From: Ken Clements (Ken@Innovation-On-Demand.com)
Date: Tue Dec 21 1999 - 00:47:16 MST
Damien Broderick wrote:
> So I suspect we all agree - Dan and Ken
> thinks we are zombies since this is the case, John and I think we're not
> because this is the case. Weird, man, but so it goes.
>
> Damien Broderick
Damien, bless your heart, you have just completed the proof along the time
honored form:
I prove A <= B,
You prove B <= A,
We get A = B.
The Philosophical Zombie thought experiment was presented to put up a straw man
(Zombie) identical, atom by atom to humans, but without consciousness or [the q
word] and then knock him down in the face of the idea that we are 'just'
patterns of atoms interacting with the atoms of our environments by the basic
laws of physics. The object was to show that assuming that Zombies could exist
(even if they do not) leads to a logical contradiction, so that consciousness
and the other stuff must exist beyond the laws of physics. See:
http://www.lucifer.com/exi-lists/extropians.4Q99/3725.html
When I first read about this (Chalmers), I translated it to engineering terms
that were more familiar to me. So I thought about an alternate world where
they build bridges, except these are zombridges. Now a zombridge is identical,
atom by atom to the kind of bridges we have here, except that in this world,
they do not have "good design" so, these zombridges always fall down as soon as
they are constructed (bummer). You must understand, the zombridges have the
same designs we have, it just is that these designs do not have the quality of
"good design."
As you know, folks like Daniel Dennett rip into this as rubbish that should be
roundly ridiculed and rightly routed to the round receptacle (ref given in the
URL above). However, pondering this, I detected a similarity with the kind of
arguments that went around when mathematicians were trying to prove Euclid's
fifth postulate. They said something like "Look, it has to be true, because if
it is not, the result would be just too weird." This held for a while until
Lobachevsky, Bolyai, and probably Gauss took the position that perhaps our idea
of the weird is the limiting factor, and made bold new discoveries. Thus I
take the position that says, "What if consciousness is just a little shadow
play put on by our neurosystems to get some useful overall behavior?" Or put
another way, what if the Zombie is real, and the idea of the conscious mind is
bunk? This goes well with the idea that you are not thinking the memes, they
are thinking you.
After working on it for a while, I could not find a difference that made a
difference (ala Gregory Bateson) if the conscious mind did exist, so I
concluded that I had to be a Zombie, and that everything I do, know or feel is
a result of self-propagating patterns of neural activity competing in a
Darwinian context to get to the future. It puts on a good show, most of the
time, but I have begun to see the little defects around the edges.
Let me share a thought I like from p.238 of _The Meme Machine_ by Susan
Blackmore, that expresses yet another way of looking at it, which is also
consistent with being a Zombie:
-- Note that here my view departs from Dennett's. For him 'Human
-- consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes (or more exactly, meme-
-- effects in brains)' (Dennett 1991 p. 210). This means that a person is
-- conscious by virtue of having all the thinking tools that memes provide,
-- including the 'benign user illusion' and all the self memes, and without
-- them they would, presumably, cease to have 'human consciousness'. By
-- contrast, I suggest that the user illusion obscures and distorts conscious-
-- ness. Ordinary human consciousness is indeed constrained by the self-
-- plex, but it does not have to be. There are other ways of being conscious.
-- There are implications here for artificial consciousness and for
animals.
-- If ordinary human consciousness is entirely dominated by the selfplex
-- then only systems that have a selfplex can be conscious in that way. So,
-- since other animals no not generally imitate and cannot have memes, they
-- cannot have the human kind of self-consciousness. This does not,
-- however, rule out the possibility that there is something it is like to be
-- a bat, or a rat, or even a robot.
-- Second, I want to emphasize that consciousness cannot do anything.
-- The subjectivity, the 'what it's like to be me now' is not a force, or a
causal
-- agent, that can make things happen. When Benjamin poured out his
-- cornflakes he may have been conscious, but the consciousness played no
-- role in making him do it. The consciousness simply arouse as what it was
-- like to be that human being, taking those decisions, and doing those
-- actions, and with a memeplex inside saying 'I am doing this'. Benjamin
-- may think that if 'he' did not consciously make the decision then it would
-- not happen. I say he would be wrong.
Check out: http://www.memes.org.uk/
I now conclude with the following little ditty:
If you're a Zombie and you know it, flip your bits!
If you're a Zombie and you know it, flip your bits!
If you're a Zombie and you know it, then your logic states will show it.
If you're a Zombie and you know it, flip your bits!
-Ken
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