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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

How do we know we've created something with consciousness, and not just a very sophisticated program?

-- How do we know other humans aren't "very sophisticated programs"? How do we care? Which is to say the whole "omg they look and act the same but are so, sooo different" of philosophical zombies talk and similar, uh, rot, is kind of leveraging the person's intuitive attachment the idea of a soul, a magic thing with no measurable properties that makes us oh-so-different than a crude material object.

Also, you're wrong about early vision. That's the best studied part of the brain, and in fact, researchers have applied ML techniques to fMRI data and extracted out the images being shown.

If you read the GP in context, it doesn't say neurologists haven't studied consciousness, it says people have no self-awareness of the preprocessing that goes into creating vision.

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>How do we know other humans aren't "very sophisticated programs"?

We don't. Most people assume that other people have consciousness, with various justifications, but no one can know that.

>a magic thing with no measurable properties that makes us oh-so-different than a crude material object.

But it does make a difference morally speaking. If we consider a Utilitarian model of morality, then what is good or bad is that which causes the experiences of happiness or suffering. But if a philosophical zombie does not experience pleasure or suffering, then there is no moral consequence to harming them, any more than there is moral consequence to watching someone die in a movie, or to splitting a rock in half.

And this becomes even more worrying when we start to think about AI. If an AI can develop consciousness as a result of our actions, then perhaps it can also experience suffering as a result of our actions.

Of course, since we cannot identify p-zombies, possibly by definition, one can argue that there's not much point thinking about it. But, well, you could say that about a lot of philosophy. Personally, I think it's valuable to think about these things as an intellectual exercise, even if we can't really conclude anything from it.

> a magic thing with no measurable properties that makes us oh-so-different than a crude material object

No, qualia/awareness is not magical, it's prima facie undeniable, we are aware of things, and we have an experience of the world. In fact, consciousness is more fundamental than everything else we know about the world, because all else we know is known by awareness. That scientific paper you read? You were aware of it. Bacteria under the microscope? You had an experience of seeing.

It's the very definition of the hard problem. How does biology lead to awareness? We have strong evidence they're related (sleep, scotomas, mental disease, drugs, etc etc etc), but we have yet to pinpoint the connection.

As for the philosophical zombie being "rot", consciousness neuroscientists have already debated if it were actually possible, and if so, detectable. We already know about a phenomenon called blindsight for vision, where you can perform visual tasks but have no experience of seeing; how do we know there's not some frontal lesion that could wipe out or reduces your awareness, but leave your other faculties mostly intact?

No, qualia/awareness is not magical, it's prima facie undeniable, we are aware of things, and we have an experience of the world.

OK, "magic" is the adjective adjective added for flavor, "no measurable properties" is the key term. The most obvious point is the "philosophical zombie" which specifically posited to have no measurable differences from a non-Zombie.

It doesn't seem particularly strange that a "thinking being" would be receiving and processing data. Human language can used to reference internal experience that is assume to be common to all humans (as your construct above shows). But these references can't directly be to something "primal" since they're representations.

Essentially, this style of mysticism references internal experiences with individuals emotionally valuing their internal experiences and wanting them to be irreducible to just matter. And once the mystical concept goes out in the world, it wants to cloth itself in the appearance of science - first philosophical zombies are have no identity except "the same on the outside, identical on the inside" and then opportunists wanting to leverage this canard take out their microscopes and imagining measuring to regain some respectability. Yet, let us posit the unmeasurable and then try to measure it. I assume the church of the Giant Spaghetti Monster has a rite for doing just this.

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