In one of the sub-comments, I thought about the tests that identified mental-imagery, and started thinking of how you might test for several variants of “lack of sense of self” or some related attributes.
Related Tests for inner-sense or model of self
No-qualia seems challenging to test. But “no model of self” (one form of “lack-of-self-awareness”) seems halfway-there, or at least in the correct spirit of the question? And I think that could be tested reliably; just get a group of people to predict their own behavior, and watch that subset of the group who reliably fail catastrophically at this.
For lack of consistency and other-awareness… There’s a Nazi (ETA: Eichmann) who seemed likely to be a troublingly-vivid example of “no consistent worldview or other-awareness”; all his words and beliefs were inconsistent platitudes, and he seemed genuinely surprised when Jewish judges didn’t feel sympathy for the difficulty in his attempts to get promoted by doing a “good job” optimizing trains for death. Unfortunately, I can’t track down his name. If someone knows who I’m talking about, I’d love to be pointed at an article about his strange psychology again.
Lack-of-attachment-to-internal-identity seems to be another semi-related thing. I feel like there are some things where I care about “identity-alignment” a great deal, and other matters that others clearly care about where I just lack any feeling of identity euphoria/dysphoria around the matter regardless of what I do. I suspect there are some people who lack either sensation altogether. Probably some fraction of those people come across as identity chameleons; people who switch out identities according to external incentives, because they have no internal reason not to.
(Personally, meditation updated me considerably towards a reduced attachment to internal-identities, but there are still some I’m attached to and care about maintaining.)
Alexithymia is a phenomenon where you lack awareness of your own emotions, sometimes even as you are acting them out. This seems easy to test in a manner similar to green/red color-blindness; have the person try to appraise what sort of emotion they’re feeling, and then read their circumstances or watch their behavior for a read of which emotion it actually is, and see who usually seems to misjudge it (or believe they’re not feeling emotions entirely).
Another p-zombie variant
There’s a different p-zombie subtype I’ve been thinking about a great deal myself..
If you set up a system where there’s an observer, an actor, and an environment, then there are 2 kinds of consciousness:
The observer influences, controls, or is the actor who does things in the environment
A policy feedback loop
The observer is just modeling what the actor will do in the environment
A one-way modeling of the agent
I suspect the later can feel “conscious” even if the observer never influences the actor in any way.
Humans are usually a bit of both, but someone who only has “consciousness” in the later capacity feels a bit like a… “consciousness hitchhiking on a q-zombie” to me.
In one of the sub-comments, I thought about the tests that identified mental-imagery, and started thinking of how you might test for several variants of “lack of sense of self” or some related attributes.
Related Tests for inner-sense or model of self
No-qualia seems challenging to test. But “no model of self” (one form of “lack-of-self-awareness”) seems halfway-there, or at least in the correct spirit of the question? And I think that could be tested reliably; just get a group of people to predict their own behavior, and watch that subset of the group who reliably fail catastrophically at this.
For lack of consistency and other-awareness… There’s a Nazi (ETA: Eichmann) who seemed likely to be a troublingly-vivid example of “no consistent worldview or other-awareness”; all his words and beliefs were inconsistent platitudes, and he seemed genuinely surprised when Jewish judges didn’t feel sympathy for the difficulty in his attempts to get promoted by doing a “good job” optimizing trains for death. Unfortunately, I can’t track down his name. If someone knows who I’m talking about, I’d love to be pointed at an article about his strange psychology again.
Lack-of-attachment-to-internal-identity seems to be another semi-related thing. I feel like there are some things where I care about “identity-alignment” a great deal, and other matters that others clearly care about where I just lack any feeling of identity euphoria/dysphoria around the matter regardless of what I do. I suspect there are some people who lack either sensation altogether. Probably some fraction of those people come across as identity chameleons; people who switch out identities according to external incentives, because they have no internal reason not to.
(Personally, meditation updated me considerably towards a reduced attachment to internal-identities, but there are still some I’m attached to and care about maintaining.)
Alexithymia is a phenomenon where you lack awareness of your own emotions, sometimes even as you are acting them out. This seems easy to test in a manner similar to green/red color-blindness; have the person try to appraise what sort of emotion they’re feeling, and then read their circumstances or watch their behavior for a read of which emotion it actually is, and see who usually seems to misjudge it (or believe they’re not feeling emotions entirely).
Another p-zombie variant
There’s a different p-zombie subtype I’ve been thinking about a great deal myself..
If you set up a system where there’s an observer, an actor, and an environment, then there are 2 kinds of consciousness:
The observer influences, controls, or is the actor who does things in the environment
A policy feedback loop
The observer is just modeling what the actor will do in the environment
A one-way modeling of the agent
I suspect the later can feel “conscious” even if the observer never influences the actor in any way.
Humans are usually a bit of both, but someone who only has “consciousness” in the later capacity feels a bit like a… “consciousness hitchhiking on a q-zombie” to me.
(Related: The Elephant and The Rider)
This is Eichmann, notably written about by Hannah Arendt, who coined the phrase “the banality of evil” in response.