[DonaldFisk]

And David Chalmers has an excellent rebuttal to Dennett's rebuttal. Different people take different sides, and I'm with Chalmers on this one.

The evidence for the conceivability of p-zombies is in your living room, if you have a television. You can see people on it and they behave intelligently. Are they conscious? Of course not, they're just red, green, and blue dots. Maybe we could make this a bit more realistic?

You're now in a very realistic virtual reality. Your character is conscious, because you are. So is the character being played by your friend over there (assuming he's not a p-zombie). But what about the characters next to you? Maybe Doug Lenat and Geoffrey Hinton collaborated and developed an AI as intelligent as a person, and that's what controls them. They can't be conscious, because they're just pixels like the dots on your flat-screen TV, so not conscious in the virtual reality, and they're not conscious in the real world either, because they're just software, which is an epiphenomenon, like wetness or tidiness. The computer which runs the VR, and the AIs, might be conscious but that would be a very different consciousness from yours. Maybe it senses voltage levels at its memory addresses, but it certainly wouldn't see you or the submachine gun you're carrying in the VR.

Maybe we already are in a virtual reality. Nick Bostrom thinks we might be. If it's sufficiently realistic, there might be no way to tell, and no way to tell whether everyone is conscious, or nobody is conscious except you.

[naasking]

> The evidence for the conceivability of p-zombies is in your living room, if you have a television. You can see people on it and they behave intelligently. Are they conscious? Of course not, they're just red, green, and blue dots.

I don't see how that constitutes evidence for the conceivability of p-zombies. They're obviously distinguishable from conscious entities with a simple test: ask a TV person a question.

[DonaldFisk]

The TV person is obviously distinguishable, but the non-playing character in the VR I described would not be.

[naasking]

And your VR example simply assumes the conclusion:

> Maybe Doug Lenat and Geoffrey Hinton collaborated and developed an AI as intelligent as a person, and that's what controls them

How do you know the AI isn't conscious? You're simply asserting that it isn't. For all you know, "AI as intelligent as a person" literally isn't possible without consciousness, which makes your assertion inconceivable.

Which is why the whole p-zombie thought experiment doesn't convince anyone: if you already think consciousness is physical, then p-zombies aren't conceivable and the thought experiment isn't convincing, and if you already think consciousness is not physical, then p-zombies merely assert the same conclusion you already hold and you're "convinced".

[DonaldFisk]

The computer that runs the VR (including the AI controlling the behaviour of the NPCs) might well be conscious, but the NPCs themselves are just pixels. Before you argue that you are too, you know otherwise and you see the VR's pixels. Meanwhile, the computer which is generating the VR, and is outside it, doesn't have to see anything. It might sense some electrical signals originating from you and your friend's bodysuits, but that isn't going to feel anything like the experience you and your friend are having.

[naasking]

> The computer that runs the VR (including the AI controlling the behaviour of the NPCs) might well be conscious, but the NPCs themselves are just pixels.

Where and how the information processing actually occurs to produce this intelligence doesn't seem relevant. The NPCs are individually either as intelligent as a person, and equally distinct, or they are not. If they are, they may be conscious. You said they are so intelligent, and therefore, you have no idea whether they are or are not conscious.

> It might sense some electrical signals originating from you and your friend's bodysuits, but that isn't going to feel anything like the experience you and your friend are having.

I don't see how that's relevant to whether the game system or NPCs are conscious.

[DonaldFisk]

I think we're arguing past each other here. I accept that the computer controlling the VR might be conscious of something while it runs the AI software, but the brains of the NPCs clearly aren't conscious. In fact, they don't even need to have brains. The computer isn't immersed in the VR the way you and your friend are. It doesn't use senses the same way you do.