Going on about zombies and consciousness as if you were addressing philosophical issues, when you have redefined consciousness to mean a particular easily-comprehended computational or graph-theoretic property, falls squarely into the category of ideas that I consider Silly.
Although, ironically, I’m in the process of doing exactly that. I will try to come up with a rationalization for why it is Not Silly when I do it.
It probably doesn’t feel silly when you do it because you unconsciously have two epistemic subjects in your model of the world. One is the conscious you, and the other is the brainy speaky, from wernicke to mouth to the word “consciousness” you.
Since the model your physical self has made of the world includes both the physical you, and the chalmersian-conscious-you, and the physical self does not know it has this division, the model constantly switches between representations, allowing for silly things to happen.
In fact, except for Chalmers, who is really skilled at dodging this mistake (because he invented it and made a career out of it), most smart people do this. (It was so hard to find where Chalmers cheated in his “The Content and Epistemology of Phenomenal Belief” I wrote an article pointing it out.)
If you want to gain a few bits to the model of what feels like you, the chalmersian-conscious-you, tononi http://www.biolbull.org/cgi/content/abstract/215/3/216 will give you a little information, it will explain only (don’t put high hopes) why colors are different from sounds.
I have never read anything else that improves the brute model of chalmersian-conscious-me with which we are equipped naturally.…
It probably doesn’t feel silly when you do it because you unconsciously have two epistemic subjects in your model of the world. One is the conscious you, and the other is the brainy speaky, from wernicke to mouth to the word “consciousness” you.
Since the model your physical self has made of the world includes both the physical you, and the chalmersian-conscious-you, and the physical self does not know it has this division, the model constantly switches between representations, allowing for silly things to happen. In fact, except for Chalmers, who is really skilled at dodging this mistake (because he invented it and made a career out of it), most smart people do this. (It was so hard to find where Chalmers cheated in his “The Content and Epistemology of Phenomenal Belief” I wrote an article pointing it out.)
If you want to gain a few bits to the model of what feels like you, the chalmersian-conscious-you, tononi http://www.biolbull.org/cgi/content/abstract/215/3/216 will give you a little information, it will explain only (don’t put high hopes) why colors are different from sounds.
I have never read anything else that improves the brute model of chalmersian-conscious-me with which we are equipped naturally.…