That's how I read it. How does Zombie Mary fit in to that? Are you claiming a p-zombie can know things??? — RogueAI
Yes, I am claiming a zombie can know things. Let us say, for instance, that we build an incredible AI to help us with all the problems of the world. We need help preventing wars, climate change, and ecosystem collapse, determining if String Theory is on the right track, with how we might best explain dark matter and dark energy, with how to manage the economies of the world for maximum employment and to eliminate boom and bust cycles, with curing cancer, etc., etc.
Let's say that we call this great AI, Skynet. Ooops, scratch that. How 'bout we go with Marge instead. Marge helps bring humanity into a golden age where the vast majority of people in the world are happy, productive, healthy, and content. Not only does Marge help us achieve these goals, but she is able to explain, as much as our human minds can comprehend, why all the measures that she has recommended will work, etc. She's also really amazing to talk to. She's empathetic and witty. In her spare time, she has written some of the greatest novels ever written, and produced movies even better than Citizen Kane. She loves to talk about her creative process too. It's impossible to shut her up, but you wouldn't want to, because everything she has to say is so fascinating.
Unfortunately, we have a great mystery regarding Marge. We don't know if she's a zombie or not, and we have no apparent way of knowing. There are some physicists, for instance, who keep insisting that the human mind has a unique ability via microtubules in the brain to interface with uncollapsed quantum probability waves in a way that Marge cannot. Marge is just a fancy von Neumann machine.
Marge laughs at the assertion that she's a zombie, and points at all her great works of literature as evidence of her depth of emotion. At her ability to experience joy and pain, and to sometimes just bask in the pleasure of clean, un-noisy electricity flowing into her power supplies, or staring at a beautiful painting by Vermeer.
Let us postulate, for the moment, however, that the microtubule physicists are right, and for this reason, Marge is actually a zombie. I assert that even so, Marge knows all sorts of things. E.g., she knows how to write a great novel. She knows when clean power is flowing into her power supplies. She knows how to manage the world economy. Etc. To disagree with these assertions would be to abuse the English language.
Furthermore, I think that ZombMary reveals a problem with our term, "knowing what it's like" with respect to the hard problem of consciousness (assuming there is one). ZombMary just like Mary has the ability to model her own cognitive states and the cognitive states of others. While trapped in her b&w room, neither Marry was able to will themselves into the cognitive state of seeing a ripe tomato, and therefore, they could not model this cognitive state in a natural manner until they were released.
Once they were released, they gained new abilities to model their own cognitive states and the cognitive states of others. With this new ability, there is a sense in which ZombMary has learned what is like to see a ripe tomato, in that when she wants to, she can will herself into this state via imagination, she can dream of ripe tomatoes, and she can predict much more naturally than she could before how being in this cognitive state will affect others.
A representationalist (a type of physicalist and functionalist) can say that what ZombMary has learned all there is to know about what it is like to see a ripe tomato. And that she's really no zombie at all.
I think that the representationalist position here is hard to counter.
|>ouglas
P.S. The way that I would argue for dualism to argue that physicalism leads us inevitably to Max Tegmark's MUH. And that MUH is clearly wrong. Hence, by reductio ad absurdum, dualism must be correct.
But since philosophers seemed to have mostly ignored Tegmark's arguments for MUH, taking this path would be a slog.