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?
Scott Aaronson says here that the zombie argument that science cannot explain consciousness is completely convincing to him. Do you find Aaronson especially lacking in rationality?
Honestly I don’t know who Scott Aaronson is, so hard to say for me.
And regarding that science cannot explain consciousness—it probably cannot explain it exhaustively YET. But this was the same with a lot of other things in the past, which were not explainable at some moment in time but were explained completely clear after some work has been done. So be patient, science will explain consciousness some day as well (at least I want to believe in this).
In the paragraph beginning “The most obvious thing”. But it is worth reading the paragraphs that follow. He says it’s “perfectly reasonable” to reject that argument on the basis that the “hard problem” (as Chalmers calls it) is mere sophistry—that being roughly what I think most people here on LW would be inclined to do. But he objects to the combination of (1) doing that with (2) saying that some theory in neuroscience will solve the “hard problem”.
That seems to me like a reasonable objection, but I’m not sure his diagnosis is correct; I suspect at least some of the people he’s objecting to actually (1) say that the “hard problem” is mere sophistry but (2) say that some theory in neuroscience gives an answer to the question “what is consciousness?” that doesn’t involve that sort of sophistry; an answer not to the question “what is this further extra thing that constitutes consciousness, above and beyond people’s behaviour and how their brains work?” but to “what exactly is it about people’s behaviour and how their brains work that constitutes this thing we call consciousness?”.
He goes on to accept that this sort of question is reasonable, and in fact that’s the question he focuses on in the rest of what he writes.
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?
Scott Aaronson says here that the zombie argument that science cannot explain consciousness is completely convincing to him. Do you find Aaronson especially lacking in rationality?
Now I know who is Scott Aaronson, so your comment was useful.
Honestly I don’t know who Scott Aaronson is, so hard to say for me. And regarding that science cannot explain consciousness—it probably cannot explain it exhaustively YET. But this was the same with a lot of other things in the past, which were not explainable at some moment in time but were explained completely clear after some work has been done. So be patient, science will explain consciousness some day as well (at least I want to believe in this).
Where in that (long) post does he say that?
In the paragraph beginning “The most obvious thing”. But it is worth reading the paragraphs that follow. He says it’s “perfectly reasonable” to reject that argument on the basis that the “hard problem” (as Chalmers calls it) is mere sophistry—that being roughly what I think most people here on LW would be inclined to do. But he objects to the combination of (1) doing that with (2) saying that some theory in neuroscience will solve the “hard problem”.
That seems to me like a reasonable objection, but I’m not sure his diagnosis is correct; I suspect at least some of the people he’s objecting to actually (1) say that the “hard problem” is mere sophistry but (2) say that some theory in neuroscience gives an answer to the question “what is consciousness?” that doesn’t involve that sort of sophistry; an answer not to the question “what is this further extra thing that constitutes consciousness, above and beyond people’s behaviour and how their brains work?” but to “what exactly is it about people’s behaviour and how their brains work that constitutes this thing we call consciousness?”.
He goes on to accept that this sort of question is reasonable, and in fact that’s the question he focuses on in the rest of what he writes.