Re: ZOMBIE: Now

From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Mon Dec 20 1999 - 13:01:42 MST


On Mon, 20 Dec 1999, Madame Ubiquitous wrote:

> That's not what I mean. Essentially, Kant would argue that we have no
> direct experience of the world, that everything comes to us essentially
> piecemeal as it passes through the filters of our senses, and that our mind
> then constructs the world as we "know" it out of those pieces. Without such
> construction, what we would basically have is meaningless raw data that we
> would be unable to make heads or tails of.

I would agree with this. Though, it is possible through mental exercises
like meditation to focus attention and raise some of the lower level data
up to a more conscious level.

> I'm starting to ponder the
> possibility that qualia can be equated to mental superglue of
> sorts...uber-concepts which fill in the incomplete spaces left by our
> partial perception and allow us to "know" a complete picture. Zombies, it
> would seem, do not possess this superglue, but rather just deal with raw
> data (why they shamble so slowly, perhaps? I mean, processing time has got
> to suck...). So, without that superglue, how do you "know"? It would seem
> to me knowing requires a complete picture.

It may be that you know, but you don't know that you know.

At least some people working on the brain believe that those "magical"
feats (super-arithmatic, pictographic memories, etc.) may be present
in each of us. There may be no *meaning* behind the computation of the
square root of 2^79-1 or having a perfect mental image of a telephone
book page and being able to recall any of the numbers. If the above
interpretation of qualia is correct, then zombies, like idiot savants
are lacking the conscious image of self that makes them the central
player of the "movie in the mind".

However, if I recall, don't zombies experience pain or something
equivalent? If they do, even if it is much more slowly than normal
humans, then it would seem that they do have "qualia". Idiot savants
certainly feel pain. On the other hand profoundly depressed or
abused people, may be so desensitized that they may essentially
"feel" nothing. I suspect this may occur in some individuals
who undergo interrogation as prisoners of war. They certainly have
qualia but have detached the "movie in the mind" (and themselves)
from them.

I'm not sure that the filling in of incomplete pictures could be
treated as qualia. That is simply a difference mapping (a mental
"diff" for the computerphiles) of a sensory experience and a
collective built-in image of what one expects the image (sound,
feeling, etc.) to be. Since "differences" in some circumstances
may be very dangerous, this should be happening at a very unconscious
level with your conscious mind only seeing someone raising the red
warning flag.

Robert



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