot fly backward. It just cannot be done.

It’s the same with zombies. In one sense it’s trivial to imagine a philosophical zombie. I just picture a version of myself wandering around without having any conscious experiences. But can I really conceive this? What I’m being asked to do, really, is to consider the capabilities and limitations of a vast network of many billions of neurons and gazillions of synapses (the connections between neurons), not to mention glial cells and neurotransmitter gradients and other neurobiological goodies, all wrapped into a body interacting with a world which includes other brains in other bodies. Can I do this? Can anyone do this? I doubt it. Just as with the A380, the more one knows about the brain and its relation to conscious experiences and behavior, the less conceivable a zombie becomes.

Whether something is conceivable or not is often a psychological observation about the person doing the conceiving, not an insight into the nature of reality. This is the weakness of zombies. We are asked to imagine the unimaginable, and through this act of illusory comprehension, conclusions are drawn about the limits of physicalist explanation. — Seth

Not to worry. I already disagree him in other ways.

I don't see this as anything but me.
— Patterner

Ah, a brain in a vat would not get essential information without a body. What are you without a body? What is your body without a brain? People with Alzheimer's Disease have a sense of who they are but they may not remember anyone around them. They are not exactly in the here and now, but often in the past. — Athena

The premise is that the brain is still connected. No explanation as to how, but that's the premise. It is still getting the same information from the body, through whatever unspecified means.

At least that's my interpretation of the premise.

Consciousness also has a functional component, when someone loses consciousnesses they also lose functionality. As far as I am concerned that is all there is to it. — goremand

if that's all there is to it, do you mean consciousness is functionality?

Yes, I saw The Bit Player a couple months ago. Enjoyed it. Shannon seems to be the most important person nobody ever heard of.

Then why is it surprising that it rained in the Sahara and not that it rained in Oxford?
— TheMadFool

As I pointed out, the surprisingness is only related to external information concerning the frequency of rain in these places, it has nothing to do with any supposed information within the message. — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course. The difference between information and meaning. No message provides the complete background necessary to make the information in the message meaningful. All messages assume the intended receiver already has at least a certain level of understanding of one or more topics. The sender need not explain what rain is, that the Sahara is a desert, or what a desert is.

But i found this thread because I'm listening to Anil Seth’s Being You: A New Science of Consciousness on my commute. I only heard of Claude Shannon a few months ago because posts here lead me to Barbieri, who writes about him, and now it seems he’s in every book I pick up. Seth wrote:

In this view, the “what-it-is-like-ness” of any specific conscious experience is defined not so much by what it is, but by all the unrealized but possible things that it is not. An experience of pure redness is the way that it is, not because of any intrinsic property of “redness,” but because red is not blue, green, or any other color, or any smell, or a thought or a feeling of regret or indeed any other form of mental content whatsoever. Redness is redness because of all the things it isn’t, and the same goes for all other conscious experiences. — Seth

Can someone explain this to me? Because it seems to me he's trying to apply (what little i know of) Shannon's work (and big thank you to for your posts in this thread) in ways he shouldn't. Maybe everyone does, and I'm only beginning to learn about all this. It seems to me I could communicate that i had an experience of pure redness in this way. But that's not the same as this being the nature of the experience. What if I had never seen the colors blue or green? My experience of pure red could not be the way it is because it is not colors i have never seen. It could only be because of the intrinsic property of "redness."

About Shannon's theory - I can't help but feel too much is being read into it. Shannon was a communications engineer, first and foremost, and the problem he set out to solve had some very specific boundary conditions. It was a theory about converting words and images into binary digits - as the article notes, Shannon might have coined the term 'bit' for 'binary digit' - and transmitting them through a medium. Why it is now taken to have a profound meaning about the nature of reality baffles me a little. — Wayfarer

Perhaps you agree?

I'm thinking the "what it is like to be..." is due to subjective experience. Kind of the same thing. If I did not have subjective experience, there would be nothing it is like to be me.

Do you think consciousness is subjective experience, but it doesn't lead to "what it is like to be..."? If not, if you don't think consciousness is subjective experience, and you don't think it is the concept of self, then what do you think consciousness is?

Apologies if you've told me this before. My 60 year old brain doesn't retain what it once would have.

Just started reading this thread. Sorry if I'm repeating what's been said.

Being conscious and having a concept of selfhood is very different — goremand

I agree. I like Nagel’s definition in What is it like to be a bat?

But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something it is like for the organism. — Nagel

I don’t see a concept of selfhood as being necessary for that. The concept of self is certainly an aspect of human consciousness, and likely other animals. But not necessarily a requirement of consciousness in general.

I mean it makes sense to say "the dog was knocked unconscious", right? — goremand

In Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, Anil Seth discusses many ways the word consciousness has been used, and differentiates between wakefulness and consciousness. The dog might be dreaming, which is a state of consciousness, while knocked out.

A concept of self is much more rare and specific, human babies clearly don't have it in my opinion, I would even say it's more of an idea that we are taught as opposed to an inborn attribute. — goremand

I don't know if you mean taught in the sense of someone literally setting out to teach that lesson. I suspect not, since I've never heard of anyone doing so. I assume you mean taught while interacting with others, which i agree with. I doubt someone raised without the slightest human contact, or interaction from whatever machines kept it alive, would develop a sense of self. Perhaps hearing ideas from outside our own heads is key to noticing self. The idea that there is no self without other.

Ah. Ok. No, I am still working my way through others. Slow process for me. I started it. But I don't expect him to have the answer to the question of how consciousness can come from the physical when he begins the book by saying we don't know how:

§0.4 The deepest problems have yet to be solved. We do not understand the neural code. We do not understand how mental events can be causal. We do not understand how consciousness can be realized in physical neuronal activity. — Peter Tse

I'm sure he has much great information about the physical. Which is fascinating in its own right, as in the Behe quote above. But all the physical detail doesn't answer the question, even in principle. Still, I do feel like a change of POV, so maybe I'll give this another go. Thanks.

Please clue me in! :grin: What do we see taking place that is on top of what I'm talking about, and how does it cause consciousness? The crux of the Hard Problem is that the physical events all add up to describe our behavior, which is a physical process. There doesn't seem to be anything extra going on. If there were physical events going on among all that that do not contribute to the behavior, we might hypothesize that they cause subjective experience. It might be difficult to explain how the physical events cause a non-physical process, but at least we might have a starting point.

Note that what you describe as science doesn't seem to include the study of processes, including processes underlying human consciousness. Study of processes might be worth considering. — wonderer1

Indeed, it is processes that lead to consciousness. Although I’ve heard someone say otherwise, I think consciousness, itself, is also a process. However, the Hard Problem is figuring out how the former lead to the latter. So far, we don’t have any clue.

Let’s take vision as an example. Here’s the very beginning of the process, as described by Michael Behe in Darwin‘s Black Box. (Anybody can say what they want about Behe’s conclusions, but he knows the science.)

When light first strikes the retina a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal. (A picosecond is about the time it takes light to travel the breadth of a single human hair.) The change in the shape of the retinal molecule forces a change in the shape of the protein, rhodopsin, to which the retinal is tightly bound. The protein’s metamorphosis alters its behavior. Now called metarhodopsin II, the protein sticks to another protein, called transducin. Before bumping into metarhodopsin II, transducin had tightly bound a small molecule called GDP. But when transducin interacts with metarhodopsin II, the GDP falls off, and a molecule called GTP binds to transducin. (GTP is closely related to, but critically different from, GDP.) — Behe

That, combined with a ridiculous number of other steps, each made up of an equally ridiculous number of events, describes how we perceive a certain range of frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can add other events and steps, and get a description of how we differentiate different frequencies within that range.

Add more, and we will see physical reactions to all of that - the description of events that leads to the process of our responding to what we perceive. Still more describes how patterns of what we perceive are stored in our brains. THEN, we can see how those patterns that are stored become part of the chain of events that lead to future reactions to new perceptions.

All of that is physical events and processes, and, overall, that describes our behavior.

The Hard Problem exists because none of that suggests that there is subjective experience present. We don't see physical events and processes in our brains in addition to the physical events and processes that explain our perceptions/responses/behavior that might explain consciousness. So what explains it? Something extra is going on, so it seems reasonable to expect something extra is causing it. We have made machines that can do quite a bit that we can do, including distinguishing colors. But we don't suspect they have the subjective experience of red and blue on top of the ability to distinguish the frequencies we call red from those we call blue. Why don't they? Their physical events and processes are not the same as ours, but they are still just physical. Why does purely physical and nothing extra cause subjective experience in one case, but not the other?

-Is the medium the key? What is it about biological that explains it that doesn't work with electronic?
-Is it the number of feedback loops, or types of feedback loops? How many, and how does the specific number cause the jump to subjectivity?
-Something else? What?

Ba DUM bum

I guess autocorrect visited me again. I'm leaving it. :lol:

Deacon talks about the importance of zero, and how it twisted to to his thinking.

Where is said thesis?

I am entirely lacking in formal education in all things philosophical. Reading what I can on consciousness. Plenty of available, of course. Less is readily comprehensible.

I listen to Incomplete Nature, among others, during my commute.

But, like Gravity, we only know what it does physically, not what it is essentially. — Gnomon

Not arguing for proto-consciousness here. Just pointing out that Brian Greene says something similar. In Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe, he writes:

If you’re wondering what proto-consciousness really is or how it’s infused into a particle, your curiosity is laudable, but your questions are beyond what Chalmers or anyone else can answer. Despite that, it is helpful to see these questions in context. If you asked me similar questions about mass or electric charge, you would likely go away just as unsatisfied. I don’t know what mass is. I don’t know what electric charge is. What I do know is that mass produces and responds to a gravitational force, and electric charge produces and responds to an electromagnetic force. So while I can’t tell you what these features of particles are, I can tell you what these features do. In the same vein, perhaps researchers will be unable to delineate what proto-consciousness is and yet be successful in developing a theory of what it does—how it produces and responds to consciousness. For gravitational and electromagnetic influences, any concern that substituting action and response for an intrinsic definition amounts to an intellectual sleight of hand is, for most researchers, alleviated by the spectacularly accurate predictions we can extract from our mathematical theories of these two forces. Perhaps we will one day have a mathematical theory of proto-consciousness that can make similarly successful predictions. For now, we don’t.

Deacon is great. As far as I was able to understand it.

In fact, from my perspective it would seem rather impoverished, to be dependent on language for a stream of consciousness. — wonderer1

Same goes for our thinking and communicating. I don't know how to think without it. If someone came up with a way to communicate without it, I suppose I could learn it. But can't imagine what it would be.

Concepts and ideas are physical things that we think about and can communicate to each other over physical mediums
— Philosophim

Concepts are not physical things. Find me one reputable philosopher who says otherwise. — Wayfarer

How much do they weigh? How much volume do they take up?

When I reflect on consciousness I try to think of it in physical terms to see your point of view. I put on my science helm (yes, it's a science helm and not a helmet), and I reduce all of reality to the level of atoms bouncing around in the void. Thanks Epicurus or Lucretius or Hobbes or whoever's idea that was. "Here are some atoms in this rock. But these atoms in my brain produce consciousness," I think to myself. And I wonder, "why are these brain atoms producing consciousness? What is special about them?" "Well maybe when you arrange atoms in that way they are conscious?" "But Not Aristotle," I say to myself, "that is entirely an ad hoc explanation and besides, why would the arrangement of the atoms matter?" And I am unable to answer. And that's the hard problem as I understand it. If you have an answer to that problem, I would be happy to hear it. — NotAristotle

Yes, that is the Hard Problem. How would purely physical things bring about a non-physical thing?

:up:

Subjective consciousness is not empirically observable. Behavioral consciousness is. — Philosophim

Behavior is not consciousness. That's stimulus and response. How do you behave when something sharp pokes into your back? How do you behave when your energy levels are depleted? These are not questions of consciousness.

The only reason its a mystery is you think that its impossible for consciousness to come out of physical matter and energy. Why? It clearly does. — Philosophim

It's a mystery because nobody can explain it. Christof Koch can't, try though he does. You are not even offering speculations. You only say it happens in the brain. That's obviously where my consciousness is. But what is the mechanism?

Is it some necessary desire that we want ourselves to be above physical reality? — Philosophim

Not for me. I don't care what the answer is. I just want to know what it is.

Because if you eliminate that desire, its clear as day that consciousness is physical by even a cursory glance into medicine and brain research. I just don't get the mystery or the resistance. — Philosophim

If it was not a mystery, we would have the answer. We don't. The resistance, in my case, is that the answer of "It just does" to the question of "How does the physical brain produce consciousness?" is no answer at all. Just as we wouldn't accept that answer to "How does eating food give us energy?", we shouldn't accept it here.

That is the Hard Problem. "Through our physical brain" is a where, not a how. "In the sky" does not tell us how flight is accomplished. "In our legs" does not tell us how walking is accomplished. "In our brain" does not tell us how consciousness is accomplished. The details are not insignificant. They are remarkably important. And they are unknown.
— Patterner

Sure, but its not the hard problem. — Philosophim

Yes it is. That's what is meant when people refer to the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

From Chalmers' The Conscious Mind:

Many books and articles on consciousness have appeared in the past few years, and one might think that we are making progress. But on a closer look, most of this work leaves the hardest problems about consciousness untouched. Often, such work addresses what might be called the “easy” problems of consciousness: How does the brain process environmental stimulation? How does it integrate information? How do we produce reports on internal states? These are important questions, but to answer them is not to solve the hard problem: Why is all this processing accompanied by an experienced inner life?

From wiki:

In philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness is to explain why and how humans and other organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experiences. It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining why and how physical systems give a (healthy) human being the ability to discriminate, to integrate information, and to perform behavioral functions such as watching, listening, speaking (including generating an utterance that appears to refer to personal behaviour or belief), and so forth. The easy problems are amenable to functional explanation: that is, explanations that are mechanistic or behavioral, as each physical system can be explained (at least in principle) purely by reference to the "structure and dynamics" that underpin the phenomenon.

From Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why any physical state is conscious rather than nonconscious. It is the problem of explaining why there is “something it is like” for a subject in conscious experience, why conscious mental states “light up” and directly appear to the subject.

From Scholarpedia:

The hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers 1995) is the problem of explaining the relationship between physical phenomena, such as brain processes, and experience (i.e., phenomenal consciousness, or mental states/events with phenomenal qualities or qualia). Why are physical processes ever accompanied by experience? And why does a given physical process generate the specific experience it does—why an experience of red rather than green, for example?

I don't know of anyone who doesn't think the brain is necessary for human consciousness. But that doesn't tell us how the material brain produces consciousness. If my refrigerator started showing signs of consciousness, and I said, "How the hell is my refrigerator conscious?", would you say "Unplugs refrigerator"?

I don't consider consciousness to be a thing but rather a process. — wonderer1

I agree.

Still, in light of the scientific evidence on the side of physicalists it seemed worth bringing up the question of why it is physicalists that are supposed to have the burden of proof. — wonderer1

The burden of proof is on anyone who claims to have the answer. Nobody has the answer at the moment. It’s all guesswork on everybody’s part. Somebody thinks it’s physical? Prove it. Somebody thinks it’s proto-consciousness? Prove it. Someone thinks it’s fields? Prove it.