> It seems entirely possible that the "philosophical zombie" is an impossible/illogical construct, and that in fact anything with all the structure necessary for consciousness will of necessity be conscious.
Yes, and that's pretty much exactly the point: we don't know of any way of determining whether someone is a p-zombie or a being with conscious phenomenal experience. We can certainly have an opinion or belief or assume that sufficient structure means consciousness, which is a perfectly reasonable stance to take and one that many would take, but we have to be careful to understand that's not a scientific stance since it isn't testable or falsifiable, which is why it's been called the "hard problem" of consciousness. It's an unfounded belief we choose out of reasons like psychological comfort.
With regards to your latter point, I think you are making some sophisticated distinctions regarding the "map and territory" relation, and it seems you've hit upon the crux of the matter: how can we report "what its like" for us to experience something the other person hasn't experienced, if its not deconstructible to phenomenal states they've already experienced (and therefore constructible for them based off of our report)? The landmark paper here is "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Josh Nagel, and if you're ever curious it's a pretty short read.
With regards to "blindsight" since I'm not familiar with it and curious, how do we distinguish between loss of visual consciousness and loss of information transfer between conscious regions, or loss of memory about conscious experience?
I'm not sure how much, if any, work has been done to study the brains of people with blindsight. I'm also not sure I would differentiate between loss of visual consciousness and loss of information transfer ... my understanding is that it's the loss if information transfer that is causing the loss of consciousness (e.g maybe your visual cortex works fine, so you can see, and you can perform some visual tasks that have been well practiced and/or no longer need general association cortex, but if the connection between visual cortex and association cortex was lost, then perhaps this is where you become unaware of your ability to see, i.e. lose visual consciousness).
I don't think it's a memory issue - one classic test of blindsight is asking the patient to navigate a cluttered corridor full of obstacles, which the patient succeeds in doing despite reporting themselves as blind - so it's a real-time phenomena, not one of memory.
> Yes, and that's pretty much exactly the point: we don't know of any way of determining whether someone is a p-zombie or a being with conscious phenomenal experience.
That seems to come down to defining, in a non hand-wavy way, what we mean by "conscious phenomenal experience". If this is referring to personal subjective experience, then why is just asking them to report that subjective experience unsatisfactory ?!
I get that consciousness is considered as some ineffable personal experience, but as a thought experiment, what if the experimenter, defining themselves as "conscious" wanted to probe if some subject's subjective experience differed from their own, then they could at least attempt to verbalize any and all aspects of their own (the experimeter's) subjective experience and ask the subject if they felt the same, and the more (unconstrained) questions they asked without finding any significant difference would make it asymptotically unlikely that there was any difference.
> which is why it's [p-zombie detection] been called the "hard problem" of consciousness
AFAIK the normal definition of the hard problem is basically how and why the brain gives rise to qualia and subjective experience, which really seems like a non-problem...
We have thoughts and emotions, and mental access to these, so it has to feel like something to be alive and experience things. If we introspect on what having, say, vision, is like, or what it is like to have our eyes open vs shut, then (assuming we don't have blindsight!) we are obviously going to experience the difference and be able to report it - it does "feel" like something.
Qualia are an interesting thing to discuss - why do we experience what we do, or experience anything at all for that matter when we see, say a large red circle. Why does red feel "red"? Why and how does music feel different in nature to color, and why does it feel the way it does, etc?
I think these are also really non-problems that disappear as soon as you start to examine them! What are the differences in quales of seeing a small red circle vs a large red circle, or a large blue circle vs a large red one... When you consider differences in quales vs the fact that we experience anything at all (which is proved by our ability to report that we do). Color is perceived as surface attribute with a spatial extent, with colors differentiated by what they remind us of. Blue brings to mind water, sky and other blue things, Red brings to mind fire, roses, and other red things. Perception of color can be proven to be purely associative, not absolute, by Ivo Kohler's chromatic adaptation experiments, having the subject wear colored goggles whose effect "wears off" after a few days with normal subjective perception of color returning.
I'm actually curious here, because maybe our experiences are different. When you look at something red, before any associations or thoughts kick in, before you start thinking "this reminds me of fire" or analyzing it, is there something it's like for that redness to be there? Some quality to it that exists independent of what you can say about it?
For me, I can turn off all the thinking and associations and just... look. And there's something there that the looking is of or like, if that makes sense. It's hard to put into words because it's prior to words, and can possibly be independent of them.
But maybe that's not something universal? I know some people don't have visual imagery or an inner voice, so maybe phenomenal experience varies more than we assume. Does that distinction between the experience itself and your ability to think/talk about it track for you at all?
> And there's something there that the looking is of or like, if that makes sense
I think I know what you mean, but if you consider something really simple like the patch of a single color, even without any color associations (although presumably they are always there subconsciously) then isn't the experience just of "a surface attribute, of given spatial extent". There is something there, that is the same in that spatial region, but different elsewhere.
At least, that's how it seems to me, and isn't that exactly how the quale of a color has to be - that is the essence of it ?!
> then isn't the experience just of "a surface attribute, of given spatial extent".
I don't know why this seems to be so hard for me to think about and even put into words, but isn't "the experience of the surface attribute of a given spatial extent" something other than the experience of the surface attribute of a given spatial extent itself?
I mean that the words we use to describe something aren't the something itself. Conceivably, you can experience something without ever having words, and having words about a phenomenal visual experience doesn't seem to change the experience much or at all (at least for me).
Maybe another way of phrasing this would be something like: can we talk about red blotches using red blotches themselves, in the same way that we can talk about words using words themselves? And then, supposing that we could talk about red blotches using red blotches (maybe the blotches are in the form of words or structured like knowledge, I dunno), can we talk about red blotches without ever having experienced red blotches? I learned this idea from Mary's Room thought experiment, but I still don't know what to think about it.
Yes - the experience / quale has nothing to do with words.
The point (opinion) I'm trying to make is that something like the quale of vision, that is so hard to describe, basically has to be the way it is, because that is it's fundamental nature.
Consider starting with your eyes closed, and maybe just a white surface in front of you, then you open your eyes. Seeing is not the same as not-seeing, so it has to feel different. If it was a different color then the input to your brain would be different, so that has to feel different too. Vision is a spatial sense - we have a 2-D array of rods and cones in our retina feeding into our brain, so (combined with persistence of vision) we experience the scene in front of us all at once in a spatial manner, completely unlike hearing which is a temporal sense with one thing happening after another... etc, etc.
It seems to me that when you start analyzing it, everything about the quale of vision (or hearing, or touch, or smell) has to be the way it is - it is no mystery - and an artificial brain with similar senses would experience it exactly the same way.
Yep that's a cogent, serious stance, and it sounds a lot like illusionism (famously argued by Daniel Dennett) or functionalism if you ever wanted to check out more about it.
It’s a serious stance, but the really interesting thing to me here is that its not a settled fact. What’s quite surprising and unique about this field is that unlike physics or chemistry where we generally agree on the basics, in consciousness studies you have some quite brilliant minds totally deadlocked on the fundamentals. There is absolutely no consensus on whether the problem is 'solved' or 'impossible,' and its definitely not a matter of people not taking this seriously enough or making some rash judgments or simple errors.
I find this fascinating because this type of situation is pretty rare or unique in modern science. Maybe the fun part is that I can take one stance and you another and here there's no "right answer" that some expert knows and one of us is "clearly" wrong. Nice chatting with you :)
Yes, and that's pretty much exactly the point: we don't know of any way of determining whether someone is a p-zombie or a being with conscious phenomenal experience. We can certainly have an opinion or belief or assume that sufficient structure means consciousness, which is a perfectly reasonable stance to take and one that many would take, but we have to be careful to understand that's not a scientific stance since it isn't testable or falsifiable, which is why it's been called the "hard problem" of consciousness. It's an unfounded belief we choose out of reasons like psychological comfort.
With regards to your latter point, I think you are making some sophisticated distinctions regarding the "map and territory" relation, and it seems you've hit upon the crux of the matter: how can we report "what its like" for us to experience something the other person hasn't experienced, if its not deconstructible to phenomenal states they've already experienced (and therefore constructible for them based off of our report)? The landmark paper here is "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Josh Nagel, and if you're ever curious it's a pretty short read.
With regards to "blindsight" since I'm not familiar with it and curious, how do we distinguish between loss of visual consciousness and loss of information transfer between conscious regions, or loss of memory about conscious experience?