Only if you agree with David Chalmers' insistence that consciousness can't be explained purely mechanistically. P-zombies are literally defined as externally identical to a conscious person, except not conscious. But the IO if you will is still identical. Chalmers uses this false dichotomy to support his "Hard Problem of Consciousness". But there is no hard problem IMO. Chalmers can keep his dualist baggage if it helps him sleep at night. I sleep just fine without it. Science will figure it out in the end.
The hard problem is "how conscious can be explained purely mechanistically?". "hard problem" is just a label from this question. So I don't get how say there's no hard problem. It seems to be a legitimate question which nobody can answer.
The philosophical zombie is just a thought experiment to help understanding the distinction between conscience and IO.
Another thought experiment that I like is the macroscopic brain. Imagine a huge mechanical device composed of mechanical entities simulating neurons. Would this whole thing be conscious? and how would we know?
That's not the hard problem at all. The hard problem of consciousness is a question formulated by Chalmers in the 90s. The problem effectively states that even if we explain in perfect detail how consciousness works mechanisticially, we would still have to explain the existence of "subjective experience" this is highly controversial in the field and serves as a dividing line between physicalist and non-physicalist camps in the philosophy of mind.
The easy problem would be to explain how the brain operates to produce output in terms of input. The hard problem is to explain how subjective experience arises from the brain activity.
> 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)
If you explain how conscience arises from the brain activity, you effectively solved the hard problem.
How can science, whose subject matter is the external world, explain the internal world of sentience? Not only has it contributed nothing to this question, it was also never supposed to.
This is akin to a Greek of 5th bce asking Leucippus and Democritus how we could know the structure of a world we cannot see.
The absence of an answer is not proof of nonexistence or impossibility. It is just neutral absence. Absence as evidence is only """ valid""" when all possibilities are exhausted in a definite way. Outside of math, that threshold is exceedingly rare in problems of even moderate difficulty.
Moreover, this style of inquiry can easily be turned on its head and used to (apparently) redress the interlocutor... Neither are worthwhile endeavors.
Just curious, can you think of a non-contrived, moderately difficult, non-mathematical problem that has or even in principle could be settled through abscence of evidence? Especially a positive assertion. Closest I could come up with is say confirming a diagnosis by elimination, through abscence of evidence of other candidate diagnoses. But even then there's a non-zero possibility that it's a hitherto unknown disease, or that there was some false negative somewhere.
Isn't that a bit extreme? Sure we don't have "the answer" but saying that the amount of things we know about how our brain works, from behavioral rhings how can our perception system can he tricked, biases in our cognition modes, the mechanism of memory and how it fails ... down to more low leven things about how the neuronal tissue works, neuroplasticity, the effects of brain injury on cognition (my favourite is when patients subjected to corpus callosotomy probably function as two independent brains and yet the individual cannot tell from inside, it doesn't "feel" like two people).
There is tons and tons of research. As with all of science there is tons of crap among the good work. As with all of science, it requires a lot of work to understand the state of the art and build upon it.
Dismissing all of that says more about you than about our scientific understanding. Yes, we humans do prefer simple explanation that fit in our heads and that are easier to achieve. That's why so many people find more compelling to believe in conspiracy theories of various kinds: they offer a clear cut, simple and total explaination instead of the messy and partial understanding of a real, ongoing rational and scientific enquiry.
After all We do prefer explainations that "make sense". On a first glance, what's wrong with that? Isn't science also trying to figure out what "makes sense"?
There are plenty of examples where our intuitions clash with reality and in some case we ended up accepting that (e.g. most people can accept that we're living on a giant sphere even if it doesn't feel so), in some other cases we kinda-sorta accept it (quantum physics) and it other cases we flat out refuse to (questions around consciousness)
I agree with you. The way I stated it was a little blunt. But no matter what the hard sciences show, they don’t really make claims about subjective experience. This is simply because the hard sciences by definition make no such claims. They can find things like correlations between states of matter and claimed subjective experience, but this doesn’t really get to the point. I think if it ever does, it will be such a huge revolution that what we’re left with should be called something other than physics or chemistry.
I think people often conflate consciousness with the perception of consciousness (or consciousness of consciousness, or meta-consciousness).
Imagine a being that is "conscious* of some experience, but lacks the ability of reflecting about the fact that it has just witnessed an experience. Is such a being "conscious"? Answers will vary but I suspect they vary because people are answering different questions. Some are thinking about the meta-consciousness and some about direct consciousness.
> my favourite is when patients subjected to corpus callosotomy probably function as two independent brains and yet the individual cannot tell from inside, it doesn't "feel" like two people
My layman interpretation of this fact is that consciousness/sentience doesn't originate in the cerebral cortex, but rather, within deeper brain structures.
If only we had more than one person... Jokes aside:
By studying how that "internal world" emerges from the anatomy of the brain(neuroscience, neuropharmacology).
By querying that internal world in various interesting ways and studying the responses(psychology and behavioral biology).
By studying the theory of computation and its physical constraints(computer science, mathematics, physics).
And by studying language and its implications for cognition(linguistics).
Philosophers can't just sit in a bubble and figure this shit out on their own. They've tried that for milennia. At the very least their theories need to be physically, neurologically, and computationally possible...
Obviously science has things to say about these questions, even Chalmers would concede that.
I pose you a question. Can you prove, or suggest a way of discerning, whether this internal world, impenetrable to outside probing, actually exists? If you can't, do you think it's reasonable to stop all attempts at scientific inquiry without proof that it's hopeless?
This is just full of ontological and epistemological assumptions which have been mainstream for a few decades but are very controversial among philosophers. Philosophers don’t sit in bubbles—and use all the evidence they can find—and make great contributions to knowledge, even though what they do is not science. There’s a reason there are other subjects besides chemistry and physics.
Right, philosophers avail themselves of science all the time. Good ones do, anyway. But you were claiming science has no bearing on consciousness, yet even non-physicalists like Nagel heavily cite scientific knowledge. So which one is it?
I'm not on some crusade against the field of philosophy. Certainly philosophy has contributed mightily, and continues to do so. But I think physicalists like Dennet are making far more tangible contributions. Reading Dennet has been enlightening to me, he's one of the only philosophers I've found who can actually explain his philosophy to non-philosophers.
Chalmers on the other hand reads like a philosopher chasing his own homonculus. I don't find his arguments very clear and when I do manage to decipher him it seems to boil down to a stubborn insistence that fundamentally subjective experience must exist just because it sure as hell feels that way. I just don't see what the epistemic value is in keeping this neo-dualist baggage around. I don't see what it brings to the table. I see nothing that it explains that makes it necessary.
I don’t know where you get the idea that these guys are dualists. Maybe Chalmers, but I don’t think so. My favorites are Nagel and Searle, and neither is a dualist or a neo-Cartesian. Their main contribution, I believe, is simply to show how silly the computational theory of mind is. Dennet may be easier to read because he professes something which inspires the imagination, and is easy to digest, since it doesn’t conform to the truth.
If you reject physicalism, you must posit some non-physical "stuff" or mechanism to explain the "qualia" that you reject as being physical. That is inherently dualism. But dualism is a dirty word in philosophy these days, so thwy don't call themselves as much.
The hard problem of consciousness is an inherently dualist conception.
Goff for instance subscribes to the patently absurd view of panpsychism, where matter is posited to have subjective experience "built in" somehow. This is such an absurd view. He first posits that there must be some fundamental subjective experience. But then he can't actually come up with a cogent theory for it, so he then just posits that mind is fundamental to matter. So he's effectively just inventing new properties of nature out of whole cloth. But then even still he has no solid conception of what those properties are, what they do or how they interact to form a conscious mind in a brain. How is any of this helpful in any way? He took one dubious problem and projected it onto the entire universe, and gave himself another problem of emergence to boot. This is not progress, more like digging a hole for himself.
As for Searle, I'm not hugely familiar with his work, but I find his Chinese Room experiment, or rather his conclusions about it, misguided at best and wilfully ignorant at worst. The system reply, which I think is just obviously true, is simply dismissed with very little argument.
Again, I fail to find justification for fundamentally subjective experience other than it sure feels that way. That's more of a theological argument than a philosophical one.
The idea that Dennet is easier to read because he doesn't conform to the truth is pretty strange. He's clearly a very skilled writer and speaker. He's very good at avoiding a dense jungle of -isms, and when he does use them, he defines them very precicely and carefully. This to me is good philosophy. Dennet does a good job of laying out and explaining these ideas in a way that isn't completely convoluted. Argument is the core methodology of philosophy, and if a philosopher fails to represent their argument in clear way, why should I even take them seriously?
Philosophers are great at dressing up bad arguments in fancy, mystical, ill-defined terminology like "qualia". This to me is the philosophical equivalent of code smell. Whenever I read these closet dualists' arguments I have to pinch my nose.
It’s like, people with scientistic views, praising objectivity, claiming that consciousness doesn’t exist, come out with conclusions like “a system understands Chinese.” I’m afraid I find this so ludicrous that I can’t continue the discussion on a civil level.
I never claimed consciousness doesn't exist, just that it doesn't require magical homunculi and wonderstuff to work. Also, that's pretty much Searle's response too. Not very convincing when philosophers are even unwilling to make an argument.
Try reading "Waking Up" by Sam Harris. I feel it does a decent job of straddling the fields of science and philosophy, and where we are in each.
Science may not yet be able to explain consciousness but it certainly can inform our understanding, and the work continues. If nothing else, it can help us understand what consciousness is not, and much has been learned about how a consciousness experiences certain degradations of the brain.
>much has been learned about how a consciousness experiences certain degradations of the brain.
A good book on this is the late neurologist Oliver Sachs' "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat". It's a collection of interesting cases of exactly this sort. And Sachs was a wonderful author and speaker. Really recommend his talks as well.
