Comment by Nasrudith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nasrudith | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The p-zombie concept always struck me as stupid solipsism. If you can't tell the difference doesn't that mean there is no meaningful difference?

Likewise if they fear the loss of priviledge that implies some degree of consciousness /somewhere/. If some absurd set of state and pseudorandom random number generator capable of passing every metric of consciousness in response to inputs then it is a consciousness even if it is made of a bizzare set of equations and state.

Anyway for the consciousness somewhere - take a hypothetical hyperintelligence or supercomputer capable of simulating a human brain completely calculation by calculation in various events like say being flayed alive. It isn't torturing anybody because the actions are simply calculations that it itself is running. The victim may not be real but there is a real intelligence somewhere behind it - and it may or may not care about the simulated suffering. Where it is "run" is material like the difference between acting out a murder and actually murdering someone.

> The p-zombie concept always struck me as stupid solipsism. If you can't tell the difference doesn't that mean there is no meaningful difference?

That's a very strange argument. If you hold your nose and you taste a piece of potato and then a piece of apple, you can't tell the difference. So now suddenly the difference is meaningless because the sense required to tell the difference is removed from the equation? The apple is still (in a, to you, non-observable reality) an apple, regardless of how your perception changed.

There is a big difference between "don't know" under specific set of circumstances and "can't know" ever.

There is obviously a difference between an apple and a potato (and in more aspects than just smell).

I still think the difference is there even if we can’t know it. It’s the whole tree-woods-nobody thing, isn’t it? Of course the tree makes a sound. If all intelligent life in the universe was wiped, a falling rock would still make a sound.

But in the case of the potato and apple, one has the ability to unplug the nose and tell the difference. If no one had any senses that could distinguish them under any circumstances, then it would be different.

This comes down to something akin to Einstein's problem with quantum physics, that it didn't make aesthetic sense to have something be fundamentally random. That it is the same, and philosophically preferable, to say that something is fixed, but cannot be measured, than to say it is actually random.

Now, I hear that with quantum stuff they somehow have proved it to be fundamentally random, but the point is that if you really can't tell in any way, the difference doesn't matter at all. At least to a reductionist viewpoint. I feel that philosophies about "what if reality is a simulation or a dream?" are dumb for the same reason. Unless there's a way to wake up, who cares?

But we don't know that we can't ever possibly test consciousness, we just don't know how to test it yet.

Before Archimedes, the problem of determining the purity of a golden crown was intractable. Archimedes' solution was not arrived at by brute force concentrating on the problem, but rather by an epiphany (leading to the famous story of him shouting "Eureka" and running out of the house naked). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_(word)#Archimedes

It's possible that someday someone like Archimedes will realize a way to test consciousness, and it'll be something ridiculously simple (like Archimedes' submerging the crown in water and seeing how much water it displaces), and we'll all kick ourselves for not thinking of it first :)

> Now, I hear that with quantum stuff they somehow have proved it to be fundamentally random, but the point is that if you really can't tell in any way, the difference doesn't matter at all.

Someone said that quantum should not be brought up in discussions about consciousness because it’s way too easy to misconstrue the quantum maths about probabilities and observations as somehow relevant on macro scale.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com