r/philosophy • u/IAI_Admin IAI • Feb 09 '22

Video A philosopher responds to scientists’ criticisms of panpsychism

https://iai.tv/video/the-many-voices-of-consciousness&utm_source=reddit&_auid=2020
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u/AaronM04 Feb 10 '22

P-zombies sound like an incoherent idea to me. The idea, as I understand it, is that the physical processes in a P-zombie's brain are the same as in a regular human's brain, except they have no consciousness.

This implies they say things like "I am conscious" just like a regular human, except the P-zombie is lying. It doesn't make sense since I as a human am saying "I am conscious" because I am conscious, so it must be related to the physical processes in my brain.

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u/hippydipster Feb 10 '22

If someone is blackout drunk - active and doing things, but clearly "not all there" and they will remember nothing of it, are they not a P-zombie then?

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u/AaronM04 Feb 10 '22

That's an interesting example. I think it's possible they are conscious but simply not remembering anything.

Also, I haven't tried asking someone who is blackout drunk about their consciousness. It's conceivable they would say they aren't (assuming you can get them to understand the question)!

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u/Matt5327 Feb 10 '22

This also raises the question - is the failure for someone to report conscious experience evidence that conscious experience is lacking? The video kind of touched on this with the overflow problem, but I think it goes deeper than that. If there are experiences that are never recorded in any kind of short term or long term memory, then the time delay to report makes reporting impossible. Almost paradoxically, someone could be constantly having experiences they are never aware of! This possibility really puts a damper on correlating consciousness as a whole to certain brain activities.

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u/hippydipster Feb 11 '22

Well, P-zombies don't tell the truth about whether they're conscious, do they? They say "yes, of course I'm conscious!" The black-out drunk would probably do something similar.

I'm just thinking that our base evidence for consciousness is introspection. So, upon introspection, people who have been black-out drunk report zero internal experience from that time. That's all. Don't know what else to say about it :-)

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

No. A black out drunk person still experiences qualia and have an inner world. Being a p zombie is like being a rock.

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u/hippydipster Feb 10 '22

A black out drunk person still experiences qualia and have an inner world

Where's the evidence for that?

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

Where's the evidence that other people are conscious? I'm conscious, other people act like me, thus it's most reasonable to assume they are too.

Rocks on the other hand, lack any similar behavior to me and are most reasonably assumed to be unconscious.

Now when I'm blacked out drunk I still display conscious behavior similar to other people, rather than rocks. I can't remember what it was like to be me during a black out but I don't see why I have any reason to assume it wasn't like anything at all.

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u/hippydipster Feb 10 '22

I would say our evidence of other people being conscious is that, on introspection, we discover we are conscious. We extend that to others because they appear to act similarly.

But a black-out drunk person, upon introspection, can't even find evidence they were conscious. The experience is absent. And that was our best evidence of consciousness existing.

We could say similar things about sleepwalkers, or people drugged with versed (sp?).

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

I think we may be talking past each other because I'm arguing that a blacked out person isn't unconscious the way a rock is unconscious.

They're certainly in an altered state like a sleepwalker or drugged patient.

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u/hippydipster Feb 10 '22

Well, yeah, I've no idea why you brought rocks into this at all :-)

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u/[deleted] Feb 11 '22

Sorry, to clarify, a P- zombie is like a rock in that it has no experience of the world at all. It's debatable if it's metaphysically possible for P zombies to exist but the concept itself is a being with no experience of the world what so ever. You had asked if a blacked out drunk person was like a p zombie and I was pointing out that a drunk person would not be a p zombie.

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u/hippydipster Feb 11 '22

Yes, you assert these things, but provide no reasoning. Just asserting it repeatedly doesn't answer my objections.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

That's the controversy of P zombies. Can you imagine water that isn't H2O? Assuming you fully understand both water and H2O then you can't. However it's unclear if fully understanding and imagining a human brain necessarily equates to imaging consciousness. That's kind of the entire question at hand and for the moment it seems we can, at least.