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P-zombies are indeed all about epiphenomenalism.
No, they are primarily about explanation.
. But it is the unsolved Hard Problem of Consciousness, as some would say, to prove that the person home in your body is you. We could have an extra consciousness-essence attached to these bodies, they say. You can’t prove we don’t!
It has virtually nothing to do with personal identity.
Dennett thinks peoples’ expectations are that “real qualia” are the things that live in the space of epiphenomenal essences and can’t possibly be the equivalent of a conjuring trick.
If they are a trick,. no one has explained how it is pulled off.
That is, on the object level: it is not at all sensible to think that philosophical zombies are useful as a concept; the idea is deeply confused.
Suppose you made a human-level AI. Suppose there was some doubt about whether it was genuinely conscious. Wouldn’t that amount to the question of whether or not it was a zombie?
Separately, it seems highly possible that people vary in their internal experience, such that some people experience ‘qualia’ and other people don’t. If the main reason we think people have qualia is that they say that they do, and Dennett says that he doesn’t, then the standard argument doesn’t go through for him.
Or it’s terminological confusion.
It seems to me that they failed for different reasons.
Moreover, they can vary with changes to the environment that aren’t changes to the electron. They aren’t proper or intrinsic to the electron, but intuitively ones qualia are intrinsic.
It’s not just contemplative practitioners. “there are alternative realities” is a floridly metaphysical claim.
Have you seen:
http://joeduffyblog.com/2016/02/07/the-error-model/
Or http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ for that matter.
And here’s an interesting observation: The API of the socket changes as you move from one state to another.
Anyway, this rant is addressed to programming language designers: What options do we have to support such mutating API at the moment. And can we do better?
It’s called typestate. It’s been tried, and it tends to be cumbersome.
but in general, we have a ton of blind spots and biases that are harmful in a practical, real world sort of sense,
..but which don’t get selected out, for some reason.
If you actually incorporate every single constraint you have, you end up having one action.
You can’t infer backwards to the idea that a decision was made deterministically (whether physical or rational determinism) from that fact that only one decision actually gets made.
In this case, we can think of absolute freedom as a measure of flatness of f
If f is absolutely flat, it isn’t determining your decisions.
Counterargument: coroutines are Turing-complete, FSM’s are not, equivalence is two-way.
Moreover, the “co” isn’t doing any work, because you can write FSMs in languages that don’t have coprocessing.
To start, I’m personally skeptical of the claim that preferences and moral values can be clearly distinguished, especially given the variety of value systems that people have preferred over time, or even today.
There is a clear distinction within each system: if you violate a moral value, you are a bad person, if you violate a non-moral value, you are something else—irrational or foolish, maybe.
Also, you have not excluded levelling down—nothing is a moral value—as an option.
If you want a scale of moral value that is objective universal and timeless, you are going to have problems. But it is a strange to want in the first place., because value is not an objective physical property. Different people value different things. Where those values or preferences can be satisfied individually, there is no moral concern. Where there are trade-offs , or potential for conflict, then there is a need for—in the sense that a group is better off with—publically agreed and known standards and rules. Societies with food scarcity have rules about who is allowed to eat what, societies with food abundance don’t. Morality is an adaptation., it isn’t and should not be the same everywhere.
The EA framing—where moral is considered in terms of making inprovements, and individual , voluntary actions makes it quite hard to understand morality in general, because morality in general is about groups, obligations and prohibitions.
I would see that as the definition of control as opposed to alignment.
So?
You are assuming some relationship between agency and free will that has not been spelt out. Also, an entirely woo-free notion of agency is a ubiquitous topic on this site, as has been pointed out to you before.
There aren’t, but not in a way that allows you to conclude the universe is finite
It is not obvious that “value” is synonymous with “moral value”, and it is no clear that divergence in values is a moral issue, or necessarily leads to conflict. Food preferences are the classic example of preferences that can be satisfied in a non-exclusionary way.
You are telescoping a bunch of issues there. It is not at all clear that top-down causation is needed for libertarian free will, for instance. And MIRI says free will is illusory.
Physics says there is no such thing, all your decisions are either predetermined, or random or chaotic
No, free will is not a topic covered in physics textbooks or lectures. You are appealing to an implicit definition of free will that libertarians don’t accept.
Versions of the “nature of being” question are relevant to things like MWI and the mathematical universe hypothesis.
In The Emotion Machine, Minsky argues that shame is absolutely critical to AI.