On zombies: What's it like to be nobody?

A strictly private truth is no truth at all.

This of course is not true. Any truth which we know is strictly private as we know it. There is no going around behind the scene to check that someone other than us knows the same thing as we do. Instead, we may, as well as may not, have the private belief that other people know whatever it is that we believe that we know. We live and prosper on the premise that other people could clearly see the tree that we see so clearly.

Consciousness is not a Turing machine. It is just a fact. We certainly don't understand much about it, but when we are conscious, we are conscious of something, however fuzzy it might be, or else we are not conscious. And to be conscious of a thing is to know it. Zombies by definition cannot do that. If they can do it, then they are not zombies. I know pain whenever I am in pain, and I cannot be in pain if I am not conscious of being in pain.

I wouldn't personally absolutely deny the possibility of real philosophical zombies, but the idea sounds just terribly implausible. If there are philosophical zombies, then reality is truly other than anything anyone thinks it is, even by today's very lax standard.

If there is no consciousness in the machine, what am I? Consciousness is exactly as we are conscious that it is and truly nothing but that. Just like pain is nothing but what we feel when in pain. A conscious being cannot be conscious that it is not conscious. If we are conscious of pain, or of anything else, however fuzzy it may be, then consciousness exists at that point, and exists as we experience it. Or, rather, as consciousness experiences itself. I experience consciousness; therefore I am consciousness.

The zombie joke only works because we believe that other people are just as conscious as we are. The idea of philosophical zombie is only interesting if we believe, and only if we believe, that other people are conscious. If we could know that they are conscious, or that they are not conscious, then we wouldn't even understand the joke. It just wouldn't work.

This is not the only good philosophical joke we know. Last Thursdayism another one and similarly absurd. Yet, not even a Manhattan project could prove that Last Thursdayism is false. I could retrieve some of what I was doing last Thursday. Not only last Thursday, but we nearly every Thursday in the last ten years. Yet, I don't actually know that the world wasn't created last Thursday.

Ok, so what? I don't know it, but I believe it. I even believe that the Earth existed millions of years ago. We don't need to know. Belief is good enough. If I am hungry, it is good enough that I believe I know where the food is. It seems to work really well.

Yes, it is true that I don't know that other people are not philosophical zombies, but it does not really matter. It is good enough that I really believe that they are not, even if in some cases I have my doubts.

I don't want to belittle the sort of metaphysical angst manifest in what all those potential zombies sometimes express, in so many different ways, including religion, anger, flipancy and depression. Metaphysics just comes out of our own nature. Nothing we can do about that. We have survived because we cannot stop ourselves from questioning the world, even at the point where there is no longer any possibility of a useful answer. But people believe whatever they believe.

The answer is that normal people are not zombies. I know I am not a zombie. The idea that everyone else is a zombie is utterly implausible, given that they have my same body chemistry, biology, common ancestry, behaviours, etc etc etc, and none of them says anything consistent with being a zombie.

Science and empiricism do not operate off "I predict that whichever answer you may give, will, unfortunately, be fully compatible with ..." Quine-Duhem notes that for EVERY hypothesis, EVERY observation is compatible with that hypothesis, provided one applies sufficient patches. Therefore, to do science at all, we need some more discriminatory criteria to sort between hypotheses than merely "is this logically compatible?". The criteria science uses is an IBE evaluating predictive power, falsifiability, explanatory power, simplicity, fruitfulness, and consilience.

Also, your presumption in "A strictly private truth is no truth at all" is blatantly false. All of our observations are "private truths". First person data is data, and all data is first person data.

It is NOT incoherent to hold that humans are all zombies. Most of us DO think this is absurd, and know from our perceptions that we have an interior life -- but Daniel Dennett's argument that we could all be mistaken, is actually a supported claim. Dennett compiled a significant amount of data showing that we are often mistaken about our internal perceptions, and in at least some cases we confabulate and back-date and some aspects of our unconscious selves appear to deliberately befuddle our perceptions in systematic ways. Dennett extrapolating from this to infer that ALL of our consciousness is therefore a befuddled misrepresentation -- is legitimately critiqued as an extrapolation well beyond his data. But if this hypothesis scores well in an IBE, then it should be seriously considered.

Dennett is reasonably described as claiming we are ALL zombies, but he himself refused to embrace this accusation, and instead tried to evade/avoid discussing zombiehood at all. While Dennett was a brilliant thinker, he was also a passionate advocate of his POV, and he would refuse to concede or even articulate, any point that he considered might lead to his views being viewed negatively by others. He treated winning as more important than clarity.

As for your ultimate question, one of Dennett's points is highly relevant. Selves are not fully unified. Your four options assume there is one truth about our self. But if one accepts plurality of one's self -- both options 1 and 2 can both be true. We could therefore all be unconscious zombies, and also all conscious. And this appears to be what investigation of minds has revealed. Our System 1 is unconscious, and most of system 2 is conscious, but not all of it. The qualia experiences appear to be the way system 1 communicates to system 2. As system 1 does 99.9% of our processing, we are at least 99.9% zombie.

Comments (due to the fact that your advice: "I predict that whichever answer you may give, will, unfortunately, be fully compatible with your being a zombie" denies the possibility of any answer: first paradox :-))

See a recent post about "I".

Provided that we do not know what is "the self", what does it mean to be nobody: without a self (an I)?"

Can we understand it? or at least try to imagine (like a sci-fi novel)?

IF the "extreme" behaviorist position (Ryle?) is teneable and there is nothing "inside" (consciousness, soul, etc), and the "I" is only the projection that others make on (what? me?) according to the sameness of behavior, then Zombies are exactly like us: "hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère”.

But of course, there is a (big) difference: zombies do not project upon (you/me) their "sameness of behaviour" because they have no conscious experiences of their behavior (or so we think...)

Note after first submission

The system prompted the Human Verification question: Are you a human being?

My first impression was that it was from you... but then I've decided to answer: yes (second paradox?)

Last quip

How can we say of a zombie that it is nobody, when it is only a body?

And we have Ryle again, saying that "we are our body". Being an analytic philosopher, he started from language, noting that we never say: "tomorrow I'll go to the party... and I'll bring my body with me".

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Following the suggestion by the poet, we have to consider literature and psychoanalysis in a broad sense: Sartre and Proust and the theory of desire: love assumes a narcissistic nature, instrumental to the creation of a Self, and in which the Other that one loves is no other than a reflection of one own self in the Other.

In short: " amo (the Other), ergo sum (the Self)."

You ask:

If a philosophical zombie is behaviorally identical to a conscious being, but lacks qualia, couldn't we just define consciousness as that behavior?

As qualia are essentially defined as increments of conscious experience, we are left with a philosophical dilemma: a thinker can reject qualia in others while experiencing them themselves. "Consciousness", after all, has a collection of phonemes that simply indicate awareness of the inside and outside. We can directly inspect our own awareness because introspection is a process "inside" us, but we already rely on behavior to accept consciousness in others. In fact, it seems no great controversy to define "consciousness" with an operational definition:

Consciousness is being aware of something internal to one's self or being conscious of states or objects in one's external environment, and is determined in others as behavior which one can reasonably conclude result from analogous processes in others.

This second part of the definition, of course, is nothing more than philosophical behaviorism as Ryle would have accepted it in protest to Descartes's views being limited only to the first. One can dissolve the problem by using heterophenomenalism. The heterophenomenological approach was advocated by Dennett, who also advocated the position that we can call such type-theoretic language use the intentional stance to categorize intelligent, conscious behavior and use the specific language of agency to describe it.

Of course, under a modern conception of naturalized philosophy, there seems to be nothing controversial about accepting a pragmatic and effective definition of consciousness that doesn't try to force us to reconcile the fact that we do not have epistemic access to others' introspection. It's only when we try to force the position that 'consciousness' as a type can only be applied to that of which we have first-person epistemic access or deny it entirely and claim that external behavior is the only acceptable approach that we wind up with what Wittgenstein would likely consider a pseudoproblem of language and an abuse of type-theoretic semantics.

So, just like a judge doesn't rely on the testimony of the criminally accused to determine mens rea, so too does the intelligent philosopher reject the idea that we have to rely on introspective access first hand to define consciousness. We can rely on the "mirror of nature" as Rorty considers it, to be imperfect, but reliable enough to see around corners and inside boxes where we cannot otherwise gaze directly. Ryle may have overstated the case, but so too does the paranoid solipsism of the Cartesian epistemologist who rejects the good on the basis it is not perfect thus allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good.

Zombies are impossible since consciousness at some level just is certain types of physical complexity. It is like hypothesizing that there is a complex bundle of atoms that make up a chair but then saying the chair does not exist.

You will fail to define or describe a complete physical account of what it means to be a chair using only fundamental physics, the same way you will fail to define or describe a complete physical account of what it means to be conscious. But does this mean the chair doesn’t exist? And does this mean that the chair is constituted of anything more than its fundamental physical structure? Surely not.

What's it like to be nobody?

Exactly the same as it is to be a somebody.

There is no subjective difference between having qualia and believing you have qualia. In other words, it’s zombies all the way down.

However, if there is no difference between these, then both are conscious beings.

It seems to be an incoherent question, because you need consciousness to even consider it.

Does anyone even understand what consciousness is? John Lennox thinks not.

I assume you are referring to the possibility of AI becoming conscious; or, alternatively, that we really aren't, and just think we are - which seems self-contradictory out of hand.

As far as AI becoming conscious, that would very much depend on where you believe consciousness arises from in the first place. Is it from our biological machinery? Or something else?

Here is an interesting perspective from neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor, author of The Immortal Mind. This is part of a summary of Egnor's position in a debate on "whether an immortal soul exists and whether human beings are machines" between Egnor and Michael Shermer, at the COSM meeting last November.

[Egnor] was informed by his textbooks that consciousness is a product of the brain; it arises from the brain. What he started to witness in his neurosurgery practice did not support that view. Consciousness, at some points, did not seem to arise from the brain. For instance, as he illustrated with a slide, “Cindy” was a girl born without most of her brain. But she remained fully conscious. If consciousness comes wholly from the brain, how is this possible? ...reason and free will in particular seem independent of brain activity. “Reason and free will come through the brain, but not from it,” he said. For example, epileptic seizures evoke movement, sensations, memories, and emotions but not reason or free will. He observed that a seizure has never been reported to evoke a rational thought or moral reasoning in anyone. He also noted a rare case of conjoined twins who share parts of a brain. They share some feelings and motor control yet each must learn the alphabet and mathematics for herself. He referenced the fascinating findingsof Alice Cronin at MIT, who researched the capabilities of split-brain patients, in which reason, free will, and abstract thought do not appear to be split. Finally, Egnor addressed near-death experiences, which he called “the most radical examples” of an immortal soul separate from our finite brain. First, he points out that these experiences are “very clear, coherent, (and) organized.” Second, these experiences include out-of-body experiences in which they see things occurring that are verifiably true. Third, “nobody has ever seen in the medical literature a living person at the other end of the tunnel.” In fact, sometimes the person they encounter is someone who has died so recently that the person having the NDE doesn’t know the person they are seeing is dead.

In this interview, Egnor more fully elucidates his experiences doing brain surgery, and reviews the literature regarding brain stimulation and reason and free will, as well as describing in more detail the other evidence outlined in the above summary.

Given that I can't answer "what it would be like" to be me, never mind what it would be like to be you, I don't see how one could answer what it would be like to be anything else... Or nobody else.

We might discuss specific details; being a cat might mean certain changes in physical abilities, senses, maybe cognitive abilities, maybe instinctive reactions, certainly experience, certainly memories and learning. But I am not sure that adds up to an understanding of "being like", just of how it might be unlike. And then there is the question of whether one would be aware of the differences, not having experience of being us.

I don't think the question is answerable as posed.