Comments on: #119 The Zombie Solution

By: Azraphon

Azraphon — Tue, 25 May 2010 15:07:09 +0000

@chaospet Blast! The zombie invasion of this world is once again halted by phenomenal chauvinism! We shall have our revenge

In all seriousness though, given that I will still believe myself to be experiencing pain, I can’t see how it would be preferable to me to have my qualia turned off. It’s one of those things that seems appealing at first, but then David Chalmers has a quick word and points out that it’s not such a sweet deal.

By: chaospet

chaospet — Tue, 25 May 2010 15:00:24 +0000

@Azraphon – Unfortunately I think you’ve just convinced me that you ARE a zombie, for only a zombie could be so dismissive of the moral significance of qualia.

By: Azraphon

Azraphon — Tue, 25 May 2010 09:06:36 +0000

Besides which, I have definitely had qualia while suffering. So, at least for my part, I can empirically disprove the theodicy. That or God hates me.

How irritating that I can’t prove myself not to be a zombie. I can see why some choose not to believe in the possibility.

By: Azraphon

Azraphon — Tue, 25 May 2010 08:47:07 +0000

@chaospet – The phenomenal aspect only seems significant because we’re phenomenal creatures. If you were a zombie, you wouldn’t know what you were missing. In fact, you wouldn’t notice the difference between pain felt normally and under the anaesthesia, since if it’s just the qualia that are being switched off, your cognitive states remain the same. So, if one takes consciousness and the nature of qualia seriously, as I do, there really is no difference except for a prima facie semantic difference, between phenomenal pain and non-phenomenal pain. There would be neither a measurable difference to me, nor to a third person, excluding our misguided supreme being. The only difference would come about if God also turned off my nociception, which is a physical change and constitutes anaesthesia anyway.

@Wm – Even so, anaesthetists are affecting something cognitive, i.e. something functional, i.e. something physical. We aren’t going to come close to a philosophical zombie in this world, because we live in a world where phenomenal facts seem to supervene on physical ones. Whether this is true in all possible worlds is a matter of continued debate.

By: Wm Tanksley

Wm Tanksley — Mon, 24 May 2010 19:09:55 +0000

@Wm – you seem to have missed my point about the anaesthetics. They affect our nervous system, and our phenomenal experience only changes because of that. There is no strongly conceivable sense in which I could change my phenomenal consciousness without my cognitive systems being effected, almost by definition.

I accidentally made my purpose unclear by replying to you where I did. I wasn’t intending to deny that anesthetics affect the brain; I was intending to say that we can to all appearances _almost_ turn off the phenomenal aspect of consciousness with only minimal side effects.

I wasn’t trying to explain how science would allow us to construct perfect philosophical zombies within 10 years; I was simply attempting to give the closest possible example to a philosophical zombie that we have right now.

This fails the definition much worse than simply because its cause is a functional change in the nervous system. It fails because it changes how the “zombie” actually behaves — the putative zombie no longer can differentiate between sustained pain and instantaneous pain.