On 16 Jan 2014, at 16:11, Jason Resch wrote:
On Jan 16, 2014, at 8:41 AM, Stephen Paul King <[email protected]
> wrote:
Dear Jason,
Could you be more specific about why you are skeptical of p-
zombies? I have my reasons to disbelieve in them, but I am curious
as to your reasoning.
Ask a zombie if it is conscious, and it will say yes. For some
unexplianed reason it is lying, even though it does not believe
itself to be lying, and even though it has all the same
informational patterns in it's brain at the time.
Throw a ball to a zombie and have it catch it. It caught the ball
without seeing it, even though it saw it by every third person
measurable description of what seeing involves. The information
went into it's brain, spread to other parts of it's brain, was used
to catch the ball, was stored, and when you ask the zombie if he saw
the ball his brain recalls the information that it did, again, for
some reason it is lying, since zombies cannot see.
Finally consider a world where everyone is a zombie. They still have
their Descartes and dennett, their mystics, theories of dualism,
epiphrnominalism, functionalism and so on. They have books on
consciousness and thought experiments like inverted qualia. They
have classes on consciousness and mailing list discussions about
zombies. Yet all this, is supposed to be a product of things that
never once were conscious!
That's why I find them so doubtful.
I agree that zombies do not make a lot of sense ... assuming comp. But
if we forget all assumptions, the concept of zombie makes logical
sense. It is someone behaving like you and me, but which happens to
lack consciousness. I think your argument is build on the comp
intuition pump. You find the notion of zombie doubtful, because you
find non-comp doubtful, OK?
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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