That is, from my point of view, asking me to have two contradictory experiences at once: being normal and being comatose. And you’re going to say, “not being comatose, feeling comatose.“ And I will say, I can’t imagine acting awake and also feeling comatose. Let‘s look at a particular feature of coma: not being able to stand upright. I would feel like I was unable to stand, while in fact standing up whenever appropriate. And this is not some crazy delusion— in fact my brain is operating normally. No, I can’t imagine what that would feel like. We‘re both intelligent persons, not trying to be deceptive. And yet we have a large difference in what we can imagine ourselves being like when we introspect. I claim this is due to an actual difference in the structure of our cognition, best summed up as “I don’t have qualia, you do.”
That would feel like being comatose. Again, I could understand if you said “it’s unlikely to happen”, but I still don’t understand how not being able to even imagine it would work. Some similar things are even can happen in the real world: you can not consciously see anything, don’t feel like you can move your hand, but still move your hand. You can just extrapolate from this to not feeling anything. You can say that feelings about being comatose are delusional in that case.
Or, can you imagine that it’s not you that experiences blue sky—your copy does—when actual you are a comatose ghost? Like, you don’t even need to have qualia to imagine qualia—they can be modeled by just adding a node to your casual graph that includes neurons or whatever. You can do that with your models, right?
Your disagreement is mirrored almost exactly in Yudkowsky’s post Zombies Redacted. The crucial point (as mentioned also in Hastings’ sister comment) is that the thought experiment breaks down as soon as you consider the zombies making just the same claims about consciousness as we do, while not actually having any coherent reason for making such claims (as they are defined to not have consciousness in the first place). I guess you can imagine, in some sense, a scenario like that, but what’s the point of imagining a hypothetical set of physical laws that lack internal coherence?
Zombies being wrong is not a problem for experiment’s coherence—their reasons for making claims about consciousness are just terminated on the level of physical description. The point is that the laws of physics don’t seem to prohibit a scenario like this: for other imagined things you can in principle run the calculations and say “no, evolution on earth would not produce talking unicorns”, but where is the part that says that we are not zombies? There are reasons to not believe in zombies and more reasons to not believe in epiphenomenalism, like “it would be coincidence for us to know about epiphenomenal consciousness”, but the problem is that these reasons seem to be outside of physical laws.
what’s the point of imagining a hypothetical set of physical laws that lack internal coherence?
I don’t think they lack internal coherence; you haven’t identified a contradiction in them. But one point of imagining them is to highlight the conceptual distinction between, on the one hand, all of the (in principle) externally observable features or signs of consciousness, and, on the other hand, qualia. The fact that we can imagine these coming completely apart, and that the only ‘contradiction’ in the idea of zombie world is that it seems weird and unlikely, shows that these are distinct (even if closely related) concepts.
This conceptual distinction is relevant to questions such as whether a purely physical theory could ever ‘explain’ qualia, and whether the existence of qualia is compatible with a strictly materialist metaphysics. I think that’s the angle from which Yudkowsky was approaching it (i.e. he was trying to defend materialism against qualia-based challenges). My reading of the current conversation is that Signer is trying to get Carl to acknowledge the conceptual distinction, while Carl is saying that while he believes the distinction makes sense to some people, it really doesn’t to him, and his best explanation for this is that some people have qualia and some don’t.
That is, from my point of view, asking me to have two contradictory experiences at once: being normal and being comatose. And you’re going to say, “not being comatose, feeling comatose.“ And I will say, I can’t imagine acting awake and also feeling comatose.
Let‘s look at a particular feature of coma: not being able to stand upright. I would feel like I was unable to stand, while in fact standing up whenever appropriate. And this is not some crazy delusion— in fact my brain is operating normally. No, I can’t imagine what that would feel like.
We‘re both intelligent persons, not trying to be deceptive. And yet we have a large difference in what we can imagine ourselves being like when we introspect. I claim this is due to an actual difference in the structure of our cognition, best summed up as “I don’t have qualia, you do.”
That would feel like being comatose. Again, I could understand if you said “it’s unlikely to happen”, but I still don’t understand how not being able to even imagine it would work. Some similar things are even can happen in the real world: you can not consciously see anything, don’t feel like you can move your hand, but still move your hand. You can just extrapolate from this to not feeling anything. You can say that feelings about being comatose are delusional in that case.
Or, can you imagine that it’s not you that experiences blue sky—your copy does—when actual you are a comatose ghost? Like, you don’t even need to have qualia to imagine qualia—they can be modeled by just adding a node to your casual graph that includes neurons or whatever. You can do that with your models, right?
Your disagreement is mirrored almost exactly in Yudkowsky’s post Zombies Redacted. The crucial point (as mentioned also in Hastings’ sister comment) is that the thought experiment breaks down as soon as you consider the zombies making just the same claims about consciousness as we do, while not actually having any coherent reason for making such claims (as they are defined to not have consciousness in the first place). I guess you can imagine, in some sense, a scenario like that, but what’s the point of imagining a hypothetical set of physical laws that lack internal coherence?
Zombies being wrong is not a problem for experiment’s coherence—their reasons for making claims about consciousness are just terminated on the level of physical description. The point is that the laws of physics don’t seem to prohibit a scenario like this: for other imagined things you can in principle run the calculations and say “no, evolution on earth would not produce talking unicorns”, but where is the part that says that we are not zombies? There are reasons to not believe in zombies and more reasons to not believe in epiphenomenalism, like “it would be coincidence for us to know about epiphenomenal consciousness”, but the problem is that these reasons seem to be outside of physical laws.
I don’t think they lack internal coherence; you haven’t identified a contradiction in them. But one point of imagining them is to highlight the conceptual distinction between, on the one hand, all of the (in principle) externally observable features or signs of consciousness, and, on the other hand, qualia. The fact that we can imagine these coming completely apart, and that the only ‘contradiction’ in the idea of zombie world is that it seems weird and unlikely, shows that these are distinct (even if closely related) concepts.
This conceptual distinction is relevant to questions such as whether a purely physical theory could ever ‘explain’ qualia, and whether the existence of qualia is compatible with a strictly materialist metaphysics. I think that’s the angle from which Yudkowsky was approaching it (i.e. he was trying to defend materialism against qualia-based challenges). My reading of the current conversation is that Signer is trying to get Carl to acknowledge the conceptual distinction, while Carl is saying that while he believes the distinction makes sense to some people, it really doesn’t to him, and his best explanation for this is that some people have qualia and some don’t.