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Comment by getpost | Hacker News Reader

Metacognition or “mentalization”[0,1] is a promising approach to mental health, on the theory that mental health difficulties reflect a metacognitive deficit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentalization [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000dpj2

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Something that I was wondering about recently, are there any types of therapy that can help philosophical zombies?

i.e. hypothetical beings that are physically identical to and indistinguishable from normal people but do not have conscious experience, qualia, or sentience.

Unfortunately, all attempts at treating philosophical zombies simply produced the complete range of observable effects of conscious experience and sentience, materially indistinguishable from true conscious experience and sentience, yet definitionally still lacking qualia.

As a maybe philosophical zombie, I would like to know more about these attempts you are mentioning.

That might be technically true, but most types of therapy seem to depend on some sort of theory of mind. Something like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is based on the idea that thoughts can control emotions & behavior.

A p-zombie might change their behavior under any given therapy, but it may be more due to behavioral feedback, the degree of change may be lesser, without thoughts acting to multiply the change.

So therapies that focus more on just behavioral feedback might be overall more effective for people that don't have much thought in their head. Such as p-zombie challenged folks.

> That might be technically true, but most types of therapy seem to depend on some sort of theory of mind.

Why wouldn't a p-zombie exhibit behavior consistent with having a theory of mind?

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