Re: Some Questions about P-Zombies Hypothesis
Posted: November 1st, 2017, 11:58 am
??? No, he isn't.Chili wrote:A doctor is looking at a whole system, and uses a body of empirical evidence to correlate inputs and outputs to the black box of life (increasingly understood reductionistically - one wonders where it will end). He is a reductionist in all the ways that matter when he comes up against new situations.
You keep using the term reductionism, and I don't think it means what you think it means.
This is a decent explanation of the term, and also explains some of the alternatives. http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_ ... onism.html
Medical doctors more often treat the brain as a emergent system than a reductionist one. I think when you say that doctors are reductionist, that you actually mean they have some other property. Possibly eliminativism? https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mate ... iminative/
It's not a stance that most medical professionals take, but it seems the closest match to what you're claiming happens.
But none of this is reductionism, or determinism, at all.Chili wrote:If he can't see somewhere there might be a problem, he looks. If somebody has a battery in their stomach, it had to get there somewhere, it is made up of particular compounds, there are good well-understood reasons why it is more harmful than some other object, relating to the physics and chemistry of batteries interacting with their environments. He doesn't embrace the simplest explanation possible, but the simplest one which works, and these are all found to be not contradictory with reductionist physics.
Please see the source I posted in the previous post, which discusses this point.Chili wrote:The Bohmian approach to the quantum world involves particular particles being at particular locations, moved by a quantum potention which is nonlocal but still deterministic. Quantum physics is not a fully deterministic theory but certainly it is not possible to "refute determinism" - and I invite you to cite sources on this.
AIs don't claim to have subjective experiences.Chili wrote:If you ask 100 AI programs if they experience thoughts, count the responses.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you're try to get at here. Presumably you're saying that evidence that can be deliberately faked isn't evidence. But can't most things be faked? The reason why we don't dismiss most scientific experiments as potentially fraud and thus useless is that we have absolutely no reason to believe that the evidence is faked. I gave you five or so different ways to physically and objectively measure the effects of an intentional consciousness, which is what science does when it is faced with something it wants to investigate but can't measure directly. If you're saying that these are all victims of some neurological conspiracy then it would be useful to know on what basis you're making this claim?
Yeah, and it works extremely well, accurately and consistently outperfroming every other model we've come up with. For what reason are you rejecting out of hand the idea that the reason why we evolved to see and models others as conscious, is because they're conscious?Chili wrote:So there's a kind of default category for anything which cannot be relied upon to just sit there.