Zombies! Zombies?

If a theory does not make you 'less confused', it doesn't mean that the theory is wrong or bad. It could just be that it is the way how the world really functions, that some things are truly unknowable. Consciousness might be one of those things that will never be solved (yes, I know that a statement like this is dangerous, but this time there are real reasons to believe this). Of course, it is always a good thing to try find flaws with the theory.

"Separately, there exists a not-yet-understood reason within normal physics why philosophers talk about consciousness and invent theories of dual properties.". Minds also have the delusion of 'free will', so I don't see that argument as a major one.

"But based on my limited experience, the Zombie Argument may be a candidate for the most deranged idea in all of philosophy." It is irrational to reject an argument because it seems absurd. However, it is a good reason to study the argument to find flaws.

Your first argument is that zombie worlds might not actually be logically possible. Fine, it is a possibility, but if you accept that minds can work by computation and that zombie worlds are impossible, it would mean that certain algorithms cannot logically exist without some kind of consciousness popping up into existence.

Re: I think the hypothesis you're testing is completely hopeless, and your experiments should definitely be funded.

How hopeless does a hypothesis have to be before the funding gets cut? ;-)

Re: Richard Chappell, David Chalmers, and the foes of reductionism.

Is this really your battle? It reminds me of Richard Dawkins getting sucked into debating with creationists. I can't help thinking that Richard is getting distracted from real science by the opinions of the masses - and that, preventing scientists from doing sensible work and advancing scientific materialism is actually one of the things on his opponents' agenda.

All pretty much in prior agreement here (though no, I haven't stated "the listener caught in the act of listening" quite so eloquently either).

Personally I just go by the priori that zombies are simply not logically possible. Postulating that they are "seems" to lead to quite contrived and/or internally inconsistent scenarios, as you lay out.

Heterophenomenology!

Sorry, I thought it needed saying.

Consciousness might be one of those things that will never be solved (yes, I know that a statement like this is dangerous, but this time there are real reasons to believe this). What real reasons? I don't see any. I don't consider "because it seems really mysterious" a real reason; most of the things that seemed really mysterious to some people at some point in history have turned out to be quite solvable.

A lesser mortal would simply fail to see the implications, or refuse to face them, or rationalize a reason it wasn't so.

But that's precisely what he's done, not with the implications, but the implications of the implications. He's simply denied them.

But, yes, on a core level, the sane thing to do when you see the conclusion of the zombie argument, is to say "That can't possibly be right" and start looking for a flaw.

No, what we say is "That argument is wrong". We've already found the flaw. Our emotional response is irrelevant - the logical contradiction has already been found. P-zombies-as-a-hypothesis is trying to both possess a cake and eat it, have unbroken eggs and make omelets with them at the same time. It is postulating a causative agent that does not and cannot cause anything and so cannot be tested by looking at consequences.

People like Chalmers don't have that negative emotional response! They are convinced, in the sense of possessing conviction, that the hypothesis works, and they have that sensation because the logical short-circuit does indeed satisfy their desire to believe they have minds that are magical, not subject to logic and causality. If we go by what feels satisfying, and we have such a desire, we'll accept p-zombies, because logical consistency is less important than satisfying our deeper desires.

People who have a deeper desire for logical consistency will note that p-zombies are a stupid, self-contradictory idea, and reject it on those grounds. No uncovering further flaws is necessary, no intuitive sense that the conclusion "doesn't look right" and needs more investigation. Those people reject p-zombies immediately and for the obvious reasons alone, because that's all you need.

To put it even more simply:

When we find a logical contradiction in an argument, we first check to make sure that we haven't made any errors in derivation. If not, then we conclude that there is a problem with the assumptions we started the argument with, and begin trying to generate ways to test those assumptions.

People like Chalmers are psychologically incapable of rejecting the idea that there is something 'special' amount minds. They cannot doubt that assumption! And so they do not look for ways to test it, because bringing an assertion into question requires admitting the possibility that it could be invalid.

Creationists, for a variety of reasons, cannot emotionally accept that the world we see was not designed by a powerful and intelligent entity. They also do not have a desire to be right that is stronger than their desire to believe themselves right. Thus, they will reject lines of reasoning that lead to a designer-less conclusion no matter how valid they are, and accept lines that produce the conclusion they want no matter how invalid they are.

Chalmers is a "Creationist". He is a True Believer. He will never admit that he is wrong, because he cannot perceive that he is wrong, because his reason is wielded by the desire to reach specific conclusions. When his reason contradicts that desire, it is abandoned.

"We've already found the flaw."

What exactly is the logical flaw you've found? The zombie argument tells among other things that there can be no test that will tell if a person is really conscious or just a zombie. You might "know" that you're conscious yourself, but there can be no rational argument that proves this.

"What real reasons? I don't see any." If Zombie Worlds are possible, we might be living in it and therefore there can be no argument that proves otherwise. Your brain assumes that you have qualia, but I make no such assumption.

Your brain assumes that you have qualia Actually, currently my brain isn't particularly interested in the concepts some people call "qualia"; it certainly doesn't assume it has them. If you got the idea that it did because of discussions it participated in in the past, please update your cache: This doesn't hold for my present-brain.

If qualia-concepts are shown in some point in the future to be useful in understanding the real world, i.e. specify a compact border around a high-density region of thingspace, my brain will likely become interested in them when that happens. However, this will necessarily mean that they're shown to refer to things that are actually measurable. Possibly clusters of atoms, but many kinds of exotic physical entites postulated by substance dualists would also work.

As Eliezer Yudkowsky mentioned, epiphenomenalism includes parts in a prediction program which are known to be dead code. That dead code won't ever interest my brain, except possibly to figure out where exactly the design fault in the human brain which causes some people to become epiphenomenalists is.

People might find this site interesting:

http://www.macrovu.com/CCTGeneralInfo.html

Whenever I come across this subject, I tend to leave it with a feeling of, "not enough information". It is a good thing AI designers only need to worry about creating physical properties.

Hmm. So, on the Chalmers view, when the AI concludes that it has no way of knowing whether it is epiphenomenally conscious and abandons the belief that it is mysteriously so, would the consciousness 'evaporate,' or are there qualia of not being aware of any qualia? It seems that Chalmers might say that in non-zombie worlds the epiphenomenal-AI would still be conscious of various things (like the 'redness' of red) but just not conscious of its consciousness. [Given our 'bridging laws' the epiphenomenal self can only think "cogito ergo sum" when the physical self does.]

Eliezer - thanks for this post, it's certainly an improvement on some of the previous ones. A quick bibliographical note: Chalmers' website offers his latest papers, and so is a much better source than google books. A terminological note (to avoid unnecessary confusion): what you call 'conceivable', others of us would merely call "apparently conceivable". That is, you view would be characterized as a form of Type-A materialism, the view that zombies are not even (genuinely) conceivable, let alone metaphysically possible. On to the substantive points:

(1) You haven't, so far as I can tell, identified any logical contradiction in the description of the zombie world. You've just pointed out that it's kind of strange. But there are many bizarre possible worlds out there. That's no reason to posit an implicit contradiction. So it's still completely mysterious to me what this alleged contradiction is supposed to be.

(2) It's misleading to say it's "miraculous" (on the property dualist view) that our qualia line up so neatly with the physical world. There's a natural law which guarantees this, after all. So it's no more miraculous than any other logically contingent nomic necessity (e.g. the constants in our physical laws). That is, it's "miraculous" in the same sense that it's "miraculous" that our universe is fit to support life. Atheists and other opponents of fine-tuning arguments are not usually so troubled by this kind of alleged 'miracle'. Just because things logically could have been different, doesn't mean that they easily could have been different. Natural laws are pretty safe and dependable things. They are primitive facts, not explained by anything else, but that doesn't make them chancy.

(3) I'd also dispute the following characterization: "talk about consciousness... arises from a malfunction (drawing of logically unwarranted conclusions) in the causally closed cognitive system that types philosophy papers."

No, typing the letters 'c-o-n-s-c-i-o-u-s-n-e-s-s' arises from a causally closed cognitive system. Whether these letters actually mean anything (and so constitute a contentful conclusion that may or may not follow from other contentful premises) arguably depends on whether the agent is conscious. (Utterances express beliefs, and beliefs are partly constituted by the phenomenal properties instantiated by their neural underpinnings.) That is, Zombie (or 'Outer') Chalmers doesn't actually conclude anything, because his utterances are meaningless. A fortiori, he doesn't conclude anything unwarrantedly. He's just making noises; these are no more susceptible to epistemic assessment than the chirps of a bird. (You can predict the zombie's behaviour by adopting the Dennettian pretense of the 'intentional stance', i.e. interpreting the zombie as if it really had beliefs and desires. But that's mere pretense.)

(4) I'm all for 'reflective coherence' (at least if that means what I think it means). I don't see how it counts against this view, unless you illicitly assume a causal theory of knowledge (which I obviously don't).

P.S. Note that while I'm a fan of epiphenomenalism myself, Chalmers doesn't actually commit to the view. See his response to Perry for more detail. (It also addresses many of the other points you raise in this post.)

A sidepoint, this, but I believe your etymology for "n'shama" is wrong. It is related to the word for "breath", not "hear". The root for "hear" contains an ayin, which n'shama does not.

Richard,

So what, in our world, would be the subjective experience of the AI in Eliezer's example when it corrects its internal make-up such that it no longer performs computations and makes utterances as though it was aware of qualia?

That is, Zombie (or 'Outer') Chalmers doesn't actually conclude anything, because his utterances are meaningless.

You have a curious definition of "conclude" and "meaningless"... or possibly "actually conclude" and "actually meaningless". If Outer/Zombie Chalmers convinces me, Conscious Cyan (haha), that property dualism is correct (something no chirping bird could manage), whence came the meaning?

"However, this will necessarily mean that they're shown to refer to things that are actually measurable."

Things that cannot be measured can still be very important, especially in regard to ethics. One may claim for example that it is ok to torture philosophical zombies, since after all they aren't "really" experiencing any pain. If it could be shown that I'm the only conscious person in this world and everybody else are p-zombies, then I could morally kill and torture people for my own pleasure.

"Actually, currently my brain isn't particularly interested in the concepts some people call "qualia"; it certainly doesn't assume it has them. If you got the idea that it did because of discussions it participated in in the past, please update your cache: This doesn't hold for my present-brain."

Does your brain assume/think it creates sensory experiences (or what people often call consciousness)?

Have to agree about Chalmer's ideas about zombies being the most deranged around, and I guess that is a polite way of putting it. They make no sense whatsoever. However, his view is not the only alternative to reductionism, and you would do yourself and your project a favor if you engaged with some of the more plausible forms, such as emergentism.

Consider "squareness". It is a property of many physical objects or systems, but it doesn't depend on what those objects are made of. It relies on the physical configuration of the object's components, but not on the physical properties of the components. If you had a quantum-level simulation of the universe, it wouldn't tell you when squares appeared (unless you also had, within the simulation or outside of it, something with the about the same computational power of the human visual system). It is a non-physical concept, but implemented, incarnated, and intimately tied to the physical. If you removed one of the sticks or pencils or iron bars making up the square, it wouldn't be a square any more. But it wouldn't make sense to talk about a zombie-square, which would be a physical object in the same physical configuration that somehow is not a square.

mtraven, I don't think that really counts as an alternative to reductionism. We just say "Squareness is in the map, not the ..." &c.

I think that Leibnitz's monadology holds that this world actually contains a zombie master, which we call god, who does his manipulation through careful set-up of the initial conditions. This view doesn't seem to be very compelling to most contemporary philosophers. I'm also of the impression that it wasn't considered plausible in his time and that many people doubt that he really believed it.

With respect to "argument from career impact", it seems highly plausible to me that within many academic circles one best advances a career precisely by making outlandish claims, the more outlandish the better, and then by defending them as well as one can.

Humans have a metaphysical consciousness which is outside the mere physical world. I know this is true because this means I'm special and I feel special so it must be true. If you say humans consciousness is not something metaphysical and special then you are saying humans are no more special then animals or mere matter. You are saying that if you arrange mere matter in a certain way it will be just as special as me. Well, for your information, I'm really really special: therefore I'm right and you are wrong. In fact, I'm so special that there must be some way in which the universe says I'm special. Also, anyone attempting to take my specialness feelings about myself away from me is evil.

It seems to me that Chalmers does not just believe in epiphenomenal consciousness. Chalmers posits a non-physical concept of "direct access" and a non-physical notion of "having an experience." I can't see how one can give an account of "direct access" and "having an experience" as dual properties. But if "direct access" and "having an experience" are given physical accounts then the whole argument for epiphenomenalism falls apart; a physical system cannot gain "direct access" because physical systems are always mediated (and it's this "direct access" that premises his entire argument; if he could be wrong about being conscious the argument would not go through) and "having an experience" couldn't be a counterpart to having a causal link between your experience and your beliefs (as Chalmers uses it) if it was identical with such a causal link.

Cyan - think of the million monkeys at typewriters eventually outputting a replica of Chalmers' book. The monkeys obviously haven't given an argument. There's just an item there that you are capable of projecting a meaningful interpretation onto. But the meaning obviously comes from you, not the monkeys.

Credulous - I'm not entirely sure what you're asking. I think an agent could still have qualia without believing that this is so on a theoretical level. (Dennett springs to mind!) But I guess if you tinkered with the internal computational processes enough, you might eventually succeed in ridding the agent of [the neural underpinnings of] phenomenal representations (e.g. of pain) altogether. It would then behave very differently.

PK - Yep, you're so very special that you're the only discussant in this conversation who's made entirely of straw!

I'm astounded. A decent philosophical view that many top philosophers agree with is once again getting equated with creationism? I mean, seriously. I would laugh if it weren't so serious and depressing.

Richard - Question: If consciousness is necessary for meaning, and I am a zombie, can I finally be free of asserting philosophical statements when I don't intend to? Can a zombie be a non-self-defeating scientismist?

Things that cannot be measured can still be very important, especially in regard to ethics. One may claim for example that it is ok to torture philosophical zombies, since after all they aren't "really" experiencing any pain. If it could be shown that I'm the only conscious person in this world and everybody else are p-zombies, then I could morally kill and torture people for my own pleasure. For there to be a possibility that this "could be shown", even in principle, there would have to be some kind of measurable difference between a p-zombie and a "conscious" entity. In worlds where it is impossible to measure a difference in principle, it shouldn't have any impact on what's the correct action to take, for any sane utility function. My ethics are by necessity limited to valuing things whose presence/absence I have some way to measure, at least in principle. If they weren't, I'd have to worry about epiphenomenal pink unicorns all the time.

Does your brain assume/think it creates sensory experiences (or what people often call consciousness)? It thinks that it receives data from its environment and processes it, maintaining a (somewhat crude) model of that environment, to create output that manipulates the environment in a predictable manner. It doesn't think that there's any non-measurable consequences of that data processing (once again: that'd be dead code in the model). If that doesn't answer your query, please state it more clearly; specifically rationalist-taboo the word "experience".

Richard, I'm a little confused by your use of "natural law". Natural laws as I know them have, you know, consequences.

Eliezer's argument could have been made in a much simpler way; there is no difference between pointing to a human being and a zombie each saying, "I am conscious," and pointing to a human being and a zombie each saying, "I see the color red," or "I plan to post this comment on the blog to see how people respond."

In other words, the causally closed process that results in the words "I see the color red," is not based in any way on the color red, just as it is not based on consciousness. And the causally closed process that results in posting a comment on a blog has nothing whatever to do with people reacting, since the laws that govern quarks do not have purposes such as seeing how people respond.

Unfortunately for Eliezer, seeing these parallel cases should also show why he is not giving anything remotely close to a reductio, nor showing that the position is improbable (after someone thinks about these cases for a bit, this should become clear). And he has given no direct response whatever to Chalmers' arguments, except by saying that the position doesn't make sense to him.

Sebastian, I'll try. Is there some property E such that: (1) an entity without E can have identical outward behavior to an entity with E (but possibly different physical structure); and (2) you assign intrinsic value to at least some entities with E, but none without it? If so, do you have property E?

Also, one other thing: if the possibility of zombies is accepted by a majority, or even a substantial minority, of philosophers who study consciousness, it seems highly unlikely that this position is so insane as Eliezer suggests. So on a core level, the sane thing to do when you see the conclusion of the Eliezer's argument, is to say "That can't possibly be right" and start looking for a flaw.

Bstark: seconded

Sebastian Hagen: You don't need a measurable difference between a p-zombie and a "conscious" entity. At least in principle you can also start from priors, not update except regarding your own consciousness, and estimate the probabilities, given that you are conscious, that you inhabit a world where a given entity is a zombie. In Chalmers' framework you ask "given that there exist bridging laws between this experience here now and this configuration of atoms, what is the probability that there are more general bridging laws relating matter to consciousness and if there are such laws what is the probability distribution over their content?" Sane utility functions pay attention to base rates, not just evidence, so even if it's impossible to measure a difference in principle one can still act according to a probability distribution over differences. Of course, its a physical system that is estimating these base probabilities, so its not at all clear that it should calculate that it is more likely that "I am conscious but you are not" than "you are conscious but I am not", or even than "tooth decay is conscious but humans are not". All it has to look at is the space of bridging laws. Chalmers comes close to intellectual honesty by embracing panpsychism on similar grounds but he fails to zero out morality by recognizing that "outer Chalmers", while right by coincidence to take into account the interests of "inner Chalmers" in this one case, does violence to the "inner Chalmers" in the infinite universes where "bridging laws" connect a flourishing life for "outer Chalmers" with unspeakable agony for "inner Chalmers". I personally think that this is a confused way of thinking about what sort of thing natural laws are in the first place, but I can play the game if that's the cost of entry to being taken seriously by some genuinely bright if deeply deluded people.

Jotedem: I'm astounded. A decent theological view that many top priests agree with is once again getting equated with property dualism? I mean, seriously. I would laugh if it weren't so serious and depressing. Pity the poor souls of those innocent heathen scientists who damn themselves by doubting creationism, fortified in their hubristic confidence that only scientists know anything by the ease with which they demolish the arguments of philosophers. Still, they should know better. Its a huge leap in arrogance to step from rejecting a tiny and little respected academic discipline like Philosophy or Women's Studies to rejecting Theology, the "King of the Sciences", the propagation and development of which was the very reason for the creation of academia in the first place.

"For there to be a possibility that this "could be shown", even in principle, there would have to be some kind of measurable difference between a p-zombie and a "conscious" entity. In worlds where it is impossible to measure a difference in principle, it shouldn't have any impact on what's the correct action to take, for any sane utility function."

Thank you. It doesn't seem to me that zombies are impossible. But I'm rather confused as to why anyone should care at a practical level, even if whatever "consciousness" is supposed to mean in this discussion is supposed to be morally salient.

If the above comment doesn't clarify it, I think that our basic problem here is still that we don't know how to properly use Aumann Agreement without falling into Majoritarianism. No-one would, after thinking through the arguments, take seriously zombies, or it seems to me most recent claims of eminent philosophers, without an argument from authority behind them, but given the argument from authority its natural to try to strengthen the argument with "he could have meant" claims or simply accept it as "profound". Because some people who we call "great philosophers" or "great scientists" actually made fairly subtle, surprising and sound arguments in the past, we may be too quick to transfer the credit that they earned to those who are currently called the same, or we may not be, but majoritarianism and Pascal's Wager seem to be the two hardest stumbling blocks that our attempts at Overcoming Bias have turned up and I think that we may need to get back to them.

"In worlds where it is impossible to measure a difference in principle, it shouldn't have any impact on what's the correct action to take, for any sane utility function."

Wrong, since it may be possible to estimate the probability of being in a p-zombie world, or more generally the probability that such a difference exists.

We have that "special" feeling: we are distinct beings from all the others, including zombie twins. I think we tend to use only one word for two different concepts, which causes a lot of confusion... Namely: 1) the ability of intelligent physical systems to reflect on themselves, imagine what we think or whatever makes us think that whichever we are talking to is "conscious" 2) that special feeling that somebody is listening in there. AGI research tries to solve the first problem, Chalmers the second one.

So let's try to create zombies then! I don't see why this seems logically so difficult, we only need some nanotechnology... So consider the following thought experiment.

You enter room A. Some equipment scans your atoms, and after scanning each, replaces it with one of the same element, same position. Meanwhile, the original atoms are assembled in room B, resulting in a zombie twin of you. You were conscious all along, and noticed nothing except some buzz coming from the walls... So you wouldn't be worried about the experiment even if your zombie is killed afterward, or sent to the stone mines of Mars for a lifelong sentence, etc.

You enter room A. Now, the copy process goes cell by cell. Scanning every cell, making an atom-by-atom perfect copy of it, then replacing, original goes into room B, assembled. You still notice nothing.

You enter room A. Your whole brain is grabbed, scanned, and then placed into room B. The body with the copied brain and other organs walks out happily of room A, while you go to the stone mines. A bit more depressing than the original version.

So, if we copy only atoms or cells (which is regularly done in our bodies), we stay in room A. If we copy whole organs or bodies, we go to room B. It wouldn't be intuitive to postulate that consciousness can be divided, it's either in room A or room B. But the quantity of atoms to be moved in one step is almost continous... it would be weird to assume that there is some magic number of them which allows consciousness to transfer.

The conclusion: to differentiate between "conscious beings" and "zombies" leads to contradiction even from a subjective viewpoint. (Where would that mysterious "inner Chalmers" be in the above cases?)

I think we are used to our consistent self-image too much, and can't imagine how anything else would feel. An example: using brain-computer interfaces, we construct a camera which watches our surroundings, even as we sleep. As we wake up, we could "remember" what happened while we slept, because of the connection the camera hardware made with our memories. (The right images just "popped into our minds".) But how would it feel? Were we conscious at night? If not, why do we remember certain things? If we were, why did we just watch as those thieves got away with all our stuff?

All we need to understand that is some experience. If it were given, we wouldn't ask questions like "why am I so special", I think.

This whole argument will dissolve into air once the brain is really understood. It's like the phlogiston issue and all the other weird stuff readers of this site know about.

Z M Davis - my point is that there are versions of non-reductionism or weak reductionism that do not depend on or imply supernatural forces. That's the sort I'm interested in, anyway. The zombie argument is a paradigm of how not to explore the conceptual space between strict reductionism and outright religious dualism.

I'll say again that the zombie argument is inane...and the fact that people who expound it have fame and tenure indicates that the quarks are cruel, arbitrary, and capricious.

While I read the SEP article and Eliezer's discussion, I don't understand much more than the basics of the theory. My biggest question is why Occam's razor cannot be used to eliminate the zombie theory?

The core of the zombie argument states that it can never be proved, even with perfect information. This is a perfect, stereotypical, textbook, etc. example of what Occam's razor is used against. From Wikipedia: "...eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory."

Occam's states that the central thesis of zombie theory should be eliminated, thus destroying the rest of it.

What is even more confusing to me is the fact that Occam's razor started as a key tenet of philosophy not science, yet it doesn't seem to apply here.

I'd come at it from a different direction. Reality is defined by interaction. A real something that doesn't interact at all, ever, is a straightforward contradiction in terms.

From reading your article, it seems that the flaw of epiphenomenalism goes beyond what you have stated, Eliezer. The epiphenomenalist position is that, say, a zombie sensation ZS can cause a zombie belief, ZB, while ZS causes MS, the mental sensation, and ZB causes MB, the mental belief. There is supposed to be no relation between MS and MB. Surely then, this means that all beliefs, language and logic in the mental universe, or whatever it is, are both unjustified and unjustifiable. The connection normally assumed in justifying things is necessarily absent. Beliefs must not be caused by argument, or experience, experiment, or anything else. If mental beliefs even resemble true beliefs which exist in a world where beliefs are actually related to some sort of justification, it cannot be known. The epiphenomenalist position thus seems to resemble the skeptical hypothesis of the evil demon espoused by Descartes. All truth only seems to be true by virtue of the composition of experience. Particular phenomena are merely arranged as such to provide only the illusion of a coherent world, where in fact the illusion may be all there is. Just as Descartes' demon would decieve us such that we think we know 2+2=5, we, the epiphenomenal consciousnesses, could be decieved by the nature of our feeling into believing it. There can be no way to know whether 2+2 is or is not 5. There are only sensations arranged such that it seems that way. Thus, an epiphenomenalist must admit that all meaning and truth apparent to us is probably meaningless and false -it cannot be known to be otherwise. So, by simply attempting to use language or logic to establish epiphenomenalism, there is contradiction. Epiphenomenalism must either be true, and so all we 'know' is probably nonsensical, or epiphenomenalism is false and the three paragraphs I just typed are a meaningful refutation.

While I don't necessarily endorse epiphenomenalism, I think there may exist an argument in favor of it that has not yet been discussed in this thread. Namely, if we don't understand consciousness and consciousness affects behavior then we should not be able to predict behavior. So it seems like we're forced to choose between:

a) consciousness has no effect on behavior (epiphenomenalism)

or

b) a completely detailed simulation of a person based on currently known physics would fail to behave the same as the actual person

Both seem at least somewhat surprising. (b would seem impossible rather than merely surprising to a person who thinks physics is completely known and makes deterministic predictions. In the nineteenth century, most people believed the latter, and some the former. Perhaps this explains how epiphenomenalism originally arose as a popular belief.)

I haven't read Chalmers book, so I am just going by what I read here, but at the beginning of the post you promise to show the zombie world as logically impossible, but never deliver; you show that it is improbable enough to be perhaps be considered practically impossible, but since we are just dealing with a "thought experiment," that is irrelevant. For example, I do not think that everyone around me is a zombie. In fact, I'd bet all the money I have that they aren't. But I still don't KNOW they aren't, the way I KNOW that I am not.

On another note, I'm surprised at some of the ad hominem-type statements on this thread (people that don't agree with are like creationists, people that don't agree with me just don't want to see the truth). On most blogs, it's expected, but it is interesting to see it here.

1) You haven't, so far as I can tell, identified any logical contradiction in the description of the zombie world.

You seem to be missing the point, Richard. Eliezer isn't concerned with the "zombie world" so much as the very idea of "consciousness" that the zombie thought experiment presupposes.

Let's make this really, really simple:

Various entities have asserted the existence of a phenomenon that cannot be examined by any physical test and that has no effect on any physical process; they claim to have direct experience of this phenomenon.

However, the entities making the proclamation are physical, as are the means by which they make the proclamation. If the asserted phenomenon really couldn't affect physical systems, they could have no experience of it at all.

By their own claims, they can possess no knowledge about the thing they're making the claims about. Whatever experiences they may be experiencing, they are necessarily wrong about the specific assertions they're making about them.

The contradiction is that Chalmers is a physical being claiming to possess knowledge that he claims cannot be derived by physical beings.

Imagine a minimally complete physical duplicate of our cosmos. (So, e.g., the earth travels round the sun consistent with Keplar's laws, etc.) But: There's no gravity.

* That-which-we-name "consciousness" happens within physics, in a way not yet understood, just like what happened the last three thousand times humanity ran into something mysterious.

not yet understood? Is your position that there's a mathematical or physical discovery waiting out there, that will cause you, me, Chalmers, and everyone else to slap our heads and say, "of course, that's what the answer is! We should have realized it all along!"

Question for all: How do you apply Occam's Razor to cases where there are two competing hypotheses:

1. A and B are independently true

2. A is true, and implies B, but in some mysterious way we haven't yet determined. (For example, "heat is caused by molecular motion" or "quarks are caused by gravitation", to pick two inferences at opposite ends of the plausibility spectrum.)

I don't know what the best answer is. Maybe the practical answer is a variant of Solomoff induction: somehow compare "P(A) P(B)" with "P(A) P(B follows logically from A, and we were too dumb to realize that)", where the P's are some type of Solomonoff-ish a-priori "2^shortest program" probabilities. But the best answer certainly isn't, "A is simpler than A + B, so we know hypothesis 2 is correct, without even having to glance at the likelihood that B follows from A." Otherwise, you would have to conclude that, logically, quarks are caused by gravitation, in some currently-mysterious way that future mathematicians will be certain to discover.

For the record, my belief is that many of the debaters have beliefs that are isomorphic to their opponent's beliefs. When I hear things like, "You said this is a physical law without material consequences, but I define physical laws as things that have material consequences, so you're wrong QED!" then that's a sign that we're in "does a tree falling in the forest make a noise" territory. Does a conciousness mapping rule "actually exist"? Does the real world "actually exist"? Does pi "actually exist"? Why should I care?

In the end, I care about actions and outcomes, and the algorithms that produce those actions. I don't care whether you label conciousness as "part of reality" (because it's something you observe), or "part of your utility function" (because it's not derivable by an intelligence-in-general), or "part of this complete nutritious breakfast" (because, technically, anything that's not poisonous can be combined with separate unrelated nutritious items to form a complete nutritious breakfast.)

"You said this is a physical law without material consequences, but I define physical laws as things that have material consequences!

If the law has no material consequences, it doesn't matter whether we assert it to be true or false. The two states are identical in every way. Asserting that the law is true, or false, is therefore incorrect. It is neither; it is incoherent and thus can not be true or false.

This is not a matter of personal definition.

"not yet understood? Is your position that there's a mathematical or physical discovery waiting out there, that will cause you, me, Chalmers, and everyone else to slap our heads and say, 'of course, that's what the answer is! We should have realized it all along!'"

I would actually suppose something like this. I found this post to be a compelling knockdown of property dualism, and substance dualism is untenable until we (say) observe the pineal gland disobeying the laws of physics because it's being pushed on by the soul. Practically the only alternative left is that there's something about physical brains that explains consciousness that we're just too stupid or ignorant to understand.

Unless there's some other alternative of which I am too stupid or ignorant to understand.

I must say I found this rather convincing (but I might just be confirmation biased). Also, I have a question on the topic: The zombiists assume that the universe U of existing things is split into two exclusive parts, physical things P and epiphenomenal things E. The physical things P probably develop something like P(t+1)=f(P(t),noise), as we have defined that E does not influence P. But what does E develop like? Is it E(t+1)=f(P(t)[,noise]), or is it E(t+1)=f(P(t),E(t)[,noise])? I have somehow always assumed the first, but I do not remember having read it spellt out so unmistakeably.

Stephen:

So it seems like we're forced to choose between: a) consciousness has no effect on behavior (epiphenomenalism) or b) a completely detailed simulation of a person based on currently known physics would fail to behave the same as the actual person

c) a completely detailed simulation of a person would behave like the actual person, and have "consciousness", which actually refers to some complex physical property.

Cyan - think of the million monkeys at typewriters eventually outputting a replica of Chalmers' book. The monkeys obviously haven't given an argument. There's just an item there that you are capable of projecting a meaningful interpretation onto. But the meaning obviously comes from you, not the monkeys.

Suppose I expend the energy to search through the monkeys' output, discarding random strings and the large set of near-copies of Chalmers' book that degenerate into gibberish or have Shakespeare spliced into to the middle. I decide that the string that is Chalmers' book has meaning, and its arguments convince. In this situation, the meaning obviously comes from me. Zombie/Outer Chalmers' book is not the outcome of such a process, so I'm not convinced that the meaning can sensibly be located where you put it.

And "expend the energy" is not just a figure of speech here -- my efforts will increase entropy in a fashion related to the amount of information I incorporate into my brain structure.

Nick,

Thanks for your comment. If I understand correctly, by c) you are suggesting that consciousness is something like temperature or pressure, a property of physical systems, but one which you don't need to know about if you are doing a completely detailed simulation. I was lumping this in with epiphenomenalism, since in that case, consciousness does not affect physical systems, it is a descriptor of them. However, I guess the key point is that one can subscribe to epiphenomenalism in this sense without concluding that zombies are logically possible. Because we understand temperature, it is obvious to us that imagining our world exactly as it is except without temperature is nonsensical. To make an even starker example, it would be like saying there are two identical universes that contain five things, but in one of the universes they don't have the property of fiveness. Maybe if we understood in what way consciousness is a descriptor of physical systems, we would see that our world exactly as it is except without consciousness is a non-sequitur in the same way.

Apart from Occams Razor (multiplying entities beyond necessity) and Bayesianism (arguably low prior and no observation possible), how about the identity of indiscernibles:
Anything inconsequential is indiscernible from anything that does not exist at all, therefore inconsequental equals nonexistent.

Admittedly, zombiism is not really irresistibly falsifiable... but that's only yet another reason to be sceptical about it! There are gazillions of that kind of theory floating around in the observational vacuum. You can pick any one of those, if you want to indulge your need to believe that kind of stuff, and watch those silly rationalists try to disprove you. A great pastime for boring parties!

Also, the concept of identity is twisted beyond recognition by zombiism:
The psysical me causes the existence of something outside of the psysical me, which I define to be the single most important part of me. Huh?

Btw, anyone to answer my question further above?
I asked: Can epiphenomenal things cause nothing at all, or can they (too, as can physical things can,) cause other epiphenomenal things?
Maybe Richard, as our expert zombiist, might want to relieve me of my ignorance?

I happened to write an article about this the other day (click my name to read it), but from a different vantage point. I am enjoying your article(still reading it!)

I agree with the spirit of what Eliezer has written here: The possibility of p-zombies would suggest epiphenomenalism. If you believe in redness, you should expect it to be causally efficacious.

However, subjective redness manifestly exists; subjective redness manifestly does not exist in any physics known to us; yet the physics we have already have appears to be fantastically predictive in detail, and quite capable of producing intelligent behavior in principle.

The usual way out of this is to deny my second proposition, and say that redness is a type of brain state or property, and therefore as much a part of physics as any other material thing. But the elementary properties one finds in physics are of a very limited nature: quantitative, geometric, causal, probabilistic. How can piling up number and shape, even when glued together by causal relations, create color?

The answer is that it cannot, at least if you restrict yourself to logical, set-theoretic, and other relations truly intrinsic to arithmetic and geometry. This is why people become property dualists, or believers in "strong emergence".

Another possibility canvassed by Chalmers is a reinterpretation of the mathematical formalism of physics, so that it is about something other than what it appears to be about, namely entities starkly devoid of the "secondary qualities" revealed in conscious perception. This is his panpsychism or panprotopsychism. It's "pan-" because current physics has monistic tendencies, a homogeneity of kind among its fundamental entities; if any of them are mind-like or qualia-like, one might expect all of them to participate in or at least to approach that condition.

Given the problems of epiphenomenalism, I find this monistic approach more appealing. However, it seems that even those few philosophers who pursue this avenue are hindered by a rather crude notion of mind. People talk as if consciousness is nothing but sensation, and as if sensation is nothing but a pile of pixel-like elementary sensations, and as if these elementary qualia then just need to be identified with something physically elementary. There is a tendency, for example, which denies that there is any phenomenology of thinking, and no such thing as conscious perception of meaning; cognition is unconscious computation, and it's just the raw feels of sensation which exist and constitute conscious experience.

But in reality, they are just the part of consciousness which is hardest to deny. Also, this mode of thought is least removed from billiard-ball materialism: an object is a heap of particles, a conscious experience is a heap of qualia. Alas, it is not so simple.

If anyone out there really wants to engage in phenomenology, I have a few recommendations. First, you must overcome the conceptual reflex which rejects the reality of "reifications" and "abstractions". Err in the other direction, see what picture you build up, and then have a go at paring it back. My training curriculum is as follows. First, Chapter IX of Russell's The Problems of Philosophy, which makes the case for the reality of properties and relations, as entities which exist just as much as "things" do. Then, ideally I would recommend Reinhardt Grossman's The Categorial Structure of the World, for a mind-stretching example of a systematic ontology in which abstract entities exist just as much as concrete ones do, and in which the relationship between them is also analysed at length. But the book may be hard to obtain, so some other contemporary system of categories might have to do. Then, one should tackle Husserl and Kant, for epistemologically systematic ontology. And the final step - but by now I'm just describing my own research program - is to interpret the world of appearances which one has been describing as interior to a single entity, and to embed that in physics. As I remarked here last month, quantum entanglement suggests an ontology in which there are fundamental entities with arbitrarily many degrees of freedom. It is the one indication we have from physics that old-fashioned atomism (according to which all fundamental entities are simple and perpetually encapsulated) may be radically wrong.

Returning to the theme of zombies - in a monistic ontology like this, you can't subtract the mental properties and leave the causal relations unchanged, so the critique of epiphenomenalism no longer holds. The best one can do is to imagine a possible world in which the causal laws are isomorphic, but the elementary states they relate are different: are not 'mind-like', are not states of consciousness. However - and this is relevant for AI, Friendly or otherwise - there is nothing to guarantee that every causal simulation of consciousness even in this world will itself be conscious, if consciousness is indeed this deeply grounded in "substance" rather than "algorithm". For example - if conscious states are only ever states of a single elementary entity (e.g. a single tensor factor such as I mention in the previous link), then any distributed simulation of consciousness will not be conscious, even though it will exhibit all the same problem-solving capacities. (The correspondence between these two would begin to break down if they set about investigating their own physical constitution, which by hypothesis is different, so there is a limit to the duplication involved with this sort of "zombie".)

Note 1: Chalmers does acknowledge the challenge of epiphenomenalism in The Conscious Mind, and discusses it at length. He proposes a number of ways in which the phenomenal properties might still be causally relevant, but does say that if forced to a choice between epiphenomenalism and eliminativism, we should prefer the former. (He develops the monistic alternative to property dualism in later papers.)

Note 2: A few commenters on this blog have tried the old dodge according to which "redness" is just a word. I would agree that it is a categorization whose scope is vague and varies with the individual. But is it not clear that the individual patches of color and shades of red to which it is applied do exist, and that they pose a challenge to the colorless ontology of physics, regardless of how we group them by name?

Mitchell: Very interesting. But, in what sense is the brain not already a distributed simulation?

Nick, that final step leads to a quantum-mind theory in which the Cartesian theater of consciousness is a single irreducible tensor factor of very high dimension. The notion may make more sense if you look at a paper like this. Physical reality is modelled as a "quantum causal history" in which one has a partially ordered set of events, each event being characterized by a Hilbert space and a state therein. The partial order gives you causality, but if you take a spacelike cross-section of the history, it need not reduce to a set of spatially localized events. In a formalism like that, you can represent an EPR pair (of spatially distant entangled particles) as a single entity, and the quantum state of the universe on any such spacelike cross-section is just the direct product of all the individual states. So I would propose to recast physics in that fashion, and then ontologically interpret it as I described. To be distributed here would mean to be implemented using many of those tensor factors at once, and the whole idea is that the instantaneous global state of consciousness is (formally) described by just one, very big, tensor factor. The rest of the brain would indeed be performing distributed computations, which (in physically ultimate terms) would consist of large numbers of simpler (lower-dimensional) tensor factors; but they would be causally coupled to the big central one, which would be an objectively existing self.

The standard notion of consciousness in neuroscience, insofar as there is a standard notion, is that some (possibly changing) subset of the brain is the "neural correlate of consciousness"; it's the physical entity whose state is my current state of consciousness, and somehow it contains that representation of external reality which is the direct object of my experience. What I write above is exactly the same, except that I propose that the place where it all comes together is one of these physically elementary tensor factors, rather than some loose set of coarse-grained mesoscopic neurocomputational states. The advantage of my idea is that there is no fuzziness regarding the boundary of the "correlate of consciousness". The disadvantage is that it would seem to require that macroscopic quantum coherence exists in the brain and is functionally relevant, something for which there is no evidence. (I should add in passing that Tegmark's well-known calculations are far from conclusive, as there are many other ways to look for entanglement in the brain, and a variety of possible coherence-protecting mechanisms.)

It is unlikely that my particular ideas are correct, but it's vitally important to show that detailed alternatives to the existing way of thinking are possible, because even people who agree that consciousness is somehow a problem are conceptually frozen in place, and more inclined to think that the problem arises from some personal incapacity rather than from a defect in the conventional wisdom.

Richard,
is he burden of proof always upon the person proposing that something is impossible when it looks like it might be possible? You are after all trying to use this item to prove something and it is a scenario constructed carefully by your own side of the argument to be almost impossible to disprove. I would think you carry the burden of showing that it is extremely likely to be ideally conceivable - something I think you are very far from doing because of more or less the sort of argument made in the main article above.

2) That is, it's "miraculous" in the same sense that it's "miraculous" that our universe is fit to support life.

is it not conceivable (in the sense that you refer to) that you could have qualia that don't line up with the outside world? That is a situation where we are concious in such a way as we might reasonably be in that world (in the same way that we obviously can't be in a world where there is no conciousness) just not in a sense that looks like it has causality - ie you are a watcher of some actions but they are different from your desires - like how some people describe hypnosis but much more extreme.

anon,
> If it could be shown that I'm the only conscious person in this world and everybody else are p-zombies, then I could morally kill and torture people for my own pleasure.

that would seem to imply that if I don't believe in qualia that I can kill and torture people... cripes.... sounds a bit like the "if there was no god we could all do anything" argument.

What bothers me is that from reading the Chalmers quotes, it seems like he assumes that this world is the world with the listener, the conscious people. Because 'this' world and the zombie world are physically indistinguishable from one another, then this world could be equally likely to be the zombie world and the other world is full of conscious people.

Or better yet of course, the argument is absurd and there is no external part that is what we call 'consciousness'.

that would seem to imply that if I don't believe in qualia that I can kill and torture people... cripes.... sounds a bit like the "if there was no god we could all do anything" argument.

Not really. If something doesn't feel pain, or pleasure, or anything else, it's not a moral object.

To put it much more briefly, under the Wesley Salmon definition of "explanation" the epiphenomenal picture is simply not an explanation of consciousness.

There, pretty as a picture.

Someone e-mailed me a pointer to these discussions. I'm in the middle of four weeks on the road at conferences, so just a quick comment. It seems to me that although you present your arguments as arguments against the thesis (Z) that zombies are logically possible, they're really arguments against the thesis (E) that consciousness plays no causal role. Of course thesis E, epiphenomenalism, is a much easier target. This would be a legitimate strategy if thesis Z entails thesis E, as you appear to assume, but this is incorrect. I endorse Z, but I don't endorse E: see my discussion in "Consciousness and its Place in Nature", especially the discussion of interactionism (type-D dualism) and Russellian monism (type-F monism). I think that the correct conclusion of zombie-style arguments is the disjunction of the type-D, type-E, and type-F views, and I certainly don't favor the type-E view (epiphenomenalism) over the others. Unlike you, I don't think there are any watertight arguments against it, but if you're right that there are, then that just means that the conclusion of the argument should be narrowed to the other two views. Of course there's a lot more to be said about these issues, and the project of finding good arguments against Z is a worthwhile one, but I think that such an argument requires more than you've given us here.

David, thanks for commenting!

It seems to me that there is a direct, two-way logical entailment between "consciousness is epiphenomenal" and "zombies are logically possible".

If and only if consciousness is an effect that does not cause further third-party detectable effects, it is possible to describe a "zombie world" that is closed under the causes of third-party detectable effects, but lacks consciousness.

Type-D dualism, or interactionism, or what I've called "substance dualism", makes it impossible - by definition, though I hate to say it - that a zombie world can contain all the causes of a neuron's firing, but not contain consciousness.

You could, I suppose, separate causes into (arbitrary-seeming) classes of "physical causes" and "extraphysical causes", but then a world-description that contains only "physical causes" is incompletely specified, which generally is not what people mean by "ideally conceivable"; i.e., the zombies would be writing papers on consciousness for literally no reason, which sounds more like an incomplete imagination than a coherent state of affairs. If you want to give an experimental account of the observed motion of atoms, on Type-D dualism, you must account for all causes whether labeled "physical" or "extraphysical".

Type-F monism is a bit harder to grasp, but presumably, on this view, it is not possible for anything to be real at all without being made out of the stuff of consciousness, in which case the zombie world is structurally identical to our own but contains no consciousness by virtue of not being real, nothing to breathe fire into the equations. If you can subtract the monist consciousness of the electron and leave behind the electron's structure and have the structure still be real, then that is equivalent to property dualism or E. This gets us into a whole separate set of issues, really; but I wonder if this isn't isomorphic to what most materialists believe. After all, presumably the standard materialist theory says that there are computations that could exist, but don't exist, and therefore aren't conscious. Though this is an issue on which I confess to still being confused.

I understand that you have argued that epiphenomenalism is not equivalent to zombieism, enabling them to be argued separately; but I think this fails. Consciousness can be subtracted from the world without changing anything third-party-observable, if and only if consciousness doesn't cause any third-party-observable differences. Even if philosophers argue these ideas separately, that does not make them ideally separable; it represents (on my view) a failure to see logical implications.

It seems to me that although you present your arguments as arguments against the thesis (Z) that zombies are logically possible, they're really arguments against the thesis (E) that consciousness plays no causal role. Of course thesis E, epiphenomenalism, is a much easier target. This would be a legitimate strategy if thesis Z entails thesis E, as you appear to assume, but this is incorrect.

If 'consciousness' plays a causal role, then we cannot imagine a world in which it is removed, yet everything behaves precisely as it did when it was present.

In that case, p-zombies are impossible, because the whole point of their hypothesized existence is that they're identical in every way to people with 'consciousness' except that they lack it. If you remove a causal factor from people, they behave differently in some way, even if the difference is not immediately obvious to a limited observer. If the p-zombies really do behave precisely the same as they would with 'consciousness', and nothing else has been changed, then there is no difference between having consciousness and lacking it.

The link under "Bayesian" is wrong: it points to yudowsky.net instead of yudkowsky.net

Thanks for removing my post from earlier. It was pure spill over from a debate in the ImmInst forums: I linked to this post ready to brawl and spoke crassly, vulgarly and abominably.
Me sorry.
:-(

Wait! It's still there. Thought it was deleted. Guess there are 2 pages of comments.
For the love of all that is good in the world, please expunge it forever! :-)

Paul

Hi. Eliezer, very interesting post - I have been thinking along the same lines against epiphenomenalism, though I don't think the point is as clear as you thought.

Richard wrote:
"(2) It's misleading to say it's "miraculous" (on the property dualist view) that our qualia line up so neatly with the physical world. There's a natural law which guarantees this, after all. So it's no more miraculous than any other logically contingent nomic necessity (e.g. the constants in our physical laws). That is, it's "miraculous" in the same sense that it's "miraculous" that our universe is fit to support life. Atheists and other opponents of fine-tuning arguments are not usually so troubled by this kind of alleged 'miracle'."

Actually the fine tuning of physical laws to support life is a big deal. Pretty much the only way to explain it is that there are a large variety of physical universes with different laws, so it's not improbable that some would support life, and (by anthropic selection) we'd be in one of those.

The fine tuning of the hypothesized qualia bridge laws would likewise need an explanation. If there are a wide variety of bridge laws, does anthropic selection explain why ours are fine tuned to make our qualia the same as our mathematically describable brains would say they are? It seems evident that it does not - we could have very odd qualia yet still be conscious. So it would indeed be a strange coincidence to say the least.

To me it would be an even stranger coincidence if 'qualia-properties' need not logically exist, but do exist in nature, which happen to be just like the qualia that material beings would (falsely) say they have.

I don't think that is the case; I think that it's much more likely that either we are material and material beings must be on to something when they think that they have qualia, or that we are not on to something when we think we have them, or some middle ground between the two (we are are material and have some kind of qualia but they are not what we think they are).

Eliezer, why do you give more attention to Chalmers than to Professor Koch of Caltech?

Chalmers is an enormously more adept philosopher than Koch. I don't even understand this question.

Well, a lot of what you're doing here regarding consciousness and "zombies" seems to me like philosophy-of-the-gaps. If I'm not mistaken, Prof. Koch and his peers are the most literate (and adept) on where and how empirically derived evidence is filling in these gaps. I confess I'm not reading these ginormous posts from you carefully -but I'm curious why (as far as I can tell) you're not mucking around with cutting edge empiricism on consciousness with the same glee Robin's mucking around with cutting edge empiricism on behavioral economics, decision theory, etc.

To which I say: Given the two worlds and the otherwise identical twins populating them, what makes you think they are the zombies?

1. Consciousness has no effect: The zombie hypothesis is true.

2. Consciousness has an effect: There are two possibilities:

a. It's logically possible for a universe to exist in which something else has the same effect: the zombie hypothesis is true.

b. It's logically impossible for a universe to exist in which something else has the same effect.

2b is the only possibility in which the zombie hypothesis is false. I'll examine that. I will not, however, make a pun about it.

Since nothing else can have the effect consciousness has, it can be defined by its effect. In other words, consciousness is whatever has that effect.

In other words, there's some function, f(x), that's conscious. No matter what physical method you use to compute f(x), if you put the right input into it, there will be qualia.

f(x) might involve mathematics more complex than we can make. Essentially, it would require an infinitely large lookup table. If it does, it can still be approximated within our universe to arbitrary accuracy using only a finite lookup table. I don't see why the idea that a p-zombie can only act arbitrarily close to how you act would be any less unsettling. If they can't do that, that means that f(x) is something you can write down using nothing more than basic arithmetic.

What function is it? Is there really any reason to believe that the result of f(x) will be "I am self-aware" rather than, say, "I am not self-aware"? How can you even begin to figure out what f(x) is?

Have you begun to figure out what f(x) is? If so, by all means, tell us. If not, you're guessing. Not estimating; guessing. You are using some method that is simply wrong. In other words, "The internal narrative is mysteriously malfunctioning, but miraculously happens to be correctly echoing the justified thoughts of the epiphenomenal inner core".

Does it matter whether it works in only our universe or all universes? Does it matter if it can be proven? You haven't proven humans are conscious. It's entirely possible that within the next 30 seconds, you will finally figure it out and elegantly prove, once and for all, that humans are not conscious.

.

Well, I just can't comprehend why this zombie fuss might have any practical consequences for AGI (other that supporting/disproving "soulless machine" cliche). Either it's epiphenomenal, or not - there will be neuronal correlates of "mysterious listener". Let philosophers think should it always listen, or not, and just act as it should.

#include

int main() { printf("Following my stream of thought... I feel pretty conscious!\n"); return 42; }

Yeah - We made it!

Also check out this.

Edit: As I realized not everyone here might be familiar with programming: I meant that, if I understand Eliezer right, his POV would mean that creating a computer program that simply outputs "I can follow my stream of consciousness." is conscious.

Huh. I guess I got lucky then.

Last year, I had a very strange dream, whose details I have unfortunately forgotten. It had a plot which involved some mysteries needing explanations, and I remember feeling tension as details about whatever was happening accumulated and the resolution to the various questions the plot had posed seemed to be about to be resolved.

But then, the story tried to execute a twist. It failed miserably; I only remember vaguely, something incredibly lazy along the lines of some characters having had psychic powers all along or the such. At which point I remember very clearly saying to myself "Oh, come ON!", but not being able to continue, having jerked awake, as if from a nightmare, but instead of cold sweat and horror, confusion and the feeling which leads one to say well let's see YOU do better.

I guess somebody was listening...

(where by somebody, I mean me.)

You have misunderstood the argument completely. You say "I know I'm speaking from limited experience, here. But based on my limited experience, the Zombie Argument may be a candidate for the most deranged idea in all of philosophy." Melodrama, this, but I would advise focusing on the first part of the phrase ("But based on my limited experience....") if you want to make progress.

The main point of the zombie argument is that if science is so completely helpless that it can say nothing -- even in principle -- about the subjective phenomenology of consciousness (and by widespread consensus, this appears to be the case), then the possibility of a parallel universe in which that particular aspect is missing (i.e. the Zombie universe) cannot be ruled out. This Can't-Rule-It-Out aspect is what Chalmers is deploying.

He is NOT saying that we should believe in a parallel zombie universe (a common misunderstandinga among amateur philosophers), he is saying that IF science decides to do a certain kind of washing-its-hands on the whole phenomenology of consciousness idea THEN it follows that philosophers can declare that it is logically possible for there to be a parallel universe in which the thing is missing. It is that logical entailment that is being exploited as a way to come to a particular conclusion about the nature of consciousness.

Specifically, Chalmers then goes on to say that the very nature of subjective phenomenology is that we have privileged access to it, and we are able to assert its existence in some way. It is the conflict between privileged access and logical possibility of absence, that drives the various zombie arguments.

But notice what I said about science washing its hands. If science declares that there really is absolutely nothing it can say about pure subjective phenomenology, science cannot then try to have its cake and eat it too. Science (or rather you, with remarks like "I think I speak for all reductionists when I say Huh?") cannot turn right back around and say "That's preposterous!" when faced with the idea that a zombie universe is conceivable. Science cannot say:

a) "We can say NOTHING about the nature of subjective conscious experience, and

b) "Oh, sorry, I forgot:  there is one thing we can say about it after all:  it is Preposterous 
     that a world could exist in which subjective conscious experience did not exist, but 
     where everything else was the same!"

Your misunderstanding comes from not appreciating that this is the conundrum on which the whole argument is based.

Instead, you just fell into the trap and tried to use "Huh!?" as a scientific response.

Finally, in case the point needs to be explained: why does the "Huh!" response not work? Try to apply it to this parallel case. Suppose you are trying to tell whether there is a possibility of a liar faking their emotions. You know: kid suspected of stealing cookies, and kid cries and emotes and pleads with Mother to believe that she didn't do it. Is it logically possible for the kid to give a genuine-looking display of innocence, while at the same time being completely guilty inside? If all liars had an equal facility with this kind of fake emotion, would philosophers be justified in saying that it is nevertheless LOGICALLY POSSIBLE for there to be all the outward signs of innocence, but with none of the internal innocence?

According to your approach, you could just simply laugh and say "Huh?", and then declare that "the Fake-Innocence Argument may be a candidate for the most deranged idea in all of philosophy."

Late note, and apologies if this is obvious: could Chalmers' missing piece be that his epiphenomenal-Chalmers is actually the model Chalmers has of himself? Ie. not that dual-Chalmers causes a physical effect, or that they're causally distinct, but that the physics of physical-Chalmers' cognition cause the epiphenomenal-Chalmers-model to be created in Chalmers' physical head? And that that's the reason physical-Chalmers talks about consciousness? (Which would make zombieChalmers correct, of course) And that it looks like there'd be an epiChalmers because Chalmers doesn't correctly identify modelChalmers as a product of physicalChalmers' cognitive algorithm?

In other words, he'd need to read How an Algorithm Feels on the Inside.

The following paragraph from the article is not a sound argument against epiphenomenalism.

If you can close your eyes, and sense yourself sensing—if you can be aware of yourself being aware, and think "I am aware that I am aware"—and say out loud, "I am aware that I am aware"—then your consciousness is not without effect on your internal narrative, or your moving lips.

The above argument is conflating a you, some kind of agent which can cause thinking, moving lips, etc. with consciousness which does not necessarily have any agency. As I understand it, modern neurological research has some pretty convincing evidence that there is no you controlling the show.

If consciousness has no agency, then that is consistent with epiphenomenalism. Perhaps, substituting “consciousness” for “you” where you” is either stated or implied will make it clearer.

If consciousness can close eyes, and consciousness can sense consciousness sensing—if consciousness can be aware of consciousness being aware, and conscious can think "I am aware that I am aware"—and consciousness can say out loud, "I am aware that I am aware"—then consciousness is not without effect on internal narrative, or moving lips.

The above argument simply asserts if consciousness can cause thinking or saying, then it affects the physical world, which is a tautology, because thinking and saying are physical phenomena. In order to provide argue against epiphenomenalism, you would have to show that consciousness can cause thinking or saying.

Minor nitpick - נְשָׁמָה (soul) is not related to לִשְׁמוֹעַ (to hear) - note the difference in the last (left-most) characters.

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/47

If I understand correctly, Yudkowsky finds philosophical zombies to be implausible, as it would require consciousness to have no causal influence on reality, which Yudkowsky seems to believe entails that if there are philosophical zombies, it’s purely coincidental that accurate discussions of consciousness are done by those who are conscious, which is very improbable and thus philosophical zombies are very implausible. This reasoning seems flawed, as discussing and thinking about consciousness could cause consciousness to exist, but this consciousness would have no effect on anything else. For philosophical zombies to exist, thinking about consciousness could only bring about consciousness in certain substrates.

I would seriously nominate this as the largest bullet ever bitten
Why would anyone bite a bullet that large?
No, the drive to bite this bullet

This has bugged me for a while: is there a definition of "biting" or "dodging" a "bullet"? It seems to be used here in a way exactly opposite how I've seen it used elsewhere.

Eliezer, I am wondering why to bother yourself with going into dispute with people who profess a zombie argument :) Do you hope that some of them will change their way of thinking? I hardly believe they visit this site often. In general, have you personally seen a transformation of such type of person who operates seriously by things like zombie argument to a more rational type of person?

The said Chalmersian theory postulates multiple unexplained complex miracles. This drives down its prior probability, by the conjunction rule of probability and Occam's Razor. It is therefore dominated by at least two theories which postulate fewer miracles, namely:

Substance dualism: 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.

Not-quite-faith-based reductionism: That-which-we-name "consciousness" happens within physics, in a way not yet understood, just like what happened the last three thousand times humanity ran into something mysterious. Your intuition that no material substance can possibly add up to consciousness is incorrect. If you actually knew exactly why you talk about consciousness, this would give you new insights, of a form you can't now anticipate; and afterward you would realize that your arguments about normal physics having no room for consciousness were flawed.

The second theorie seems odd to me. Since it seems to postulate a solution that will happen in the future, of which we have no possible knowledge right now. And therefore any counter argument (like the mentioned intuition) fails, because as soon as the solution is revealed, of course all that opposes it is proven flawed.

Which means that this position is quite bullet proof. Anything opposing it is automatically wrong, we just need to wait until we can see that for ourselves. I have a slight unwillingness to follow that instruction.

But okay: What gives the permission to put such an amount of trust into the field of physics? Mentioned is that this situation happened "three thousand times" before: That people would see no solution (or rather wrong solutions) until physics cleared the case. That is true enough to me. But does it give the possibility to anticipate it happening in the future? On a topic that has not been cleared three thousand times before by physics?

But as we can see in the quote, the arguments against "normal physics" being incapable of the solution are invalid - will be proven invalid - too! For the then "new" physics must be of a completely new structure. Which cannot be anticipated now as well.

I can see how this argument is perfectly bullet proof. But I still don't trust it, and that's because it's so bulletproof. With this structure of "It will be proven in the future!" I can make anything bullet proof.

So: Does our case have any special properties so that it is more fit than "anything" to be made bullet proof? The only possibility I see would be: "It is more probable to be true". This "three thousand times"-sentence is a way to make it look probable. So we are now looking at the question if we rate the solution of the problem of consciousness through physics in the future more probable than - for example - the also mentioned substance dualism. Now how could we get any useful measurement on the probability of something we have not the slightest amount of knowledge about? If it was, as proposed, the fact that physics cleared not understood cases before, that would also count for any other well working and developed system such as psychology, philosophy, biology, mathmatics, etc. We could claim the soon-to-be-there-solution for any theorie claiming to be close to it.

Therefore it doesn't seem to be a useful theory to me. When it's appliable to more or less anything, how can we know where it is applied correctly? All I can see in this case is the intuition that material substance CAN possibly add up to consciousness. And why would this intuition be more reliable than the one opposing it?

The said Chalmersian theory postulates multiple unexplained complex miracles. This drives down its prior probability, by the conjunction rule of probability and Occam's Razor. It is therefore dominated by at least two theories which postulate fewer miracles, namely:

Substance dualism: 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.

Not-quite-faith-based reductionism: That-which-we-name "consciousness" happens within physics, in a way not yet understood, just like what happened the last three thousand times humanity ran into something mysterious. Your intuition that no material substance can possibly add up to consciousness is incorrect. If you actually knew exactly why you talk about consciousness, this would give you new insights, of a form you can't now anticipate; and afterward you would realize that your arguments about normal physics having no room for consciousness were flawed.

The second theory seems odd to me. Since it seems to postulate a solution that will happen in the future, of which we have no possible knowledge right now. And therefore any counter argument (like the mentioned intuition) fails, because as soon as the solution is revealed, of course all that opposes it is proven flawed.

Which means that this position is quite bullet proof. Anything opposing it is automatically wrong, we just need to wait until we can see that for ourselves. I have a slight unwillingness to follow that instruction.

But okay: What gives the permission to put such an amount of trust into the field of physics? Mentioned is that this situation happened "three thousand times" before: That people would see no solution (or rather wrong solutions) until physics cleared the case. That is true enough to me. But does it give the possibility to anticipate it happening in the future? On a topic that has not been cleared three thousand times before by physics?

But as we can see in the quote, the arguments against "normal physics" being incapable of the solution are invalid - will be proven invalid - too! For the then "new" physics must be of a completely new structure. Which cannot be anticipated now as well.

I can see how this argument is perfectly bullet proof. But I still don't trust it, and that's because it's so bulletproof. With this structure of "It will be proven in the future!" I can make anything bullet proof.

So: Does our case have any special properties so that it is more fit than "anything" to be made bullet proof? The only possibility I see would be: "It is more probable to be true". This "three thousand times"-sentence is a way to make it look probable. So we are now looking at the question if we rate the solution of the problem of consciousness through physics in the future more probable than - for example - the also mentioned substance dualism. Now how could we get any useful measurement on the probability of something we have not the slightest amount of knowledge about? If it was, as proposed, the fact that physics cleared not understood cases before, that would also count for any other well working and developed system such as psychology, philosophy, biology, mathematics, etc. We could claim the soon-to-be-there-solution for any theory claiming to be close to it.

Therefore it doesn't seem to be a useful theory to me. When it's applicable to more or less anything, how can we know where it is applied correctly? All I can see in this case is the intuition that material substance CAN possibly add up to consciousness. And why would this intuition be more reliable than the one opposing it?

I think of consciousness more like the heat extruded from the motor. The motor does the work and consciousness is a product of the motor. If the motor accelerates then the consciousness will think it has caused the acceleration, even if it did not. Modern neuroscience hints at the fact that decisions are made before we are conscious of them.

I find it likely you will never read this, or probably anyone else on this very old thread, but I will give a statement that you may like, since I believe you are actually correct at framing this issue:

Firstly, I think zombies are unavoidable unless you are a flat-out dualist. And that Chalmers framing this thing called the Hard Problem, was a way of his own question being answered. That also means you can't really say the Hard Problem is answerable from his framing either with zombies being the true point in it. It's already set up for failure via a category error on its own from someone who is basically using this to get a circular argument out of someone who didn't understand the logic to begin with. SO if you are not just a dualist, you can create this problem for any ideology. Which is basically silly and you can say that any non-physicalism would also have a zombie effect counterpart unanswerable not based on reductive problems but on still a conceptual ground. Which is a problem with conceptual arguments. 

Secondly, Penrose is not a dualist. He is basically a physicalist but his view from his book Shadows Of The Mind he refers to it as Three Worlds based on a Platonic version of Karl Popper's metaphysics. However, his is not dualism, and his version of the quantum state reduction positions the reduction inside of a physical world using a version of gravity and quantum oscillators that randomize incomputable events, so it is basically still a physicalist view of consciousness. His view does not even take into consideration the Hard Problem as I understand it and never mentions it. And by the end of his book the idea itself was unfinished. Whether or not this is coherent enough to be truly tested or understood as a theory on the other hand is something else. (which is only considered by some physicalists) The confusion over dualism I think stems from the fact that everyone basically seems to not understand the idea of it or never read the book fully and how confusing it is. And Hameroff, who he was working with on this also referred to his idea as an "identity theory" of consciousness. Which has perhaps become the confusion between Hameroff and Penrose's statements.