It sometimes seems to me that those of us who actually have consciousness are in a minority, and everyone else is a p-zombie.
When I myself run across apparent p-zombies, they usually look at my arguments as if I am being dense over my descriptions of consciousness. And I can see why, because without the experience of consciousness itself, these arguments must sound like they make consciousness out to be an extraneous hypothesis to help explain my behavior. Yet, even after reflecting on this objection, it still seems there is something to explain besides my behavior, which wouldn’t bother me if I were only trying to explain my behavior, including the words in this post.
It makes sense to me that from outside a brain, everything in the brain is causal, and the brain’s statements about truths are dependent on outside formalizations, and that everything observable about a brain is reducible to symbolic events. And so an observation of a zombie-Chalmers introspecting his consciousness would yield no shocking insights on the origins of his English arguments. And I know that when I reflect on this argument, an observer of my own brain would also find no surprising neural behaviors.
But I don’t know how to reconcile this with my overriding intuition/need/thought that I seek not to explain my behavior but the sense experience itself when I talk about it. Fully aware of outside view functionalism, the sensation of red still feels like an item in need of explanation, regardless of which words I use to describe it. I also feel no particular need to feel that this represents a confusion, because the sense experience seems to demand that it place itself in another category than something you would explain functionally from the outside. All this I say even while I’m aware that to humans without this feeling, these claims seem nothing like insane, and they will gladly inspect my brain for a (correct) functional explanation of my words.
The whole ordeal still greatly confuses me, to an extent that surprises me given how many other questions have been dissolved on reflection such as, well, intelligence.
When I myself run across apparent p-zombies, they usually look at my arguments as if I am being dense over my descriptions of consciousness. And I can see why, because without the experience of consciousness itself, these arguments must sound like they make consciousness out to be an extraneous hypothesis to help explain my behavior. Yet, even after reflecting on this objection, it still seems there is something to explain besides my behavior, which wouldn’t bother me if I were only trying to explain my behavior, including the words in this post.
It makes sense to me that from outside a brain, everything in the brain is causal, and the brain’s statements about truths are dependent on outside formalizations, and that everything observable about a brain is reducible to symbolic events. And so an observation of a zombie-Chalmers introspecting his consciousness would yield no shocking insights on the origins of his English arguments. And I know that when I reflect on this argument, an observer of my own brain would also find no surprising neural behaviors.
But I don’t know how to reconcile this with my overriding intuition/need/thought that I seek not to explain my behavior but the sense experience itself when I talk about it. Fully aware of outside view functionalism, the sensation of red still feels like an item in need of explanation, regardless of which words I use to describe it. I also feel no particular need to feel that this represents a confusion, because the sense experience seems to demand that it place itself in another category than something you would explain functionally from the outside. All this I say even while I’m aware that to humans without this feeling, these claims seem nothing like insane, and they will gladly inspect my brain for a (correct) functional explanation of my words.
The whole ordeal still greatly confuses me, to an extent that surprises me given how many other questions have been dissolved on reflection such as, well, intelligence.