From: Patrick Wilken (patrickw@cs.monash.edu.au)
Date: Sat Dec 11 1999 - 17:58:03 MST
>Look. Suppose I made a copy of you who was a zombie. He acted like you
>in every way, but he had no experiences, no qualia, etc.
>
>Would he believe he was a zombie? No. He'd be just like you: he'd insist
>that qualia are real, that he is having an undeniable internal experience
>right now, etc. If I asked that zombie "how do you know you're not a
>zombie?" what would he tell me?
Well if you made an identical physical copy how could it be a zombie? The
question only arises when you create a functional copy which differs
physically, since no-one has assigned a reasonable functional role for
qualia.
Of course if we created a functional copy of you that claimed it was
conscious we would be hard pressed to say it was not. The problem is that
we do not know how to relate the functional and the experiential in a
causal manner. Until we do this the issue of the zombie's conscious state
cannot be resolved. All you can do is create arguments that intuitively
feel right one way or the other. However science has taught us (e.g. QM)
that intuitions are useless when it comes to understanding these sorts of
fundamental processes in nature.
best, patrick
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Patrick Wilken
Editor: PSYCHE: An International Journal of Research on Consciousness
Board Member: The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness
http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/ http://assc.caltech.edu/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:06:03 MST