Comment by aninhumer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aninhumer | Hacker News Reader

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>I was talking about partial p-zombie, which doesn't experience red color only.

Ah sorry I missed that part of the argument. Yes, I agree that I can't imagine such a thing, because I don't think experience can be subdivided in that way. Anything a consciousness can perceive, it must experience.

I could however imagine a person whose brain perceived and reacted to the colour red in certain ways, but never became conscious of that perception, and merely experiences vision with all red things having the same qualia as another colour. It's quite a weird thing to imagine, but if you're trying to assert that it's impossible, I will do so to disagree.

> You can't imagine p-zombie, you imagine someone with attached label "There's darkness inside" (as Chalmers had put it).

Can you imagine a non-conscious rock? Or does the rock just have a similar label attached? If you believe one can imagine such a rock, then I can imagine such a human in the same way.

If not, then your imagination must be teeming with errant consciousnesses.

> I don't think experience can be subdivided in that way.

So you are adding more epicycles.

> merely experiences vision with all red things having the same qualia as another colour.

Swapped qualia qualia argument. I can answer that, but I think I already know how you will answer.

ETA: Or do you mean you see all greens as greens and all reds as greens? Will it not change your behavior when you'll notice that you are confidently calling very similar colors by very different names and cannot say why are you doing that?

> Can you imagine a non-conscious rock?

I can imagine a rock. I can guess that the rock is not conscious because it doesn't demonstrate any signs of consciousness, unlike you and me. I am pretty sure I can't change whether the rock is conscious or not by the power of my imagination.

Thank you for conversation.

>So you are adding more epicycles.

Not really? I don't conceive of consciousness experience as something that can be meaningfully separated from the perception of that consciousness. For a consciousness, perception is experience.

However, I can imagine a perceiving system which does not have any consciousness, and thus experiences nothing.

> Will it not change your behavior when you'll notice that you are confidently calling very similar colors by very different names and cannot say why are you doing that?

In this hypothetical, the "partial p-zombie" cannot distinguish them consciously, so they would not do that. This is the closest thing I can conceive of to what you described.

>I am pretty sure I can't change whether the rock is conscious or not by the power of my imagination.

But the rock exists within your imagination, you have total power over it?

> I can imagine a perceiving system which does not have any consciousness, and thus experiences nothing.

I can imagine a system which is presumably too simple to have any conscious experiences. But the only thing that really matters is the lack of first person experience of such a system. I can't imagine being such system, and that is what matters, if we are talking about consciousness and not about some words which are used as a substitute for a real conscious experiences.

> In this hypothetical, the "partial p-zombie" cannot distinguish them consciously, so they would not do that.

Let's suppose, for simplicity, that I don't experience color differences at all. All I experience is brightness. But my brain works exactly the same as yours. I see two grey cups and hear myself saying "Do you prefer red or green?" Am I not conscious of this discrepancy too? Am I also not conscious of the lack of any clues when I'm asked to select one of the things which looks exactly the same to me? Sorry, sounds like complete bullshit to me. I will prefer physical consciousness over such brain-damaged metaphysical one.

BTW, are you sure you are experiencing colors? You will not notice if your point of view is true.

> But the rock exists within your imagination, you have total power over it?

Sure, I can image a rock which has supernatural soul and conscious experiences. Why all the p-zombie fuss, when it clearly shows that dualism is true? That's sarcasm of course. But why p-zombie argument is any better? You can't even conceive what is really matters in p-zombie - the lack of first person experience. You can only conceive some images like "dark inside" or a textual description of that.

I'm sorry for "bullshit". It is totally logically consistent, but requires explanation why such volatile substance as metaphysical consciousness has anything in common with our experiences.

To clarify things a bit. I am not trying to prove falsehood of dualism. I'm trying to show that arguments for dualism are inconclusive and sometimes are plain and simple circular, but circularity is masked by intuition pumps. So it's all mostly intuition and I've no expectations of changing yours.

Physicalism is based on intuition too, but as I said it requires less epicycles.

First person experiences exist. First person experiences are uniquely determined by physical processes. The end.

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