Literally just mainlining marketing material straight into whatever’s left of their rotting brains.
Premise B is where you lost me.
The premise of philosophical zombies is that it’s possible for there to be beings with the same information processing capabilities as us without experience. That is, given the same tools and platforms, they would be having just as intricate discussions about the nature of experience and sentience. without having experience or sentience.
I’m not convinced it’s functionally possible to behave the way we behave when talking & describing sentience without being sentient. I think a being that is functionally identical to me except that it lacks experience wouldn’t be functionally identical to me, because I wouldn’t be interested in sentience if I didn’t have it.
thats’ the entire point. if the existence of complex unconscious behaviors (or even just computers and math) proves that information processing can be done without internal subjective experience (if we assume a stone being hit by another stone, for example, is not experienceing subjectivity), and if there is something humans do beyond what is possible for pure information processing, then that is proof that consciousness is fundamentally irreducible to it. if there is something we can do that a philosophical zombie (a person with information processing but not subjectivity) could not, it is because of subjectivity/qualia, not information processing. subjectivity can influence our information processing but is not identical with it.
I think my point didn’t exactly get across. I’m not saying philosophical zombies can’t exist because subjectivity is something beyond information processing, I’m saying it’s plausible that subjectivity is information processing.
To say “a person with information processing but not subjectivity” could be like saying “a person with information processing but not logical reasoning”.
I would argue a person that processes information exactly like me, except that they don’t reason logically, wouldn’t process information like me. It’s not elevating logic beyond information processing, it’s a reductio ad absurdum. A person like that cannot exist.
I was saying philosophical zombies could be like that, it’s possible that they can’t exist. By lacking subjectivity they could inherently process information differently.
i know this is necroposting but i have to clarify.
one of the major premises of the p-zombie thought experiment is that there is nothing about information processing (AS WE CURRENTLY UNDERSTAND IT***) that entails or necessitates subjectivity. Information processing has zero explanatory ability for subjectivity. You cannot just assume that ‘subjectivity is information processing’ without proving it somehow, that’s not how science or philosophy work. Making a positive claim like ‘information theory can account for and explain subjectivity’ requires proof. and since no proof has been provided we must assume the negative claim, that subjectivity is not explained by information processing theory. If subjectivity is information processing (the way we currently understand information processing), prove it! Show your work. If you think information theory only needs trivial modifications to account for subjectivity it should be easy to elucidate what kinds of modifications those could be and what kinds of experiments we can conduct to test those modifications.
***For if information processing theory requires substantial revision to account for subjectivity, which i think is at least plausible if not obviously true at this point in history, then the claim that ‘subjectivity is information processing’ becomes vague and meaningless - we do not know what this hypothetical revised information theory looks like, what it claims and assumes as logical axioms or empirical truths, so making any statements about this hypothetical future information processing theory is completely pointless and meaningless.
