The Zombie Argument is that if the Zombie World is possible—not necessarily physically possible in our universe, just “possible in theory”, or “imaginable”, or something along those lines—then consciousness must be extra-physical, something over and above mere atoms. Why? Because even if you somehow knew the positions of all the atoms in the universe, you would still have be told, as a separate and additional fact, that people were conscious—that they had inner listeners—that we were not in the Zombie World, as seems possible.
I interpret “knowing the positions of all the atoms in the universe” as omniscience, and since Eliezer sets out the problem this way, this is what I interpret the problem to be.
I interpret “knowing the positions of all the atoms in the universe” as omniscience
Then, to paraphrase Nesov’s point which you ignored: A conceptual error here seems to be attributing to “knowing the positions of all the atoms in the universe” the ability to clarify a confusion.
In that case, what exactly is the thought experiment supposed to prove?
If we suppose that this being can’t clarify confusions merely by virtue of its knowing the positions of all the atoms of the Universe on an ongoing basis, then if it doesn’t understand qualia this is merely one confusion amongst many mundane physical confusions. So there would be nothing “extra-physical” about its failure to understand qualia, since it doesn’t understand certain high-level phenomena that everyone agrees to be “physical”.
Under this interpretation the debate seems pointless to me.
In that case, what exactly is the thought experiment supposed to prove?
Yudkowsky explained how the being knowing the positions of all the atoms in the universe could use human level reasoning to arrive high confidence that “qualia” refers to something real.
You criticize this argument claiming this being is omniscient and therefore should know with certainty that qualia are real if they are. Your criticism fails because the being does not have omniscient level ability to make logical inferences and resolve confusions, it uses only the human level reasoning Yudkowsky is able to explain and attribute to it. (And Yudkowksy’s argument never used more knowledge of physics than we have. Really, the level of confidence we attribute to this being is the level of confidence we have that a totally omnicsient being would know for certain that qualia exist. Obviously, if we could explain why an omnicient being would have more confidence in our position that we do, we would already have that higher level of confidence.)
[C]riticism fails because the being does not have omniscient level ability to make logical inferences and resolve confusions
To develop this point: if logical inferences are the “Ethereum” to the “Bitcoin” of mere omniscience about patterns of information; or, to use a more frivolous metaphor, David Bowie’s “The Next Day” in comparison to “Heroes”, then I think this was a concept that was missing from OP’s headline argument.
On rereading, I noticed that the sentence “Your criticism fails because the being does not have omniscient level ability to make logical inferences and resolve confusions” was missing the word “not” which screws up the meaning. Anything else not make sense?
It still seems off, as in pointing out strangely irrelevant things, but it’s 3AM, so I might be missing an obvious motivation for what you’re saying...
On re-reading Eliezer’s zombie post, I noticed that he also said:
And it’s logical possibility of the Zombie World, not conceptual possibility, that is needed to suppose that a logically omniscient mind [my italics] could know the positions of all the atoms in the universe, and yet need to be told as an additional non-entailed fact that we have inner listeners.
Although “resolving confusions” may be another thing entirely, this seems worth pointing out.
Yudkowsky explained how the being knowing the positions of all the atoms in the universe could use human level reasoning to arrive high confidence that “qualia” refers to something real.
So knowledge of the positions of all the atoms in the Universe turns out in this case to be an irrelevance, since Yudkowsky’s argument applies to humans just as much as this hypothetical being using “human level reasoning”.
If this were really the intended thought experiment, it proves nothing about physicalism vs extra-physicalism, or the logical impossibility of p-zombies. We just learn that it’s very likely that humans all possess qualia. So why did Yudkowsky even mention this being that knows the positions of all the atoms, and why does he claim that the debate is about disproving extra-physicalism?
Whereas the omniscient intelligence thought experiment, in which the being can actually use its information to resolve all kinds of multi-level confusions, actually tests the question whether there is some extra causal factor responsible for the reality of “awareness”, “qualia” or “consciousness” (whatever each of them considered himself to be discussing) besides mere physics. Which might just be reason to suspect that that is what Yudkowsky actually intended.
That detailed knowledge of physics doesn’t help is at least the point I made in the top-level comment. “Information” isn’t magic, you can’t fix a broken question with more information (i.e. ability to answer questions better).
Yudkowsky’s argument was focusing on origins of the question (concept of qualia), on reasons for it getting asked. The article presents motivation for interpreting the question as referring to properties of physical world. (See also: A Priori.)
But might we not expect that computations occurring in the human brain will turn out to offer a causal account of why we refer to ourselves as possessing qualia (much as Dennett aims to describe in Consciousness Explained) without this satisfying the large majority of philosophers and general public that their “qualia”—the indefinable concept of whose nonexistence they can nonetheless not be persuaded—have been explained at all rather than simply ignored in favour of some eliminativist “consciousness”.
As far as I am concerned, if such an account did emerge upon our investigating the brain in detail (as I expect it would) then I would not accept that qualia had been explained and would continue to believe that the selfsame computations occurring in the brain also produce via psycho-physical bridging laws the phenomenon of “qualia”, which is irreducible.
Since qualia are such an intensely personal affair, I don’t see that Bayes’s Theorem could ever have anything sensible to say as regards the rationality of this belief without its begging the question.
So as I see it, if Yudkowsky is presuming that “qualia” either don’t exist or are reducible to quarks then a) his argument was way too long-winded—he could just have said that intelligence + knowledge about quarks ⇒ understanding of anything built from quarks
b) this is not an assumption that anyone else is rationally compelled to make
You seem to be criticising conclusion “a”. But surely Yudkowsky has to pick from one of the three choices: qualia do not exist, qualia exist and are reducible to quarks, qualia exist and are not reducible to quarks. If he believes none of these, arguing instead that the qualia concept is a confusion, then he believes that qualia do not exist as far as I’m concerned. This is because we are already incapable of defining qualia, and our agreement to use this word is based on the fact that we are all aware of the existence of one indefinable concept that appears to have a relationship with our brain states – not on any possible definition of “qualia”. If Yudkowsky claims that “qualia” is a confusion, then this is a refusal to accept the consensus regarding the name of the indefinable concept—which constitutes a simple rejection of the concept. In any other case this rationality trick (dissolving the question, righting a wrong question or however you wish to put it) works, but in the case of an inherently indefinable concept it does not.
...And if Yudkowsky accepts the possibility that irreducible qualia can exist in the sense that I describe, which I must admit was my unwarranted assumption in the original article, then I don’t feel that he actually managed to prove in his argument with Chalmers that (we can be extremely confident that) the existence of qualia is entirely dependent on properties of the physical world. This is the origin of the supposed correction that I made to his argument, because that can in fact be proved. I hope that that particular point has already been made very clear in my article.
we are already incapable of defining qualia, and our agreement to use this word is based on the fact that we are all aware of the existence of one indefinable concept that appears to have a relationship with our brain states...If Yudkowsky claims that “qualia” is a confusion, then this is a refusal to accept the consensus regarding the name of the indefinable concept
Assuming that there’s a good deal of rich content in the world we don’t understand that is covered by our label “qualia”, the explanation for our use of a single label is that the generally undifferentiated confusion us label-makers have all feels the same from the inside.
The actual content of this unknown area might be divided in three equal parts, two new weird concepts (unphysicality and fundamental irreducibility) and one mundane one already constituting some of our mental maps (reductionism).
Our use of a single word for a lump of confusion doesn’t strongly imply that there is one underlying concept.
There probably is only one explanation, rather than two or especially three, for why we feel we don’t fully understand because that is a simpler explanation. But my point is that the use of a single new label does not imply that the things described are a single new concept—they could be parts of two new and one old, or all one new, or all one old.
Lessdazed, I was trying to argue that the use of a single word renders Yudkowsky’s arguments untrue, unless he is in fact presuming certain facts about this “confusion”. The implications of what he is arguing differ depending on the features of the “confusion” as I was grasping towards in my article and finally pointed out there.
I also suggested that if Bayesian rationality were to tell me that I don’t have qualia (i.e. if a thorough investigation of the brain found only an eliminative materialist explanation of the confusion “consciousness”) then I would view that as a refutation of the general applicability of Bayesian rationality to this unique case rather than a refutation of qualia. That is a measure of my confidence that I do have qualia. This may be attractive to negative karma, but I believe that it would be the actual humanly realistic response (in the scenario that investigation of the brain resolves the confusion in this particular way) of most Bayesians. It is also somewhat a restatement of Richard Kennaway’s aphorism here
I await (more in hope than expectation) recognition of the fact that Yudkowsky’s argument fails to refute extra-physicalism, or any explicit defence of the idea that he refuted it.
Furthermore, if you do still feel that it is legitimate for Yudkowsky to bundle together all possible referents of “consciousness”, “awareness” and “qualia” together into one “confusion”, then his argument did actually fail to disprove the likelihood of extra-physicality and my correction is still needed!
He says this:
I interpret “knowing the positions of all the atoms in the universe” as omniscience, and since Eliezer sets out the problem this way, this is what I interpret the problem to be.
Then, to paraphrase Nesov’s point which you ignored: A conceptual error here seems to be attributing to “knowing the positions of all the atoms in the universe” the ability to clarify a confusion.
In that case, what exactly is the thought experiment supposed to prove?
If we suppose that this being can’t clarify confusions merely by virtue of its knowing the positions of all the atoms of the Universe on an ongoing basis, then if it doesn’t understand qualia this is merely one confusion amongst many mundane physical confusions. So there would be nothing “extra-physical” about its failure to understand qualia, since it doesn’t understand certain high-level phenomena that everyone agrees to be “physical”.
Under this interpretation the debate seems pointless to me.
Yudkowsky explained how the being knowing the positions of all the atoms in the universe could use human level reasoning to arrive high confidence that “qualia” refers to something real.
You criticize this argument claiming this being is omniscient and therefore should know with certainty that qualia are real if they are. Your criticism fails because the being does not have omniscient level ability to make logical inferences and resolve confusions, it uses only the human level reasoning Yudkowsky is able to explain and attribute to it. (And Yudkowksy’s argument never used more knowledge of physics than we have. Really, the level of confidence we attribute to this being is the level of confidence we have that a totally omnicsient being would know for certain that qualia exist. Obviously, if we could explain why an omnicient being would have more confidence in our position that we do, we would already have that higher level of confidence.)
To develop this point: if logical inferences are the “Ethereum” to the “Bitcoin” of mere omniscience about patterns of information; or, to use a more frivolous metaphor, David Bowie’s “The Next Day” in comparison to “Heroes”, then I think this was a concept that was missing from OP’s headline argument.
I couldn’t follow you here...
On rereading, I noticed that the sentence “Your criticism fails because the being does not have omniscient level ability to make logical inferences and resolve confusions” was missing the word “not” which screws up the meaning. Anything else not make sense?
It still seems off, as in pointing out strangely irrelevant things, but it’s 3AM, so I might be missing an obvious motivation for what you’re saying...
On re-reading Eliezer’s zombie post, I noticed that he also said:
Although “resolving confusions” may be another thing entirely, this seems worth pointing out.
So knowledge of the positions of all the atoms in the Universe turns out in this case to be an irrelevance, since Yudkowsky’s argument applies to humans just as much as this hypothetical being using “human level reasoning”.
If this were really the intended thought experiment, it proves nothing about physicalism vs extra-physicalism, or the logical impossibility of p-zombies. We just learn that it’s very likely that humans all possess qualia. So why did Yudkowsky even mention this being that knows the positions of all the atoms, and why does he claim that the debate is about disproving extra-physicalism?
Whereas the omniscient intelligence thought experiment, in which the being can actually use its information to resolve all kinds of multi-level confusions, actually tests the question whether there is some extra causal factor responsible for the reality of “awareness”, “qualia” or “consciousness” (whatever each of them considered himself to be discussing) besides mere physics. Which might just be reason to suspect that that is what Yudkowsky actually intended.
That detailed knowledge of physics doesn’t help is at least the point I made in the top-level comment. “Information” isn’t magic, you can’t fix a broken question with more information (i.e. ability to answer questions better).
Yudkowsky’s argument was focusing on origins of the question (concept of qualia), on reasons for it getting asked. The article presents motivation for interpreting the question as referring to properties of physical world. (See also: A Priori.)
That makes some sense.
But might we not expect that computations occurring in the human brain will turn out to offer a causal account of why we refer to ourselves as possessing qualia (much as Dennett aims to describe in Consciousness Explained) without this satisfying the large majority of philosophers and general public that their “qualia”—the indefinable concept of whose nonexistence they can nonetheless not be persuaded—have been explained at all rather than simply ignored in favour of some eliminativist “consciousness”.
As far as I am concerned, if such an account did emerge upon our investigating the brain in detail (as I expect it would) then I would not accept that qualia had been explained and would continue to believe that the selfsame computations occurring in the brain also produce via psycho-physical bridging laws the phenomenon of “qualia”, which is irreducible.
Since qualia are such an intensely personal affair, I don’t see that Bayes’s Theorem could ever have anything sensible to say as regards the rationality of this belief without its begging the question.
So as I see it, if Yudkowsky is presuming that “qualia” either don’t exist or are reducible to quarks then a) his argument was way too long-winded—he could just have said that intelligence + knowledge about quarks ⇒ understanding of anything built from quarks b) this is not an assumption that anyone else is rationally compelled to make
You seem to be criticising conclusion “a”. But surely Yudkowsky has to pick from one of the three choices: qualia do not exist, qualia exist and are reducible to quarks, qualia exist and are not reducible to quarks. If he believes none of these, arguing instead that the qualia concept is a confusion, then he believes that qualia do not exist as far as I’m concerned. This is because we are already incapable of defining qualia, and our agreement to use this word is based on the fact that we are all aware of the existence of one indefinable concept that appears to have a relationship with our brain states – not on any possible definition of “qualia”. If Yudkowsky claims that “qualia” is a confusion, then this is a refusal to accept the consensus regarding the name of the indefinable concept—which constitutes a simple rejection of the concept. In any other case this rationality trick (dissolving the question, righting a wrong question or however you wish to put it) works, but in the case of an inherently indefinable concept it does not.
...And if Yudkowsky accepts the possibility that irreducible qualia can exist in the sense that I describe, which I must admit was my unwarranted assumption in the original article, then I don’t feel that he actually managed to prove in his argument with Chalmers that (we can be extremely confident that) the existence of qualia is entirely dependent on properties of the physical world. This is the origin of the supposed correction that I made to his argument, because that can in fact be proved. I hope that that particular point has already been made very clear in my article.
Assuming that there’s a good deal of rich content in the world we don’t understand that is covered by our label “qualia”, the explanation for our use of a single label is that the generally undifferentiated confusion us label-makers have all feels the same from the inside.
The actual content of this unknown area might be divided in three equal parts, two new weird concepts (unphysicality and fundamental irreducibility) and one mundane one already constituting some of our mental maps (reductionism).
Our use of a single word for a lump of confusion doesn’t strongly imply that there is one underlying concept.
There probably is only one explanation, rather than two or especially three, for why we feel we don’t fully understand because that is a simpler explanation. But my point is that the use of a single new label does not imply that the things described are a single new concept—they could be parts of two new and one old, or all one new, or all one old.
Lessdazed, I was trying to argue that the use of a single word renders Yudkowsky’s arguments untrue, unless he is in fact presuming certain facts about this “confusion”. The implications of what he is arguing differ depending on the features of the “confusion” as I was grasping towards in my article and finally pointed out there.
I also suggested that if Bayesian rationality were to tell me that I don’t have qualia (i.e. if a thorough investigation of the brain found only an eliminative materialist explanation of the confusion “consciousness”) then I would view that as a refutation of the general applicability of Bayesian rationality to this unique case rather than a refutation of qualia. That is a measure of my confidence that I do have qualia. This may be attractive to negative karma, but I believe that it would be the actual humanly realistic response (in the scenario that investigation of the brain resolves the confusion in this particular way) of most Bayesians. It is also somewhat a restatement of Richard Kennaway’s aphorism here
I await (more in hope than expectation) recognition of the fact that Yudkowsky’s argument fails to refute extra-physicalism, or any explicit defence of the idea that he refuted it.
Furthermore, if you do still feel that it is legitimate for Yudkowsky to bundle together all possible referents of “consciousness”, “awareness” and “qualia” together into one “confusion”, then his argument did actually fail to disprove the likelihood of extra-physicality and my correction is still needed!