hedonologist

Pleasure and pain would seem to epitomize purely subjective aspects of an experience. This is why I make a new thread for this. Subjective experience (thus an experiencer) would NOT seem to be necessary for things like “awareness” if awareness is defined by a behavior rather than a subjective experience, but I don’t know of any sort of a metaphor for pleasure that can be applied to a thing (eg AI) which doesn’t have (or isn’t believed to have) a subjective experience.

Could zombies exist who react like a being who feels, but have no subjective experience of pleasure or pain, for all you know?

Is there a known material difference between one of these hypothetical unfeeling zombies and an organism that does feel?

[ October 26, 2001: Message edited by: hedonologist ]

Jerry Smith

Hedonologist focuses the discussion. Representing 'real-thing'/'life-force'/'consciousness'/'awareness' with pleasure and pain, he asks if there were two identical beings, one of which experienced pleasure and pain, the other of which could not, both of which behaved exactly the same and reacted in the same way to any stimulus: could the materialist identify which was which?

My answer is - no we could not. What a materialist may do, however, is identify the properties of the experiences of pleasure and pain. He could show good evidence that a creature described in the way that Hedonologist suggests could not exist.

He could show that pleasure and pain are uniquely associated with certain patterns of brain activity. Therefore one who experiences these states must necessarily differ in brain activity (thus not be identical to the last molecule). He could show that pleasure and pain have physiological and biological reprocussions (thus the zombie could not react in the same way to all stimuli as the 'real thing')

The only way the hedonologist could maintain his position and keep his demonstration meaningful and consistent would be to give an unusual (but still meaningful) definition for pleasure/pain, or to find some other subjective quality to stand in its place. This other subjective quality would still have to have meaning (as does the concept of pleasure/pain), but it would have to be something not provably associated with an observable trait or behavior.

I believe that this is a near impossible task. Perhaps an example that might give us materialists a harder time would be the concept of 'belief' (of a trivial thing). We might still hook you to a lie-detector and ask you outright if you believed, but there is some wiggle-room for the non-materialist on this one.

tronvillain

I'd have to "possibly" and "probably", in that order. Saying any more really requires a far greater understanding of how the brain and consciousness work than we currently have.

hedonologist

The experiencer would be the subject of the pleasure or pain.
No one would be able to tell the zombie from a regular person, just from knowing them, in person. I have a new way of asking the question, to avoid this confusion.

How would a materialist know they, themselves are not a zombie?
The only properties of pleasure which I know of, are purely subjective rather than “material”. There are things which happen to my body which I know correspond with my pleasure or pain, in certain circumstances. From that I inductively “assume” that other organisms are the same way (that the material “body” called an “organism” has a subject/experiencer), to the extent that I can relate “their body” to my own body. The more human an organism looks, the more likely we are to think it experiences, because you only directly know that you experience, without the inductive “reasoning/assumption”.
How could he know what patterns correspond with pleasure, unless he relies on his own personal subjective experience, or what some other person tells him about their own subjective experience?
You’re assuming that because you have a subjective experience of pleasure, and you react a certain way to it, that another organism (or their brainwaves) reacting the same way, is having a similar subjective experience. You’re also relying on subjective experience to know there is any such thing as pleasure or desire.

Did you discover pleasure and pain when you learned about brainwaves or before?
“Belief” can be defined like information on a hard drive, rather than a subjective experience. But how could one know if an android really felt?

[ October 30, 2001: Message edited by: hedonologist ]

hedonologist

I’m not sure what you mean but I have a new question. How would a materialist know they, themselves are not a zombie?

NialScorva

Well, under materialism, if the zombie is like a human in everyway except lacking qualia (such as pain and pleasure given in this example), then there is no discernable difference between the two. This isn't no discernable difference between known distinct things (such as two exactly similar rubber balls that can be seen side by side).

This example is about an attribute that cannot be distinguished. It's like saying that I have a bin of rubber balls, all exactly the same, only some are foo. Foo means that they look, act, and are perceived like rubber, but are not rubber. Your job is to tell them apart. In this regard, the quest looks rediculous. There's no way for you to know the difference, and I just made up the word to create a difference that cannot be perceived. The zombie problem is similar, it *defines* an adjective that cannot be differentiated from it's options, and as such is meaningless.

Synaesthesia

hedonologist
That is an invalid question because, as Nial Scorva pointed out, by definition the zombie and human are physically identical.

excreationist

Well I think it is impossible for zombies to feel nothing. They mightn't feel the sensations we feel in exactly the same way, but some part of this system must be sensing the external world and its internal states otherwise it would be incapable of responding appropriately. If it had no senses then how could it act appropriately? Either it does it by chance (which is likely that it would continue for long) or it has a supernatural puppet-master - but here the puppet-master is its awareness because for the puppet-master to figure out the appropriate responses, it needs to be aware of the zombies senses and internal states.
By internal states I mean that the zombie has beliefs about how the world works, that may be mistaken, and goals or desires and an emotional response to the stimuli based on whether the stimuli conforms to its goals or desires or not. That way it can seek or avoid the things in the world.
Also, for it to have human-level behaviour, I believe that there must be a "central coordinator" that oversees a summarized version of our experiences and orders the other parts of our brain to go off and solve problems that it assigns them.
Even if there is a puppet-master then it would still have a central-coordinator, which is the "seat" of consciousness.
The only exception is if its behaviour has no knowledge of the external world. It would be amazing if such a zombie could even walk because balancing on two legs requires you to know a lot about the terrain and how level you are and the positions of your legs. So let's say there was an obstacle between the zombie and some food (which it needed to eat to appear normal). If it had no sense of the world then it would avoid the obstacle purely by chance. And this avoidance would have to look like intelligence was involved, which is unlikely.
e.g. a several hour long sequence of complex behaviour that appears to take into account the external world but doesn't (and doesn't even use beliefs/goals) would be based on chance. It would be about as likely as a chimp typing out all the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica in order with absolutely no typos, the first time, with no prior experience of using a type-writer or knowledge of any kind of language. But I guess it is possible. So I guess true zombies are possible, just highly unlikely.

tronvillain

hedonologist:
What I meant is that for all I know a zombie could exist (an entity who reacts like a being who feels but has no subjective experience of pleasure or pain) and that there would likely be a material difference between these hypothetical beings and organisms that feel. Of course we're talking about materialist zombies here, not the bizarre physically identical zombie concept.

I must say that I am hard pressed to recall a more meaningless question.

tronvillain

JohnClay, you seem to be taking the position that anything capable of appearing conscious actually is conscious. Is that right? I used to be a Turing Test kind of guy myself, but I've decided that it seems entirely possible that something could appear conscoius without actually being so. To decide either way requires an understanding of consiousness we don't have.