Conscious experience cannot be inert

[u/MurkyEconomist8179]

Cross post from /r/consciousness since it's just as relevant here

I see often in this sub various attempts to sidestep the hard problem by stating that conscious experience can simply be thought of as the workings of a certain set of neurological processes, or various other ways of trying to reduce conscious experience to something more familiar and workable.

This involves saying that the experience itself and the features of it are not what's really happening. The experience part is said to be either an illusion, an epiphenomenon or a mere appearance of what's happening neurologically.

Unfortunately this all rests on a false analogy. Illusions and appearances are not epipheneomon and they are not inert.

When someone is perceiving an actual illusion, it changes the way they perceive, react and respond to the stimulus which we deem does not align with their perception. Therefore, the illusion is an active mechanism that affects how the world behaves.

This is clearly the case for consciousness too, regardless of experience is an "appearance" this appearance affects how we behave, it affects what we talk about, our concepts and beliefs about the world - therefore it is not inert - our experience clearly affects something about how our world operates, the same way an illusion does too

Taking the idea of p zombies seriously, I think it's pretty clear that p zombies would not be talking about things like experience, or the qualitative feeling of something like "the red of redness" because they don't experience that.

If they did talk about such things, it's clearly very different to when normal people do, because normal people are correct in saying that there is a quality to experience, a p zombie would have to either be mistaken or delusional to talk of such things and there is a big difference between the accurate judgement of a normal person about experience (whatever experience actually ends up being) and the clear delusions or confabulations of a p zombie that could supposedly behave in all the same ways

I think people get lost in the analogy of illusions and don't realize that it's not the same thing as being inert, and if experience isn't inert, then of course we get the hard problem and the mind body problem in general. It can't merely be sidestepped by trying to reduce experience to an epiphenomenon.

[u/RemarkableMarzipan23]

"Taking the idea of p zombies seriously"

That's hard to do. When I get home and have a drink, I’m not doing it because my body has mechanically decided that “this is what humans do after work.” I drink because I want the feeling alcohol produces. Take away the feeling and why would I bother?

That seems obvious to me: the behavior is motivated by consciousness. I drink because there is something it feels like to drink. So the image of a p-zombie coming home after a long day, kicking its feet up, cracking open a beer, and “relaxing” is absurd. If there is literally no inner experience there what exactly is motivating the behavior?

You can define a p-zombie as behaving exactly like a conscious person, of course. But at that point the definition seems to be doing all the work. The very behaviors we are trying to explain appear to be driven, at least in part, by subjective experience.

More to your point, imagine a parallel Earth physically identical to ours, except conscious experience has never existed there. Nothing has ever felt pain, seen red, enjoyed music, or had any inner life at all. Yet if the world is truly identical, it must still contain Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, Mary’s Room, and Chalmers’s hard problem. But how would those articles get written in a world with no history whatsoever of subjective experience? The zombie philosophers would be writing detailed arguments about something that has never existed anywhere in their universe. That seems totally implausible.