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> They do not have to do exactly what real people do in a given situation.

But, by definition, they do have to do exactly what real people do. If they did not then there is no argument, everyone agrees this kind of zombie is very possible. The disagreement comes when Chalmers says they could exist and be indistinguishable (including asking about their inner experiences) from normal people.

> I can postulate a universe in which my molecules and everyone else's have been precisely duplicated from this universe in physical terms. I can postulate that in that universe there is no such thing as conscious experience; no qualia or whatnot.

This is actually quite a concise definition of the dualist position, the material argument is basically that being identical physically is to have identical qualia.

> Simply the act of postulating, of conceiving, of that kind of zombie universe is enough to strongly suggest that consciousness is something outside of the physical.

I don't think it is. You can conceive of a Penrose stair, but you can only believe it is physically possible if you don't understand it. We already know we don't really understand consciousness, yet, so I don't think you can draw conclusions from the possibility of imagining it to be one way or the other.

Rationally I feel like we have to accept a Daniel Dennett view: with what we know about the brain, all human behaviour is consistent with the laws of physics, and changing the brain very much changes "what it's like" to be - it doesn't take very many experiences with drugs, even alcohol, to realize this. Consciousness, then, has no explanatory power whatsoever. A lot of people argue at this point, but they have nothing substantial to stand on. Maybe they just want to believe that Free Will is something special.

However, I think the Hard Problem is a knot that can never go away. I notice physicists are willing to explain much of the properties of the universe (like time having a direction) just by saying there was a very specific initial condition, a very low entropy state that (by definition) is extraordinarily unlikely. So what about saying there's another constraint on conditions of the universe, where we have physical laws that create consciousness. Is this just an anthropic principle of some sort?

I was listening to Sean Carroll's "The Big Picture" audiobook. He argues that I can't really be sure I'm not a p-zombie. But I think I can: I'm with Descartes on this one - it's the one thing I actually _can_ be sure of. I'm sure I have an inner experience (that explains nothing scientifically to anyone else) but I can easily imagine not having it, with no change to the laws of physics.

Does anyone know of a good read that isn't full of jargon that fleshes out these ideas some more?

Did Dennett back off from his intentional stance? Consciousness seems important to explain and predict behavior in practice.

I wasn't clear, it's vitally important to predict behaviour in practice at a poetic naturalism level, but there seems to be no reason to adopt strong emergence: consciousness doesn't introduce any new explanatory power that couldn't, in principle, be explained by physics, or even chemistry, biology and so forth.

See Dennett's interview with Bob Wright starting at about 30 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss0aCWpNzSM

I'm just not ready to stop there, despite this all being true, I think it seems not parsimonious to believe there is nothing fundamentally mysterious about how I feel like something subjectively.

It's been a while, but...

Biology doesn't introduce any explanatory power that couldn't, in principle, be done by chemistry. Likewise, chemistry and physics. But they ain't nobody as is gonna work out the mating behavior of tree frogs from quantum mechanical first principles. That was, I thought, the point of the intentional stance: if you assume consciousness, you get a good model to understand behavior; if you don't, you may, in principle, be able to get a good model but you have a much greater distance to go.

> Simply the act of postulating, of conceiving, of that kind of zombie universe is enough to strongly suggest that consciousness is something outside of the physical.

By the act of postulating that kind of universe, you have defined consciousness to be something outside the physical.

No the whole point is the zombies would talk of consciousness was even whilst by experiencing it. They are externally indistinguishable.

Talking about consciousness is a physical action.

Your getting confused, if behavior is unchanged then people would talk about the same things. It's uncomfortable for some people to realize a purely material world can give rise to objective experience, but there is a lot of evidence that suggests this is true.

> It's uncomfortable for some people to realize a purely material world can give rise to objective experience, but there is a lot of evidence that suggests this is true.

You're committing the same mistake putzdown is, but in the opposite direction. There's only evidence if you assume that this is a purely material world.

Or are you counting philosophical argument as "evidence"?

Suppose we are in a simulation. Now, it would be natural to assume experiments can only tell you about that simulation. Except, in the case of a self consistent simulation they could also tell you about a physical world that had the same rules as said simulation.

So, in this case we have evidence of a possible world, even if that's not the world we live in.

PS: Notice how this argument sidesteps the possibility of a 'fake' world as meaningless in this argument. So, even if say a trickster god was simply fooling you there is nothing no suggest that it's not also possible that a world running on similar rules could exist.

Edit: Alternatively, if it was simply a fake simulation for example by improve actors, then if it was a good fake then it would act like a video recording. And as such the fake actors would still say the same words even with a different internal world.

I'm not sure I understand the argument you're trying to make. One comment, though: A simulation isn't the only possible alternative to a purely materialistic universe.

Consider for a moment the idea that God exists - that a non-material intelligence exists, and existed before the physical universe. Then there's something more than material that exists, but the material can still be real material - it doesn't have to be a simulation.

The argument is as long as the math works out for a purely physical universe to behave like X. Then that's all you need.

In other words, the possibility exists for a purely physical universe even if that's not the one we live in.

I don't think I trust the math that far.

That is, we could work out that we think the math works for a purely physical universe. But if we don't actually live in one, then we're speculating without any experience. It would be really easy to overlook something that means that the math wouldn't work for a purely physical universe. Worse, we might never know, because we couldn't see it (we'd be philosophizing and doing math purely in the abstract), and we could never find an example to look at, because the real math would say that such a universe can't exist.

I'm really reluctant to take such philosophy + math very seriously...

That's fair, though I would point out Math is a Philosophy. There is noting in the physical world that directly correlates with i or even 37.5 for example. Thus, you could say this is beyond philosophy, but I don't think that's a useful standpoint.

Seems like a standard burden of proof question. There are theories that explain consciousness just as well as any others that are purely based in the material world (my personal favourite is attention schema theory).

These are, of course, incomplete theories. But they are all incomplete, both the material-only ones and the others.

If you wish to add something, especially something fundamental that can affect physical matter but is not detectable at the scale of human brains then the burden of proof is on you.

First, Retric made the claim. The burden of proof is on him/her, not on me.

But second, I think you misunderstood my comment (or else I misunderstood Retric's). Retric said, " It's uncomfortable for some people to realize a purely material world can give rise to objective experience, but there is a lot of evidence that suggests this is true." I understood that to mean that 1) we live in a purely material world, and 2) we have objective experience. My reply was that those are both assumptions - that this is a purely material world, and that we have genuine objective experience.

Now, if the claim is that we have theories that explain these things, then I would say that "theories that explain" is not the same as evidence that suggests (or better, demonstrates) that this is true. A fine-sounding theory about something like consciousness (that we don't really understand) leaves me somewhat less than convinced.

1) we live in a purely material world

I explicetly and repeatedly did not say this.

I misunderstood, then. My error.

I might have misunderstood the comment chain here, but I was responding to this: "There's only evidence if you assume that this is a purely material world".

I wouldn't call that an assumption, that's the evidence based worldview at the moment. Any arguments that don't assume that have an additional burden of proof placed on them.