God forbade...must reading!

Philosophical Zombies





  A philosophical zombie or p-zombie is a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, a sense of  'what kind' or sentience, feeling. When a zombie is poked with a sharp object, for example, it does not feel any pain. While it behaves exactly as if it does feel pain (it may say "ouch" and recoil, or tell us that it is in intense pain), it does not actually have the experience of pain as a putative 'normal' person does.



  The notion of a philosophical zombie is mainly a thought experiment used in arguments (zombie arguments) in the philosophy of mind.



   According to physicalism, the physical facts determine all other facts. It follows that, since all the facts about a p-zombie are fixed by the physical facts, and these facts are the same for the p-zombie and for the normal conscious human from which it cannot be physically distinguished, physicalism must hold that p-zombies are not possible, or that p-zombies are the same as normal humans. Therefore, zombie arguments support lines of reasoning that aim to show that zombies are possible.





  One might distinguish between various types of zombies, as they are used in different thought experiments, as follows:

  A behavioral zombie, a neurological zombie and a soulless zombie, each with no conscious experience, as such.




  But there is a possible world in which all the physical facts are the same as those of our world but in which there are additional facts. For example, it is possible that there is a world exactly like ours in every physical respect, but in it everyone lacks certain mental states, namely any phenomenal experiences or qualia. The people there look and act just like people in the actual world, but they don't feel anything.When one gets shot, for example, he yells out as if he is in pain, but he doesn't feel any pain.



  Artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky claims that the argument is simply circular. By proposing the possibility of something which is physically identical to a human but has no subjective experiences, the argument implies the physical characteristics of humans are not what produces those experiences. But that is exactly what the argument was claiming to prove.


   Daniel Dennett coined the term zimboes (philosophical zombies that have second-order beliefs) to argue that the idea of a philosophical zombie is incoherent. Consider the case of zimboes, who are behaviorally just like us conscious human beings, but have no inner lives.


   Zombies are the mindless malevolent minions in a Boris Karloff movie; zimboes, when villainous, are more in the Sidney Greenstreet line but, by hypothesis, they show just the same range of heroism, vice, and moral muddle that we do.


   Zimboes, creatures with sophisticated sensitivities to the external world and their inner environment, enjoy just as much consciousness as there is to be had, they only insist nothing is wrong.



  Consciousness is "more like fame" --- coming in degrees, possibly patchy or restricted and transitory, but not, in the nature of things, instantaneous or confined to a single point --- "than like being on television" --- a thoroughly unambiguous, on-or-off thing.



Wikipedia