But you don’t actually need to resort to this dodge. You already said the lookup tables aren’t conscious; that in itself is a step which is troublesome for a lot of computationalists. You could just add a clause to your original statement, e.g.
“The lookup tables are not conscious, but the process that produced them was either conscious or extremely improbable.”
Voila, you now have an answer which covers all possible worlds and not just the probable ones. I think it’s what you wanted to say anyway.
“The lookup tables are not conscious, but the process that produced them was either conscious or extremely improbable.”
If that answer would have satisfied you, why did you ask about a scenario so improbable you felt compelled to justify it with an appeal to the Least Convenient Possible World?
Do you now agree that GLUT simulations do not imply the existence of zombies?
I thought you were overlooking the extremely-improbable case by mistake, rather than overlooking it on principle.
For me, the point of a GLUT is that it is a simulation of consciousness that is not itself conscious, a somewhat different concept from the usual philosophical notion of a zombie, which is supposed to be physically identical to a conscious being, but with the consciousness somehow subtracted. A GLUT is physically different from the thing it simulates, so it’s a different starting point.
But you don’t actually need to resort to this dodge. You already said the lookup tables aren’t conscious; that in itself is a step which is troublesome for a lot of computationalists. You could just add a clause to your original statement, e.g.
“The lookup tables are not conscious, but the process that produced them was either conscious or extremely improbable.”
Voila, you now have an answer which covers all possible worlds and not just the probable ones. I think it’s what you wanted to say anyway.
If that answer would have satisfied you, why did you ask about a scenario so improbable you felt compelled to justify it with an appeal to the Least Convenient Possible World?
Do you now agree that GLUT simulations do not imply the existence of zombies?
I thought you were overlooking the extremely-improbable case by mistake, rather than overlooking it on principle.
For me, the point of a GLUT is that it is a simulation of consciousness that is not itself conscious, a somewhat different concept from the usual philosophical notion of a zombie, which is supposed to be physically identical to a conscious being, but with the consciousness somehow subtracted. A GLUT is physically different from the thing it simulates, so it’s a different starting point.