excreationist

hedonologist:
Well I'm assuming you mean that experts wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the zombie and a normal person, even after decades of experiments. I don't think the Turing test (see if a layperson can distinguish between them with typed chats, etc) is good enough.

Just to repeat myself (maybe you've responded to this already), I believe that pleasure is when our brain is compelled to repeat the behaviour or situation (the urge depends on the intensity of it and conflicting goals) and pain is when the brain is compelled to avoid a particular situation or behaviour.
And anything that learns like we do, by having generalized drives (seeking mental stimulation, connectedness, relief, avoiding injury, starvation, etc), also has things which it seeks and things that it avoids. It is pretty straight-forward to see if the zombie deliberately seeks or avoids things.
You can see how sophisticated its real-time reasoning is - e.g. tell it to break one of its fingers. It should refuse. Then you could ask it how much money it would want to make it break a finger. It should hesitate for a while, then think about the different amounts - e.g. $10k, $100k, $1m, etc. Then it would cross-reference its initial "hunch" with other problem solving strategies that it has previously learnt.
If it wants a very high amount or refuses to ever break its finger then it is fairly normal. Then you could ask it if it would break its finger to save the lives of its family and friends. It should fairly quickly agree since for normal people, the loss of connectedness from losing loved ones would greatly outweigh the expected physical pain of injury.
So you could ask it about lots of moral dilemmas and see if it reacts like a human.

Anyway, with language we call associate the word "pain" with the feeling of the brain wishing to avoid a situation. The zombie would also try and avoid situations (assuming it acts normal) - and if it is describing its behaviour it can say that the undesireable situation would result in "pain". Pain is just the urge to avoid the situation. And the zombie could associate the word "pleasure" with urges it has to do certain things (e.g. seek mental stimulation, connectedness, relief). So "pleasure" is just the brain acknowledging that that situation must be repeated. The reason it must be repeated (depending on the emotion's intensity) is because it has decided that that situation must be repeated. (It is connected to core instinctual "drives"/desires through a chain of associations - e.g. if you trust your parents and they told you that spiders are dangerous then you might become scared of spiders)
I don't think I really answered you, but basically, things like insects (which are zombies) do have things that they seek or avoid - this behaviour in itself doesn't really involve pleasure or pain though. The reason is because insects don't learn their behaviours - they are born with their instincts about what is good and what is bad. But people learn most of their behaviour. It is subjective whether a situation is desireable or undesireable. But to an insect, food is pretty good, especially if you're hungry and predators are bad. The scope of their behaviour doesn't get much broader than that. Anyway, using language, we can separate the concept of desireability/undesireability from situations. So we're left with pleasure and pain, separated from the situations they referred to. Pleasure and pain is caused by situations - it doesn't exist on its own. (Unless you're on drugs or your pleasure/pain centres in your brain is being stimulated)

Well I think that the brain just does its job, obeying physical laws, and as the central part of the brain, we are aware of what it's doing (well the high level parts - we aren't explicitly aware of the subconscious processes).
In the zombie, its brain is also working and the brain would be aware of what's going on. (I define awareness as having learnt beliefs, desires and perceptions which it responds to)

If the zombie's brain doesn't receive those sensations as input, then it can't react to them. It must "feel" the massage. The question is whether it really feels pleasure from it. Well one of our instinctual sources of pleasure is the relief of tension. This ensures that our muscles are relaxed as often as possible - this might reduce muscle injury.
You could work other whether relaxation is a priority of the zombie. The zombie could be pretending that it is normal but then its primary desire would be to appear normal. And therefore normally desireable things ARE desireable and normally undesireable things ARE undesireable, unless it has other abnormal desires as well (besides pretending to appear normal).

I know that this seems obvious at first glance (that zombies can exist), but if you look at it thoroughly, things are different.

excreationist

hedonologist:
Not everything I wrote directly addressed what you were saying, but I was trying to explain why I think that things that act exactly like humans (even when tested by experts for decades) are aware of pleasure and pain. This involves them associating the words with their brain's urge to seek or avoid specific situations/behaviours.

Insects are animals whose behaviour is more or less hardwired, so their programmer is evolution. But more intelligent animals can learn most of their behaviour. So they worked out what to do rather than just obeying their hard-wired program.

Well it comes down to whether it can learn how to behave appropriately in new situations like intelligent animals can or if it has hardcoded behaviours like insects. I'm saying that insects are zombies and intelligent animals, that develop beliefs and have complex reasoning involving learnt priorities aren't zombies because they have awareness.

I've said that already - basically it involves figuring out if they are capable of human-level associative reasoning (e.g. inferring that the smell of smoke means fire without being told, or a bell means food is ready, etc) and they constantly are seeking desireable situations (that are normal desires) and avoiding undesireable circumstances with a lot of insight.

Well my definition of awareness involves it responding (as well as other things). If it doesn't respond to stimuli then I would have trouble saying that it is aware. e.g. let's say I was trying to work out if my cat was aware of what's on T.V. even when it can't see or hear the T.V. Well if it tends to act a certain way when the T.V. is doing something and then another way when the T.V. is doing something different, then the cat may be aware of what's on T.V. (or there could be other reasons). But if there is no evidence at all then I wouldn't want to claim that the cat has awareness of what's on T.V., even when it can't see or hear it.

Well pleasure is what happens when you meet your brains hard-wired urges. These urges involve specific situations/stimuli. When you look at pleasure on its own, you are just separating the urge to repeat situations from the situations themselves. Pleasure means "this is good, I've got to do this again". Pain means "this is bad, I've got to avoid this". So you could think about pleasure and pain without actually talking about specific external behaviours.

It would need to learn most of its behaviours for itself, like trained animals and humans, and autonomously form beliefs about how the world works (they're not totally preprogrammed like insects) and constantly develop goals using all areas of experience (smells, sight, etc) to seek and avoid instinctual drives. (The drives can vary though, depending on the brain chemistry)

I agree...
Anyway, this is about learning new behaviours.
If the snail senses danger, then it probably automatically goes into a defensive routine.
But more intelligent animals, like circus animals, can be made to adjust their natural responses to things - e.g. jump through rings of fire, walk on their hind legs, etc. In their brain there are two messages - pleasure (this is good, repeat it) and pain (this is bad, avoid it). This is very generalized so that mammals can learn completely new behaviours. In insects, they would always have the same responses to the same circumstances. But mammals can try and work out how to prevent the situation. In insects, their strategies for minimizing danger are just hard-coded - they just follow rules - so it's not about modifying their initial set of behavioural routines.

I think Chalmers thinks that the supernatural awareness realm exists side by side with the material realm even though materialism can explain our behaviour. Though it is true that consciousness correlates with certain neural activity, I think that certain kinds of neural activity cause consciousness - as a whole, properly functioning brains are conscious of things. This consciousness isn't an unnecessary extra, like Chalmers might think, but is necessary to explain our behaviour. (Unless you're talking about hypothetical zombies...)

Well I'm saying that we are our brains, assuming that our brain is functioning properly. In the same way, computer games are really computer games unless they are running on a computer. Yes, desire requires a subject/experiencer - the thing that does the desiring. It also requires a goal - even if it is as vague as "something different to what I have".

So we just "interpret" that "pain" is undesireable? Well what if you were asked to just have a different interpretation for a while.... let's say you really like jellybeans. And I offered you a single jellybean (which you'd enjoy) if you endured several hours of safe torture.
e.g. being thrown naked into freezing water, being forced to run until you lose consciousness (failure to try hard means your family and friends are killed), self-induce vomiting, drink your own urine [which is actually sterile], have many of your hairs pulled out (without ruining your appearance) AND having your teeth loosened with pliers (and whatever else I could think of at the time).
Now assuming you cooperated, all it would involve is temporary physical pain. And you would get the reward of a jellybean (or maybe twice your average daily salary).
Are you capable of arbitrarily determining whether any amount of pain is desireable? If so, how much money would you want to do my several hour long routine? What about a several hour long day at waiting around in a car-park? Shouldn't those amounts be the same since our interpretation of pain is arbitrary? You probably would hesitate in accepting my offer. But what is stopping you? I think that it is your *brain*, which is limited to only seeking what it perceives brings the greatest benefit or the least suffering. But if I assured you that if you did as you were told for several hours, you would only suffer minor injuries - the same injuries that you might get when doing some outdoor work. So "rationally" it might sound like a good idea, but your emotional system might be stopping you from acting so arbitrarily.

No... as DRFseven said a while ago (I've got to research this more), some people with damaged limbic system areas of the brain *can* feel the signal of physical pain (or maybe pleasure too), but it just doesn't feel undesireable any more. So two things are involved - the signal and the compulsion to seek or avoid this signal. If you don't have the compulsion then the signal is neither desireable or undesireable. If you have the emotional system but no signals, then you can't receive pain/pleasure inputs so your emotional system is useless.

What do you mean? You mean that your brain is electrically stimulated or something? Well I'd expect people's brains to be fairly similar so differences like that wouldn't happen. (Though actually I think the pleasure centre is very close to the pain centre of the brain)
Or do you mean that the signal still "hurts" but you like it anyway? This involves you deciding that for some reason this pain is desireable. (e.g. it shows that you're brave and strong, it will lead to relief, etc)

Well some people may not be capable of feeling pleasure, but they would at least be able to tell the difference between pain and a neutral feeling. These people would be called "grumps" - either things are undesireable or neutral. So they would have a vague idea of what pleasure is like - it's like things being "ok" (neutral) except that it is even better.

Yeah, colour has unclear boundaries, but I believe that we have to decide if things are *ultimately* desireable or undesireable - that allows us to make decisions - even though each option may contain many undesireable and desireable elements. It comes down to what your individual brain works out, based on past experience. On the other hand, insects have their behaviour hard-coded, so their behaviour/preferences wouldn't vary so much, from ant to ant or from fly to fly.

hedonologist

You are “defining” “desire”, feeling, and “pleasure” objectively, and then “concluding” that zombies “feel”. In the same way you could say the TV “feels” and “desires”. You flip the switch and this “inspires” Mr TV to “communicate” with you, etc. This says nothing about whether it has a subjective experience, like I (and presumably you) do. Maybe you have an way of defining “subjective” objectively? hehe IOW this isn’t to say that the zombie “feels good”, as I am defining “feeling good” by the “desirable” subjective experience of what I call “pleasure”.
I don’t see why that “learning” would necessarily require any subjective experiencer.
This doesn’t answer my question. Is the computer necessarily “feeling” what I am typing because it “stores” the data on its hard drive?
And you can think about pleasure and pain without talking about the brain signals either, if you define pleasure and pain by their subjective experiences rather than any objective, material, precisely quantifiable experience.
Here I’m not sure if you are defining “good” and thus “pleasure” merely by behavior (ie that “pleasure” is what is repeated, pain is what is “avoided”),or not. If so, again that says nothing about whether the organism has a “immaterial” subjective experience.

If not, you are assuming that the mammal is repeating or avoiding the behavior because it subjectively felt pain or pleasure. I was saying initially that even seeing that a human repeats a behavior does not explicitly prove the human organism corresponds with an experiencing being (such as myself) who felt pleasure. You would be assuming here that mammals have a neurological correlate of an experiencer of pleasure. What if a god made the other mammals to be without internal subjective experiencers, for example?
Does this have something to do with whether or not mammals or insects feel subjective pleasure or pain?
Because some define “consciousness” objectively and some consider things like human zygotes (who have no nerves) to possibly have some subjective experience, I came up with a different acronym-- a “material correlate of a being who has subjective experiences” (MCBSE).
Zombies (as I defined them) are no less hypothetical than organisms with subjective experiences, unless there is a sort of "immaterial” experiencer/ subject. I'm asserting that “immaterial” experiencers exist, as evidenced to the experiencer by the fact that they have subjective experiences.

I have two questions that I think might get to the point of what I mean by a subjective experiencer.

1) Say we had the technology to do total brain transplants and the resulting person would seem to function fine. You are considering whether to have this operation on your health insurance policy, in the event that your brain stops functioning and can’t be repaired. If you did then you would have someone else’s brain transplanted into your (former) head. Would you want to have this?

2) Is there any reason we experiencers (as opposed to our brains) would want to pursue pleasure and avoid pain? If so, what is it?

NialScorva

Are you familiar with the "No Private Language" argument? I posted a topic a while back relating it to the zombie problem, but my home connection has been down for the past couple weeks while I move. If I'm back online this weekend, I'll resurrect it.

The gist of my argument is that your distinction is a linguistic one, where there can be no such internal language. You presume that "normal" people have similar internal constructs, which isn't a valid assumption. The zombie problem is nothing more than a trivial expression of the unknowability of people's internal state, and has nothing to do with materialism. The entire problem can be invalidated soley on epistemological grounds, without appealing to various ontologies.


Sorry for the lateness of the reply, I've been trying to move for the past month, and haven't had much time outside of work (or in work for that matter). Everything should be finished by this weekend, so hopefully I can devote more time to the argument.

[ November 08, 2001: Message edited by: NialScorva ]

hedonologist

Hehe. You’re still distinguishing between us and our brain. If “we” were our brains why wouldn’t “we” still be our brains when our brains are not functioning “properly”?
Programs are objects, not subjects.
No I'm not, AFAIK. Maybe I could learn to with hypnosis, but that is another subject. The brain determines what is pleasurable, but the brain isn’t who is enjoying or desiring it, the brain is just what is causing it.

BTW, “desirable” is spelled like this <.
Now it seems your saying pleasure is defined by something in the limbic system.

This was your original statement
Whether the “signal” which corresponds with pleasure is in the limbic system or somewhere else, the experiencer is the one who desires, cares, or has any concept of the significance of this signal.
I’m basically just showing that there is no material definition of pleasure. It is defined rather by a subjective experience. We didn’t arbitrarily name some signal “pleasure”, we felt that it was subjectively pleasurable then went about searching for an objective correlate of it.
No I meant the former.

Here you seem to be defining “hurt” as a subjective experience as opposed to a material “signal”.
“Goals” can be defined by behavior and “desire” can be defined by the behavior of repeating something until the goal is reached, etc. This wouldn’t require any subjective desire or a desirer/subject. The question is, how do you know you have a subjective feeling of pleasure or a subjective desire or a subjective perception of color? I notice you define “color” subjectively above, but you are not defining “desire” subjectively. When you’re defining “desire” objectively (as explicitly evidenced by behavior) you’re really talking about a different concept than when I'm talking about subjective desire.

This gets back to the two questions I asked at the end of my last post.

hedonologist

It still sounds like you are saying a materialist can not know whether or not they exist as subjective experiencers.
I don’t see how that is connected to your last statement.

How was I presuming that? Rather, I was saying that zombies could exist. Further, maybe when you see the wavelength named “blue” you see the color I see when I see the wavelength named “red”.
I still don’t know what materialism claims does not exist. The subjective aspects of internal states have no material definition that I know of, therefore I'm saying they are not “material”, though they may correspond with material events. Every experience involves a subject/experiencer, objects, and subjective aspects. The experiencer himself, is the most subjective of subjective things, yet I am the most certain thing to exist, to my own knowledge.

Here are two sorta practical questions relating to this issue. If you are a materialist, I'm interested in how you would answer them.

1) Say we had the technology to do total brain transplants and the resulting person would seem to function fine. You are considering whether to have this operation on your health insurance policy, in the event that your brain stops functioning and can’t be repaired. If you did then you would have someone else’s brain transplanted into your (former) head. Would you want to have this?

2) Is there any reason we experiencers (as opposed to our brains) would want to pursue pleasure and avoid pain? If so, what is it?

Synaesthesia

There is already some development going on towards head transplants.

“Are you feeling low? Have your internal organs been smashed to a pulp? Come on down to Sloppy Joes head transplants! [Must be 18, possibility of loosing the use of all muscles below your jaw.]”

Yea, I’d do it. Better that than dead.

I can’t imagine what good it does for people to have a vested psycological interest in their physical well being.


Regards,
Syn

tronvillain

Actually Synaesthesia, it appears to be exactly the same as dead - it's just organ donation on a massive scale. hedonologist specified that it was your brain that fails and gets replaced with someone elses.

excreationist

I don't think you are taking in what I am saying. If you were then you would know why I don't think that T.V.'s have desires or can feel in a meaningful way - by meeting my definition of awareness.

Learning implies that they had incomplete knowledge and still have incomplete or mistaken knowledge or beliefs. This is from the "point of view" of the learning system - it's "personal" knowledge base. It learns patterns and makes inferences based on limited experience so that is why it can be mistaken. The inferences it makes aren't necessarily the Truth, they are subjective.

The term "feel" is fairly subjective since people might disagree about whether insects or plants or the planet "feels". But anyway, I try to only use the term when referring to aware systems that meet my requirements for awareness. As I explained, a computer doesn't meet these requirements.

So do you mean that pleasure and pain doesn't require aware brain-like structures to exist?

I'm talking about its intention to repeat or avoid that behaviour. It can recognize that the pain of burning skin should be avoided but it could still subject itself to that pain if it determines that the action is beneficial overall. And sometimes it might be currently unable to seek or avoid a situation, but it is aware of the goal just in case it becomes possible in the future.

Pain also causes you to seek a solution to the problem... so in the short-term you just want to avoid the problem, but then you put your brain-power to work to try and find a solution (permanently avoid the problem).

I think that pleasure and pain are basically our categorizations of whether a situation or behaviour is desireable or undesireable (and therefore it determines what should be done). It is very generalized so that we can compare the status of our hunger with other values we have to see what our course of action should be. So basically it is a very flexible system, unlike the behaviour of insects. e.g. We might come to believe that hunger is good and so over-ride our natural instincts for avoiding hunger so readily. But insects are limited to their instincts.
So I'm basically saying that the behaviour we see in mammals must come from a system of beliefs and desires - and that is what I believe pleasure and pain consist of. Our emotional response (pleasure and pain) is used to modify our beliefs and desires. (e.g. if our beliefs or desires result in pain/less pleasure, then they may need to be modified somehow. If they result in pleasure/less pain, they are reinforced)

Yes, that's what I am saying.

Those who believe that zygotes have subjective experiences may be influenced by religious dogma. Perhaps neurons aren't the only things that can lead to subjective experience - so I like that more general acronym. (Though I'd rather talk about what causes subjective experience instead of what just correlates with it)

Yes the experiencer is immaterial in the way that they aren't very obvious or tangible, in the same way that justice and beauty are pretty intangible. But I believe that justice and beauty are entirely dependent on physical systems to exist.

I think there is strong evidence that our memories are stored in our brains. So my body would be controlled by the brain donor's personality and have their memories. Or are you saying that I would still have the same personality and memories even though I had someone else's brain? Then where in the body is the experiencer or gateway to the awareness realm? It isn't in the heart though since people don't have sudden identity transformations after they have heart transplants.

What do you mean by "we experiencers" not being composed of brains? So do you think that if I vapourized your brain (and body) that you'd still continue to have experiences? And if you are just an immaterial experiencer and not your brain, how can you pursue pleasure and avoid pain? (You need to be physical to respond, even if it is just responding with thoughts) Or perhaps you believe that the experiencer (or "soul") controls the brain.

excreationist

Well if our brains aren't functioning properly then we are brain dead. e.g. if you took out someone's brain and drained the blood and chilled it to preserve the neurons, you still have a brain there, but I doubt that the brain donor's consciousness is still contained in it.
I'm talking about major lacks of function like that. In the same way, if a computer isn't plugged in the power point, it is still a computer, but not a running computer.
Our brains are still conscious if the problem is only minor, in the same way a computer might work ok even if the mouse or soundcard isn't working properly.

If the program contains autonomous entities, such as computer controlled characters, then they can involve subjects (subjective components). (Ideally the computer controlled characters should have beliefs and desires)

So when a brain creates pleasure or pain, what is it creating? Is it some type of fundamental supernatural force that interacts with the experiencer? Or do you want it just to be a mystery?

Ok... I'll try and modify that behaviour pattern...

So are you saying that the experiencer is not located in the brain, and you don't really need your brain to be able to experience something?

So you mean that we name a feeling "pleasure" when it seems to correspond with people's description of it? That is pretty obvious - e.g. if you taught a kid that plants are green, they'd call that colour green, even if it looked purple to them. (And purple looked green, but they called it purple since you've taught them to call things of that colour "purple)

Goals aren't necessarily defined entirely by behaviour - e.g. if you kept a chicken in an empty cage and it moved around a pecked the bottom of the cage a bit, its goal wasn't to do that. Its goal would have been to try and find some food to eat.