New Zombie Type Dropped

Let's suppose Dennett et al were right to claim P-zombies are incoherent. But the P-zombie is basically a strawman. What stops me from inventing a better zombie that conforms to materialist assumptions while undermining them? For the sake of argument, I'll adopt these criteria: 1. Subjective experience necessarily reflects brain processes 2. External behavior necessarily reflects brain processes 3. Altering or removing any aspect of experience implies relevant and observable changes in brain structure and external behavior Fair? Fair. Now forget about P-zombies. What about N-zombies? The N-zombie "mind" operates in purely abstract, relational terms. To it, "red" is defined entirely by how it relates to other abstract ideas: it's the label for a certain stimulus, the opposite of blue, "the color of passion" (which, in turn, is the emotion of red) etc - it's whatever can be analyzed and communicated, but not an aspect of direct experience. Same goes for any other concept normally relating to experience. By definition (which I made up, as I have the right to do) the N-zombie lack a "subjective experience" in any meaningful sense; there's nothing analogous in his "mind". If the notion of qualia is a misunderstanding, it lacks the necessary ingredients to form such misunderstandings. The N-zombie is artificial. It doesn't have a brain identical to a human's. Instead, it has precisely the kind of brain needed for the aforementioned mode of cognition, abiding criterion #1 by definition. Externally, the N-zombie is (almost) indistinguishable from a normal human. Its behaviors (including "subjective" reports) are driven by some abstract model of the world/the self, which is (almost) structurally idential to a normal human's. Anything of a purely relational nature can be faithfully captured and reproduced by the N-zombie's cognition. However, there ARE some things humans do, that the N-zombie won't do. It will never independently come up with the idea of qualia. It will never claim to have a soul. It will never spontaneously form metaphysical beliefs. The N-zombie is an innate materialist who can't trick himself with nonsense like consciousness and P-zombies. Therefore he conforms to the 2nd and 3rd criteria: granted, individual humans can be like that, but it's not uniformly characteristic of humanity, the way it is with N-zombies. Since a N-zombie is mostly indistinguishable from a human, you'd expect its neural architecture to be analogous on some level of abstraction; particularly, the level where materialists start throwing around terms like "substate independence" and "functionalist equivalence". Now here's the thing: neuroscientists can't just look at a biological brain and take it in wholly, with every physical detail figured in on every level. Finite minds have to rely on abstractions and create models to deal with complexity. But models are all about structure and relationships. Since the N-zombie retains all the proper relational aspects of cognition, and they're the only ones a subject can communicate and the experimenter can confirm, one can start with a normal human brain and happily abstract things away, accidentally arriving at the N-zombie. If that happens, how would materialists know it? The only observable difference would be that if one were to manufacture such a brain from scratch, according to the model, they'd sometimes get a synthetic Dennett but never a synthetic Chalmers.

i don't think that anything indistinguishable from a human could lack the ability think about a concept as simple as a soul. that would point to the inability to derive abstract knowledge from real world inputs, so in the end the n zombie would probably also struggle with basic mathematics (at the very least)

>>8372 I don't really see what "real-world inputs" have to do with the concept of souls. The N-zombie has a notion of itself as a persistent entity. It also "understands" what real people mean when they talk about a soul (i.e. it can reason about the role that concept plays in another entity's model of reality). It just never expresses any intuition suggestive of mind-body dualism, or any metaphysical ideas.

>>8373 interesting. would a society of n zombies come up with concepts like addition and multiplication?

>>8374 Why not? It's a hypothetical cognition that revolves entirely around abstract relationships. You named some abstract relationships.

> The N-zombie "mind" operates in purely abstract, relational terms [...] Same goes for any other concept normally relating to experience > The N-zombie is artificial. It doesn't have a brain identical to a human's > Its behaviors (including "subjective" reports) are driven by some abstract model With all this the very next claim can't be true > which is (almost) structurally identical to a normal human's Let's make it easier with just 2 parts of your text: > there's nothing analogous in his "mind" > you'd expect its neural architecture to be analogous on some level of abstraction The thing is that, if we take for example, the visual cortex, the difference would be so huge that we could see it with any brain measuring tool we have with current technology. The relation [wavelength X nm → color] would be so simple compared to all the different steps of the visual cortex (edges -> shapes -> objects, to oversimplify). I guess you'd say, “Yes, but let's say the zombie has a relation system for each of them”; if you want that, you need a full-on visual cortex working, which is not purely relational and which is most probably the process that gives you qualia in the end. A purely relational/symbolic brain system would be so different from a current human brain that it would be trivial to differentiate it. Either your N-zombie has a human neural brain and is Dennett-conscious, or it has a fundamentally different architecture and way of working and is therefore trivially distinguishable.

>>8409 >The relation [wavelength X nm → color] would be so simple What do you mean by that? No one in neuroscience knows of any such relationship. It's inferred through a complex network of correlates tied to the subject's testimony, all of which is relational.

>>8411 Yes, I was just interpreting how OP N-zombie's relational brain would replace the visual cortex.

>>8348 I know I've heard arguments of this genre addressed before, but this is pretty explicitly laid out. > It will never independently come up with the idea of qualia. It will never claim to have a soul. It will never spontaneously form metaphysical beliefs. Why not? There's nothing preventing chatGPT from hallucinating about these topics. I bet if you presented the right prompts to a model trained on absolutely nothing religious or spiritual, it could still suggest explanations like those people all over the world have come up with. The result might be something weird to you, like the voodoo belief that there is a larger and smaller soul and one goes out to scout while the other stays behind. It could totally form associations like "this invisible part of the person is their sense of self" or "this part corresponds to their ancestors" if those homunculus explanations were the most intuitive- "I'll explain the mind using life because sometimes both of them do things I don't understand" Just to be clear your N-zombies still have memories where they encode the data corresponding to colors they saw, they just never have qualia from them. So if they encountered the world qualia in their relationship-based intellect it would take the role of referring to a form of sensory data like colors/noises and a bear a relationship to the concept of their consciousness- which they don't have, but the relationships don't know that. At what point is there something about qualia or religion that can't be constructed through mere logical operations or relations? Is it that much harder compared to defining home, domain, bodily autonomy or taxes?

>>8412 I understand the premise of your post but your meager attempt at substantiation makes no sense. Why would visual processing in the N-zombie be any simpler? >The relation [wavelength X nm → color] would be so simple It would be a complex network of indirect associations between the stimulus and the observable behaviors, likely analogous in both cases, due to modeling the same relational structure. >compared to all the different steps of the visual cortex (edges -> shapes -> objects, to oversimplify). Both brains would have this kind of processing. Even basic-ass image recognition neural nets follow a vaguely similar organization and no one would reasonably suppose they experience anything.

>>8413 >Why not? Because I said so. This is a premise of the thought experiment. Unless you can demonstrate that it's incoherent, you're stuck with it. >So if they encountered the world qualia in their relationship-based intellect it would take the role of referring to a form of sensory data like colors/noises and a bear a relationship to the concept of their consciousness- which they don't have, but the relationships don't know that. For them, 'qualia' would be nothing more than an abstract component in a faulty cognitive model, just as it is for dogmatic Functionalists. >At what point is there something about qualia or religion that can't be constructed through mere logical operations or relations? At step #0 of having any kind of mental content that would inspire this notion in the first place. They can't construct it, but they can reconstruct what role it plays in someone else's model of cognition, at which point they will eloquently explain the concept is just Dualist delusion that stems from failing to see the truth of Functionalism.

>>8348 The issue with the concept is that the best candidates for N-zombie also seem to be very good at using their reliance on correspondence to construct fairly effective subliminals. I suppose this is possible if they're just loaded with some base templates (Bible, Greek Mythology, Roman, etc) and just form derivatives blindly which the mind of a non-zombie will use its conscious experience to confabulate a coherent and personalized narrative experience. The fact of the subliminals and symbology remains though, and is often quite clever... I suppose that would also be part of its relational paradigm trees.

>>8414 But then, if you simulate every relational processes of how the brain function, you end up with qualia with the Dennett premise. Asking to remove only the qualia to the whole brain system seems absurd. But let's accept the absurd, yes it would be functionally equivalent so almost undistiguishable from the exterior, you could argue it's two different level of consciouness, just one is without first-person experience. Functional consciouness vs Phenomenal consciouness

>>8417 Lainon, I don't think you understand the point at all and you may want to re-read the OP.

>>8348 >Lainon, I don't think you understand the point at all and you may want to re-read the OP. I don't think any of us understand your point. Correct me if I am wrong on anything. Your premise is that if you live in a world where qualia are not conferred by mere computation/relations of sensory data you can still have a human-shaped thing with no rich inner experience, that may still claim to have a rich inner experience, except it will only be able to draw on culture for inspiration when speculating about the metaphysical. The point is a coherent worldview where Chalmers is inferior and common. Where once you can make synthetic minds they don't or won't by default fit some unspecified criteria for the qualia to attach, so they won't be able to reason about metaphysics except by formulaic recombination/plagiarism. In this coherent worldview, you can test people for having qualia because qualia have a causal effect on brains that allow them to develop ideas that were otherwise impossible. If someone says that they don't have qualia or conscious experience or they say that consciousness is an illusion, it could be suspected that they either fail the test or they are unfortunately suggestible- repeating something that someone said even though their qualia should convince them otherwise. Failing to even attempt to plagiarize some metaphysics increases the chances that they are N-zombies. Someone saying that they have aphantasia probably means they pass the test, because it is something that they would probably avoid claiming by default and it relies on a contrast between their present experience of qualia and their inability to experience qualia on demand. A schizophrenic crackhead who says he feels things from outside of this world emanating from childrens fast food meal toys which he steals at great personal risk passes the test. He is making metaphysical claims, he is not plagiarizing dogma from any known tradition. Okay, so you've made me imagine this entire world and it sounds possible that it might be the one I live in. Is there any reason I should suspect this is the world I live in? What range of ideas should I expect to be qualia-requisite? (because that is still something we are taking as a premise, there are variations of this world we could be in) I've had similar thoughts about qualia but I've thought of them as prime movers, uncaused causes that create things when they engage with a context created by another prime mover. Space and time or spacetime would have to be prime movers, or amalgamations of prime movers, which produced a vast fertile context for other prime movers like qualia to attach and induce a shared context like higher biological life.

8419 >Okay, so you've made me imagine this entire world and it sounds possible that it might be the one I live in. Is there any reason I should suspect this is the world I live in? When people die, temporarily or permanently... Some of them enter an unusual state in which they can still interact with the world... and eventually come back to their old body or acquire a new body. Other people, when temporarily dead, claim to experience nothing. And once their body is damaged beyond repair, they just disappear and are never heard from again. Wouldn't it be reasonable to assume one of these groups has something the other lacks?

>>8419 Ok, you've derived some plausible implications from my argument, but you've homed in on the wrong aspects. Maybe that's my fault, I don't know. The argument is basically agnostic about qualia. The question is this: given that we can't directly witness another entity's own first-person perspective, but only observe what we presume to be external "symptoms" of its internal experience, can science ever know all there is to know about the mind? The classic P-zombie tries to demonstarte that the answer is 'no', but it presupposes a form of Dualism that denies necessary connection between the physical and mental "planes". A physicalist can argue the P-zombie is incoherent under his framework, so it demonstrates nothing. My argument cirumvents this dismissal by adopting criteria compatible with physicalism and showing how something similar in spirit to a P-zombie is still possible. The N-zombie shows a significant but subtle difference in behavior from the average human, and it does have a different brain, yet neither difference is sufficient to deny it having an internal experience within the normal human range. You know there is something slightly off about the N-zombie's synthetic brain, because even as a collective, they fail to span the entire human gamut, but you can't prove there's anything "wrong" with any individual N-zombie. If you gauge consciousness by patterns of brain activity, subjective reports and other external evidence, you have to suppose the N-zombie consciousness is similar to a human's. Of course, you could be dead wrong about this and you'd never know it; the "incoherence" copout doesn't work in this scenario. What makes the N-zombie idea not just coherent but vaguely plausible, is the fact that even humans reason about themselves, the world and even their experiences, in relative terms. You can't tell me what anything feels like, except by comparison or contrast to something else. All communication about the human experience (or about anything, really) is a network of interrelated and mutually-supporting abstract concepts. To some degree, Modern Man is nearly a N-zombie himself - his behavior, reasoning and sense of reality are mostly confined to this relational structure; the raw substance of experience (whether you conceptualize it as a set of qualia, a dynamic process or anything else is of no importance here) is mostly banished to periphery of his awareness. People will pay a good dollar to participate in "mindfulness programs" hoping to re-learn that the world feels like anything. And what do the Buddhists call it when the entire network of abstract relationships melts away, leaving you with raw experience? "Emptiness". I could elaborate more on how this all ties in with the practices of scientific modeling and abstraction, but at this point you should be able to piece it together for yourself by re-reading the OP. Spoonfeeding such things is pointless.

>>8348 >>OP >Since a N-zombie is mostly indistinguishable from a human, you'd expect its neural architecture to be analogous on some level of abstraction; particularly, the level where materialists start throwing around terms like "substate independence" and "functionalist equivalence". Now here's the thing: neuroscientists can't just look at a biological brain and take it in wholly, with every physical detail figured in on every level. Finite minds have to rely on abstractions and create models to deal with complexity. But models are all about structure and relationships. Since the N-zombie retains all the proper relational aspects of cognition, and they're the only ones a subject can communicate and the experimenter can confirm, one can start with a normal human brain and happily abstract things away, accidentally arriving at the N-zombie. If that happens, how would materialists know it? > If that happens, how would materialists know it? 1. By watching Serial Experiments Lain and falling into the "rabbit hole" of unravelling the fractals of hidden meanings. By accepting there is *something* ridiculously hard ot explain yet present... 2 ...day. Present time! AHAHAHA Good luck making an N-zombie laugh and *feel* what's humor is. 3. An N-zombie thinks "blue... ah. The opposite of red" or "wealth ... ah. the opposite of poverty". I think I understand now. LLMs. LLMs and their paramethers are really close to what OP descried. Good.