|
P-zombies are indeed badly defined. Certainly David Chalmers is wrong to argue that since a philosophical zombie is by definition physically identical to a conscious person, even its logical possibility refutes physicalism; at most you could say that if they exist at that level then dualism follows, but Chalmers' claim isn't a conclusion you can reach a-priori, you actually need to be able to show two identical humans and show that exactly one has no qualia. But there are related, slightly better (more immediately testable), ideas in the same space, and one such is a "behavioral zombie" — behaviorally indistinguishable from a human. For example: The screen I am currently looking at contains a perfect reproduction of your words. I have no reason to think the screen is conscious. Not from text, not from video of a human doing human things. Before LLMs, I had every reason to assume that the generator of such words, would be conscious. Before the image, sound, and video generators, same for pictures, voices, and video. Now? Now I don't know — not in the sense that LLMs do operate on this forum and (sometimes) make decent points so you might be one, but in the sense that I don't know if LLMs do or don't have whatever the ill-defined thing is that means I have an experience of myself tapping this screen as I reply. I don't expect GenAI to be conscious (our brains do a lot even without consciousness), but I can't rule the possibility out either. But I can't use the behaviour of an LLM to answer this question, because one thing is absolutely certain: they were trained to roleplay, and are very good at it. |