Zombies Redacted

Welcome back!

The "conceivability" of zombies is accepted by a substantial fraction, possibly a majority, of academic philosophers of consciousness.

This can be made precise. According to the 2009 PhilPapers Survey (sent to all faculty at the top 89 Ph.D-granting philosophy departments in the English-speaking world as ranked by the Philosophical Gourmet Report, plus 10 high-prestige non-Anglophone departments), about 2/3 of professional philosophers of mind think zombies are conceivable, though most of these think physicalism is true anyway. Specifically, 91 of the 191 respondents (47.6%) said zombies are conceivable but not metaphysically possible; 47 (24.6%) said they were inconceivable; 35 (18.3%) said they're (conceivable and) metaphysically possible; and the other 9.4% were agnostic/undecided or rejected all three options.

Looking at professional philosophers as a whole in the relevant departments, including non-philosophers-of-mind, 35.6% say zombies are conceivable, 16% say they're inconceivable, 23.3% say they're metaphysically possible, 17% say they're undecided or insufficiently familiar with the issue (or they skipped the question), and 8.2% rejected all three options. So the average top-tier Anglophone philosopher of mind is more likely to reject zombies than is the average top-tier Anglophone philosopher. (Relatedly, 22% of philosophers of mind accept or lean toward 'non-physicalism', vs. 27% of philosophers in general.)

There is a stuff of consciousness which is not yet understood, an extraordinary super-physical stuff that visibly affects our world; and this stuff is what makes us talk about consciousness.

Chalmers' core objection to interactionism, I think, is that any particular third-person story you can tell about the causal effects of consciousness could also be told without appealing to consciousness. E.g., if you think consciousness intervenes on the physical world by sometimes spontaneously causing wavefunctions to collapse (setting aside that Chalmers and most LWers reject collapse...), you could just as easily tell a story in which wavefunctions just spontaneously collapse without any mysterious redness getting involved; or a story in which they mysteriously collapse when mysterious greenness occurs rather than redness, or when an alien color occurs.

Chalmers thinks any argument for thinking that the mysterious redness of red is causally indispensable for dualist interactionism should also allow that the mysterious redness of red is an ordinary physical property that's indispensable for physical interactions. Quoting "Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness":

The real "epiphenomenalism" problem, I think, does not arise from the causal closure of the physical world. Rather, it arises from the causal closure of the world! Even on an interactionist picture, there will be some broader causally closed story that explains behavior, and such a story can always be told in a way that neither includes nor implies experience. Even on the interactionist picture, we can view minds as just further nodes in the causal network, like the physical nodes, and the fact that these nodes are experiential is inessential to the causal dynamics. The basic worry arises not because experience is logically independent of physics, but because it is logically independent of causal dynamics more generally.

The interactionist has a reasonable solution to this problem, I think. Presumably, the interactionist will respond that some nodes in the causal network are experiential through and through. Even though one can tell the causal story about psychons without mentioning experience, for example, psychons are intrinsically experiential all the same. Subtract experience, and there is nothing left of the psychon but an empty place-marker in a causal network, which is arguably to say there is nothing left at all. To have real causation, one needs something to do the causing; and here, what is doing the causing is experience.

I think this solution is perfectly reasonable; but once the problem is pointed out this way, it becomes clear that the same solution will work in a causally closed physical world. Just as the interactionist postulates that some nodes in the causal network are intrinsically experiential, the "epiphenomenalist" can do the same.

This brings up a terminology-ish point:

The technical term for the belief that consciousness is there, but has no effect on the physical world, is epiphenomenalism.

Chalmers denies that he's an epiphenomenalist. Rather he says (in "Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism"):

I think that substance dualism (in its epiphenomenalist and interactionist forms) and Russellian monism (in its panpsychist and panprotopsychist forms) are the two serious contenders in the metaphysics of consciousness, at least once one has given up on standard physicalism. (I divide my own credence fairly equally between them.)

Quoting "Moving Forward" again:

Here we can exploit an idea that was set out by Bertrand Russell (1926), and which has been developed in recent years by Grover Maxwell (1978) and Michael Lockwood (1989). This is the idea that physics characterizes its basic entities only extrinsically, in terms of their causes and effects, and leaves their intrinsic nature unspecified. For everything that physics tells us about a particle, for example, it might as well just be a bundle of causal dispositions; we know nothing of the entity that carries those dispositions. The same goes for fundamental properties, such as mass and charge: ultimately, these are complex dispositional properties (to have mass is to resist acceleration in a certain way, and so on). But whenever one has a causal disposition, one can ask about the categorical basis of that disposition: that is, what is the entity that is doing the causing?

One might try to resist this question by saying that the world contains only dispositions. But this leads to a very odd view of the world indeed, with a vast amount of causation and no entities for all this causation to relate! It seems to make the fundamental properties and particles into empty placeholders, in the same way as the psychon above, and thus seems to free the world of any substance at all. It is easy to overlook this problem in the way we think about physics from day to day, given all the rich details of the mathematical structure that physical theory provides; but as Stephen Hawking (1988) has noted, physical theory says nothing about what puts the "fire" into the equations and grounds the reality that these structures describe. The idea of a world of "pure structure" or of "pure causation" has a certain attraction, but it is not at all clear that it is coherent.

So we have two questions: (1) what are the intrinsic properties underlying physical reality?; and (2) where do the intrinsic properties of experience fit into the natural order? Russell's insight, developed by Maxwell and Lockwood, is that these two questions fit with each other remarkably well. Perhaps the intrinsic properties underlying physical dispositions are themselves experiential properties, or perhaps they are some sort of proto-experiential properties that together constitute conscious experience. This way, we locate experience inside the causal network that physics describes, rather than outside it as a dangler; and we locate it in a role that one might argue urgently needed to be filled. And importantly, we do this without violating the causal closure of the physical. The causal network itself has the same shape as ever; we have just colored in its nodes.

This ideas smacks of the grandest metaphysics, of course, and I do not know that it has to be true. But if the idea is true, it lets us hold on to irreducibility and causal closure and nevertheless deny epiphenomenalism. By placing experience inside the causal network, it now carries a causal role. Indeed, fundamental experiences or proto-experiences will be the basis of causation at the lowest levels, and high-level experiences such as ours will presumably inherit causal relevance from the (proto)-experiences from which they are constituted. So we will have a much more integrated picture of the place of consciousness in the natural order.

This is also (a more honest name for) the non-physicalist view that sometimes gets called "Strawsonian physicalism." But this view seems to be exactly as vulnerable to your criticisms as traditional epiphenomenalism, because the "causal role" in question doesn't seem to be a difference-making role -- it's maybe "causal" in some metaphysical sense, but it's not causal in a Bayesian or information-theoretic sense, a sense that would allow a brain to nonrandomly update in the direction of Strawsonian physicalism / Russellian monism by computing evidence.

I'm not sure what Chalmers would say to your argument in detail, though he's responded to the terminological point about epiphenomenalism. If he thinks Russellian monism is a good response, then either I'm misunderstanding how weird Russellian monism is (in particular, how well it can do interactionism-like things), or Chalmers is misunderstanding how general your argument is. The latter is suggested by the fact that Chalmers thinks your argument weighs against epiphenomenalism but not against Russellian monism in this old LessWrong comment.

It might be worth e-mailing him this updated "Zombies" post, with this comment highlighted so that we don't get into the weeds of debating whose definition of "epiphenomenalism" is better.

Are you planning on doing this for more of the sequences? I think that would be great.

Nice.

So, when are you going to tell us your solution to the hard problem of consciousness?

Edited to add: The above wasn't meant as a sarcastic objection to Eliezer's post. I'm totally convinced by his arguments, and even if I wasn't I don't think not having a solution to the hard problem is a greater problem for reductionism than for dualism (of any kind). I was seriously asking Eliezer to share his solution, because he seems to think he has one.

This argument is not going to win over their heads and hearts. It's clearly written for a reductionist reader, who accepts concepts such as Occam's Razor and knowing-what-a-correct-theory-looks-like. But such a person would not have any problems with p-Zombies to begin with.

If you want to persuade someone who's been persuaded by Chalmers, you should debunk the argument itself, not bring it to your own epistemological ground where the argument is obviously absurd. Because you, and the Chalmers-supporter are not on the same epistemological ground, and will probably never be.

Here's how you would do that.

---- START ARGUMENT ----

Is it conceivable that the 5789312365453423234th digit of Pi is 7?

No, don't look it up just yet. Is it conceivable to you, right now, that it's 7?

For me, yes, it is. If I look it up, and it turns out to be 7, I would not be surprised at all. It's a perfectly reasonable outcome, with predictable consequences. It's not that hard for me to imagine me running a program that calculates and prints the number, and it printing out 7.

Yet, until you look it up, you don't really know if it's 7 or not. It could be 5. It would also be a reasonable, non-surprising and conceivable outcome.

Yet at least one of those outcomes is logically impossible. The exact value of Pi is logically determined, and, if you believe that purely logical conclusions apply universally, then one of those values of 5789312365453423234th digit of Pi is universally impossible.

And yet both are conceivable.

So logical impossibility does not imply inconceivability. This is logically equivalent to saying "conceivability does not imply logical possibility" (A->B => ~B->~A).

If conceivability does not imply logical possibility, then even if you can imagine a Zombie world, it does not mean that the Zombie world is logically possible. It may be the case that the Zombie world is logically impossible. Chalmer's argument does not rule that out. For example, it may be the case that certain atomic configurations necessarily imply consciousness. Or it may be any other case of logical impossibility. What matters is that consciousness as an additional nonphysical entity is not implied by its conceivability.

---- END ARGUMENT ----

O.O.O.O
O..O..O

I wonder what probability epiphenomenalists assign to the theory that they are themselves conscious, if they admit that belief in consciousness isn't caused by the experiences that consciousness brings.

The more I think about it, the more absurdly self-defeating it sounds, and I have trouble believing that ANYONE could hold such views after having thought about it for a few minutes. The only reason I continue to think about it is because it's very easy to believe that some people, no matter how an AI acted and for how long, would never believe the AI to be conscious. And that bothers me a lot, if it affects their moral stance on that AI.

I know people who claim that they don't have qualia. I doubt that it is true, but based on their words they should be considered zombies. ))

I would like to suggest zombies of second kind. This is a person with inverted spectrum. It even could be my copy, which speaks all the same philosophical nonsense as me, but any time I see green, he sees red, but names it green. Is he possible? I could imagine such atom-exact copy of me, but with inverted spectrum. And if such second type zombies are possible, it is argument for epiphenomenalism. Now I will explain why.

Phenomenological judgments (PJ) about own consciousness, that is the ability to say something about your own consciousness, will be the same in me and my zombie of the second type.

But there are two types of PJ: quantitative (like "I have consciousness") and qualitative which describes exactly what type of qualia I experience now.

The qualitative type of PJ is impossible. I can't transfer my knowing about "green" in the words.

It means that the fact of existence of phenomenological judgments doesn't help in case of second type zombies.

So, after some upgrade, zombie argument still works as an argument for epiphenomenalism.

I would also recommend the following article with introduce "PJ" term and many problems about it (but I do not agree with it completely) "Experimental Methods for Unraveling the Mind-body Problem: The Phenomenal Judgment Approach" Victor Argonov http://philpapers.org/rec/ARGMAA-2

This was longer than it needed to be, and in my opinion, somewhat mistaken.

The zombie argument is not an argument for epiphenomenalism, it's an argument against physicalism. It doesn't assume that interactionist dualism is false, regardless of the fact that Chalmers happens to be an epiphenomenalist.

Chalmers furthermore specifies that this true stuff of consciousness is epiphenomenal, without causal potency—but why say that?

Maybe because interactionism violates the laws of physics and is somewhat at odds with everything we (think we) know about cognition. There may be other arguments as well. It has mostly fallen out of favor. I don't know the specific reasons why Chalmers rejects it.

Once you see the collision between the general rule that consciousness has no effect, to the specific implication that consciousness has no effect on how you think about consciousness (in any way that affects your internal narrative that you could choose to say out loud), zombie-ism stops being intuitive. It starts requiring you to postulate strange things.

In the epiphenomenalist view, for whatever evolutionary reason, we developed to have discussions and beliefs in rich inner lives. Maybe those thoughts and discussions help us with being altruistic, or maybe they're a necessary part of our own activity. Maybe the illusion of interactionism is necessary for us to have complex cognition and decisionmaking.

Also in the epiphenomenalist view, psychophysical laws relate mental states to neurophysical aspects of our cognition. So for some reason there is a relation between acting/thinking of pain, and mental states which are painful. It's not arbitrary or coincidental because the mental reaction to pain (dislike/avoid) is a mirror of the physical reaction to pain (express dislike/do things to avoid it).

But Chalmers just wrote all that stuff down, in his very physical book, and so did the zombie-Chalmers.

Chalmers isn't denying that the zombie Chalmers would write that stuff down. He's denying that its beliefs would be justified. Maybe there's a version of me in a parallel universe that doesn't know anything about philosophy but is forced to type certain combinations of letters at gunpoint - that doesn't mean that I don't have reasons to believe the same things about philosophy in this universe.

Can you make "something" with the same input-output behavior as a human, and have that thing not be conscious? It doesn't have to be atom-by-atom identical.

I skipped the stuff on p-zombies when I read R:AZ because I experienced difficulty reading 'Zombies! Zombies?' and I didn't expect it to be as useful as what came later in the book.

Now I feel silly, because this time my reading experience was fluent and I had that extra processing motivation from the content's 'recency'.

Now I think it didn't have much at all to do with how useful I thought it would be at the time. It seems more like I asked "Are there minutiae on Penrose?" rather than "Will this be useful to know?"

After all, I didn't read the rest of the book via some mantra of instrumentality; not really. Instrumental value was a nice side effect like profits to the cheesecake industry is a nice side effect of consuming cheesecake. I really read it because it was enjoyable to read.

So, this content now seems accessible to at least one person to whom it did not seem accessible before. That seems like a plausible goal of someone rewriting something.

"a being that is exactly like you in every respect—identical behavior, identical speech, identical brain; every atom and quark in exactly the same position, moving according to the same causal laws of motion—except that your zombie is not conscious."

As someone with a medical background, I find it very hard to believe this is possible. Not unless Consciousness is reduced to something so abstract and disconnected from what we consider our "Selves" as to render it almost meaningless. After all, traumatic brain injury can alter every aspect of your personality, capacity to reason, and ability to perceive. And if "consciousness" isn't bound up in any of these things, if it exists as some sort of super disconnected "Thinking thing" like Descartes seemed to think, I really can't see the value of it. It's like the Greek interpretation of the afterlife where your soul exists as a senseless shadow, lacking any concept of self or any memory of your past life. What good is an existence that lacks all the things which make it unique?

Then again, as a somewhat brutal pragmatist, I cease to see the meaning in having an argument when it seems to devolve beyond any connection to observable reality.

I'm curious to see if this convinces Bryan Caplan & Sam Harris.

I'm afraid none of this article is relevant.  The whole point of the p-zombie argument is to refute materialism. Now, materialists are obliged to hold that the world is physically closed, meaning that everything that ever happens is purely due to chains of physical causes and effects.

So, are they saying that consciousness therefore doesn't have any causal agency?  That it is only the underlying correlated physical processes in the brain that have causal agency?  No, because they claim that consciousness is the very same thing as the underlying physical processes.

Now, even if we accept this somehow makes sense i.e that consciousness is actually one and the very same thing as physical processes, the point here is that it remains the case that the interactions of molecules as mathematically described by the laws of physics are sufficient in and of themselves to account for all change in the world, including everything we human beings do, say and even think.  

In other words, even if consciousness is identical to physical processes, we still only need appeal to physical processes to account for all change in the world, including everything we human beings do, say and even think. Any causal efficacy of consciousness is redundant. It is superfluous.  We do not need this causal agency as well as physical causation.  But, this being so, then a world of p-zombies is at least metaphysically possible.

Your arguments against p-zombies (which I'm sympathetic towards), cannot rescue materialism since your arguments appear to be directed against physical causal closure.  But physical causal closure is precisely that which materialists cannot deny!

I think that main problem of this (and similar) reasoning is its circularity. This circularity doesn't make such reasoning untrue, but weakens its evidence base.

It starts with (some version of) physicalism is true. And its conclusion is that there is nothing that is not physical.

If we take definition (one of) of the physicalism from SEP:

"(1) Physicalism is true at a possible world w iff any world which is a physical duplicate of w is a duplicate of w simpliciter." http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/#NonModDefPhy

It means that by definition a copy has all the same qualities (including consciousness and qualia) as original.

We could see that zombies are impossible in physical world by definition of physical world.

So there is no need to prove anything.

So the only thing we need to do in order to disprove zombies - is to prove that physicalism is true. So we could go to the end of SEP article and check what kind of proves exist.

There are two:

1) Idea of casual closure of all world

2) Knowledge from science about physics and idea that philosophy should be similar to the most successful scientific explanation of the world

Both of them have some problems, some of them: What is causality? Or if we find ourself in the world which will be describe in the best possible form by existence of many small gods, should we take it as prove of their metaphysical nature?

Basically first 50 pages of SEP article is about problems with physicalism and I was surprised that there are so many of them.

These ideas penetrates in typical discussions about consciousness in subtle form. Someone starts with: "ok we know, that all out thoughts consists of atoms, neurons etc, so there is no place for qualia etc". So he used latest knowledge from science to prove his point, that is using (2). But science knowledge about where and how we have experiences are incomplete, and he also implicitly use science as a prove to physicalism

I think that we need new definition and new prove of physicalism, and in this case we will be able to solve all its puzzles.

"Darn, I'm out of orange juice." The sound of these words is probably represented in your auditory cortex, as though you'd heard someone else say it.

Note for accuracy:

If something puts a significant strain on short-term memory, it does indeed end up relying on the "inner voice" for extended/improved storage.

However extending this to "Darn, I'm out of orange juice." is unfounded and depending on a particular person, false to a greater or smaller degree.

This is an attempt at a style of proof by contradiction, without academic charity to the possibility of other alternative explanations for said contradiction.  Briefly, I summarise the argument made before offering my criticisms at the end. 

~Summary~

Definitions:

p-zombies := a perfect physical recreation of a given human being except without inner experience ("qualia") 

Assume:

A1) It is conceivable that p-zombies exist 

A2) A p-zombies would perfectly mimic that human being's observable behavior, provided that the human and the p-zombie interacts with the same external world

A3) Anything that exists (or worth speculating over its existance ["a good theory']) has to be physically observable (create physical differences in the world they exist compared to the world in which they don't)

From (A1) and (A2)

A1,  A2) Any observable, and therefore physical, evidence offered a given human being can give to defend the existence of their inner experience, can also be offered by a p-zombie of that human being.  There are no physical differences between their worlds. 

This is in tension with (A3). To resolve this, Elizier rejects (A1) and accepts (A2) and (A3) 

~Criticisms~

Criticisms:

1. As mentioned by previous commentors, Zombies and Zombies Redacted is longer than it needs to be
2. The thought experiment suggests that, given p-zombies are conceivable, there is no physical evidence that can be offered to prove the existence of inner experience ("qualia"). This has been obfuscated by polemics against dualism at the expense of clarity.
3. It is not a given that p-zombies are concievable, merely between the conceivability of p-zombies, physicalism, and the real experience of inner qualia, one of these assumptions have to be mistaken.  
4. It is not a given that qualia exists. A common argument against qualia is that what we think qualia is (the impossibility of capturing experience by simulacra or explanation) is an illusion generated by the limitations of language or thought. This seems very intuitive to me.
5. Physicalism is not a given either.  For example, the framework on which we even talk about these subjects - assumes that such things as "causes" and "consequences", or at least associations between phenomena exists. It is not obvious to me that causality is physically observable, or that, in the style of p-zombie thoguht experiment, that there exists observable evidence that would prove we live in a world that causality exists (or doesn't)!

TLDR; 

In mathematics, proof by contradiction works because every other assumption we assume are bedrock reliable. So if we introduce a new assumption, and that results in contradiction, the negation of that new assumption must be true. Even this is not perfect - when there is a contradiction in a theory, and it is not evident where the contradiction emerges, the whole theory may have to be scuttled so that mathematicians can rework something that is dependable, cf- Set Theory and Russel's Paradox.

In philosophy, proof by contradiction doesn't work the same way - as none of the assumptions in philosophy can be assumed to be bedrock.  All assumptions eventually boil down to intuition, and so, by framing and reframing, can be more or less intuitive and have to be considered charitably. This analysis by Yudkowsky is fundamentally uncharitable to assumptions held by people with a different view to him, and so more or less begins with the conclusion in mind ("(A1) p-zombies are conceivable, (A3) For a thing to exist, it's existence or non-existence has to result in two physically observably different worlds"). 

It is perfectly legitimate to argue that (A3) is nonsense, and that a sensible undertanding of the world requires a priori knowledge such as consciousness or causal reasoning, and that in fact, humans use a priori knowledge efficaciously all the time. 

I was curious about the diff, specifically what sections were being removed. This is too long for a comment, so I'll post each one as a reply to this comment.

This "Not-quite-faith-based reductionism" stating that consciousness lies within the physics and is just not yet understood - is it valid? To me it seems rather strange to state such trust in the solution capacity of a certain scientific field, when you have to add that the opposite (that consciousness does not lie within physics) is just something that will be proven wrong when the opposite of the opposite is proven right...

By the way, some kind of p-zombies is possible.

Its me in different modal states. For example, a "possible me" will have all the same thoughts (possible thoughts) and possible experience but will have not any subjective experiences (if we don't patch it with modal realism, but it comes with price).

For example if I am choosing between 2 ways home, one pleasant and one full of pain, I could imagine a copy of me, which will walk home with some suffering and thinking about its subjective experiences, but after I choose walk home by pleasant way, it will never come into existence. So the main difference for me of possible me from real is that possible me doesn't have any experiences. But it could think about its experiences.

It is also similar to counterfactual mugging argument, where we should think about possible me as of real.

I think characterizing this discussion as being about whether zombies are conceivable, as Eliezer does here, prevents productive discussion. That is not the issue, and Eliezer basically admits that in the last paragraph. Of course they are conceivable. We all know what we are talking about here.

Eliezer's basic argument is that zombies are impossible, not that they are inconceivable. And I agree that they are impossible. But the fact that he has misrepresented the nature of the argument makes it difficult to have a productive discussion of the issue.

Suppose we have a grid of pixels, with pixel #1 located at position 2,1 ; pixel #2 located at position 2,2; pixel #3 located at position 2,3; pixel #4 located at position 2,4; and pixel #5 located at position 2,5.

The pixels are in a straight line on the grid. Now suppose someone says, "Could there be a series of pixels, all in exactly those positions mentioned, but in such a way that the pixels are not in straight line?"

In this case, asking whether or not the situation is conceivable is not a helpful question here. But we do know that the situation described cannot happen. I would say that zombies are essentially the same situation -- something physically identical to a human is a human, and has all human properties, including the property of consciousness.

One difference though is this: we think we understand why the pixels must be in a straight line, but we do not think we know enough about the physical properties of humans to say why they must be conscious. We just know that humans are in fact conscious, and this is enough to tell us that zombie humans cannot actually happen.

Given the terms that physics usually uses, in fact, a deductive argument to the conclusion, "humans are conscious," is impossible, since "conscious" is not one of those terms. But in the same way, if we start from premises that only say things about the positions of individual pixels, and nothing else, we cannot formulate a deductive argument that the pixels must be in a straight line. That does not mean that the pixels might fail to be in a straight line, nor does it imply that a human could fail to be conscious. It simply means that our account, whether the physical account of the human, or the one about the positions of the pixels, is an incomplete account of reality.

And I suspect that this last point is my real disagreement with Eliezer. I think he believes that the physical account is a complete account, and likewise that an account of the pixels including nothing but the individual positions is a complete account of the pixels. If so, I think he would be mistaken in both cases.

It is furthermore claimed that if zombies are "conceivable" (a term over which battles are still being fought), then, purely from our knowledge of this "conceivability", we can deduce a priori that consciousness is extra-physical, in a sense to be described below.

Is that really the claim? Because it seems terribly silly.

Since it is conceivable (a pun, wait for it!) that Mommy fooled around on the Daddy who raised you, and you aren't his biological son, then the identity of your "social" father and your biological father can't be true in reality?

At bottom it seems like if two concepts are different, they're denying that in reality they're referring to the same thing. It's just odd.

It is conceivable that consciousness is something beyond brain function, but it is increasingly implausible.

And how about we turn around the proposition?

It is furthermore claimed that if non-zombies are "conceivable" (a term over which battles are still being fought), then, purely from our knowledge of this "conceivability", we can deduce a priori that consciousness is extra-subjective.

What do people in Chalmer's vein of belief think of the simulation argument?

If a person is plugged into an otherwise simulated reality, do all the simulations count as p-zombies, since they match all the input-output and lack-of-qualia criteria?

"Is", "is." "is"—the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.

— Robert Anton Wilson, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, as spoken by Sigismundo Celine.

You could use the "zombie argument" to "prove" that any kind of machine is more than the sum of its parts.

For example, imagine a "zombie car" which is the same on an atom-by-atom basis as a normal car, except it doesn't drive.

In this context, the absurdity of the zombie argument should be more obvious.

EDIT: OK, it isn't quite the same kind of argument, since the car wouldn't behave exactly the same, but it's pretty similar.

EDIT2: Another example to illustrate the absurdity of the zombie argument:
You could imagine an alternative world  that's exactly the same as ours, except humans (who are also exactly the same as in our world) don't perceive light with a wavelength of 700 nanometer as red. This "proves" that there is more to redness then wavelength of light.
 

This is the most brilliant argument I have every come across for libertarian free will and it's link to wave function collapse. Every theory of determinism necessarily implies consciousness is epiphenomenal. If the physical motion of particles is predetermined essentially by forces outside the control of consciousness, then by consciousness has no effect on the universe. For consciousness to act on the universe it must exert itself in a manner separated from the clockwork world of forces precisely defined velocity and position.

Wavefunction collapse is the only plausible mechanism