Dennett has shown, to my satisfaction at least, that the philosophical zombie paradoxes are logically incoherent.
I see the zombie paradoxes as pulling a similar trick to the Chinese Room. They both try to trivialise the problem to a simplistic model, but of course the problem is not simplistic.
The Chinese room would have to be the size of a planet, containing millions of trillions of symbols and would take the man inside it the lifetime of the universe to perform simple linguistic processing and cognitive tasks. Likewise the philosophical zombies are cast as simple dumb mechanisms that are somehow performing a stupendously complex and little understood process, except 'not really'. They're both just rhetorical sleight of hand.
Showing that paradoxes are incoherent is a logical exercise, not a scientific one.
If we use a truth-table to show "P and not P" is always false, that's logic. If we repeatedly drop a ball and observe that it falsifies "balls don't fall", that's science. Stop confusing the two.
Dennett has not provided a laboratory experiment X such that if "simonh is the only conscious being in the universe" is true then X has one result, and yet when we run the experiment we see a different result.
Hold on there just a cotton picking minute. You're the one that invoked philosophical zombies. So they're science when you invoke them, but only philosophy when I do?
I would rather say that it seems likely science in the strict sense cannot either support or refute the existence of consciousness. It's essentially a philosophical question.
> I would rather say that it seems likely science in the strict sense cannot either support or refute the existence of consciousness. It's essentially a philosophical question.
Agreed, but I'd make the following change: however, whatever consciousness is, science can safely assume most healthy humans have it, and can make educated guesses (and experiments) to explore whether insects have it.
Sure, I honestly don't have any problem defining consciousness in terms of the human experience of it. After all to my mind that's what it is - an experience. We can use scientific processes and techniques to analyse it for sure, to trim away misconceptions and more precisely understand it's parameters but we're never going to identify a 'consciousness particle', or special quantum entanglement whatsit that Roger Penrose seems to believe is responsible for it. I'd rather just embrace the fact that this is a philosophical question. Science can illuminate philosophy, just as philosophy can illuminate science.
I agree completely, that's my objection to the idea of consciousness being 'rich information processing'. It's way too vague. But similarly you can't (always) reduce a complex problem to a trivial one and then claim they are the same, when they are not.
I see the zombie paradoxes as pulling a similar trick to the Chinese Room. They both try to trivialise the problem to a simplistic model, but of course the problem is not simplistic.
The Chinese room would have to be the size of a planet, containing millions of trillions of symbols and would take the man inside it the lifetime of the universe to perform simple linguistic processing and cognitive tasks. Likewise the philosophical zombies are cast as simple dumb mechanisms that are somehow performing a stupendously complex and little understood process, except 'not really'. They're both just rhetorical sleight of hand.