[fuligo]

I'm not sure the original comment deserves this clarification, you'll be hard pressed to find someone on this forum who didn't already know about the nature of mutations.

The point is though that while the mutations themselves are "accidents" and the result is always characterized by a certain randomness, evolution as a problem-solving algorithm isn't itself accidental. While some (or even many) if the characteristics of an organism might be incidental, some major features tend to have a good reason for being selected. Self-awareness, I assert, is such a feature, because it carries implications too large not to have an effect on selection.

[ForHackernews]

> Self-awareness, I assert, is such a feature, because it carries implications too large not to have an effect on selection.

You might assert that, but there's virtually no evidence to support that assertion, and interesting philosophical arguments to the contrary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

Now, if what you mean by "self-awareness" is just the ability of an organism to monitor its own condition and respond accordingly, then we're in agreement, but I find that a very uninteresting assertion and it means that we're not really talking about "consciousness" except inasmuch as a thermostat is conscious: http://consc.net/notes/lloyd-comments.html

[Retra]

P-zombies are not an interesting philosophical argument anymore than "Angels dancing on pins" is an interesting argument.

[ForHackernews]

Parent comment is asserting that consciousness/self-awareness is an evolutionarily important feature, that consciousness is favored by natural selection.

P-zombies are vivid counterexample that points to the possibility of epiphenomenalism. There's no reason to believe that consciousness is a necessary feature for an organism to respond to its environment in a survival-enhancing way. In fact, there is some neurological evidence that suggests nerve impulses to take an action precede conscious awareness: http://www.consciousentities.com/libet.htm

[Retra]

P-zombies don't exist, so they are not a counterexample to anything. In fact, they cannot possibly exist, so they don't even point to the possibility of anything interesting.

>There's no reason to believe that consciousness is a necessary feature for an organism to respond to its environment in a survival-enhancing way.

The reason to believe this is that systems with "consiousness" are a strict superset of systems with "responding to the environment." They are not unrelated ideas, and in fact, the ability of an organism to survive is closely tied to this kind of behavior.

I have never heard anyone try to defend P-zomies unless they were simply unaware of what the word 'meaning' means, or how our words acquire meaning. If you know how this works, you should be able to easily see why P-zombies are a meaningless idea -- an incongruous hypothetical. (Like "what would we be talking about if I didn't exist?")

Same goes for Searle's Chinese Room argument. If you assume something that is impossible, it is easy to conclude any ridiculous thing you like. P-zombies are impossible. They are not anymore useful than any other self-contained contradiction.

[ForHackernews]

> In fact, they cannot possibly exist

I don't understand how you can be so confident of this. How are you defining consciousness? How are you measuring it? What makes you believe with such emphatic certainty that I am a conscious being and not a p-zombie? (or, if you prefer, a bot that easily passes the Turing test)

> They are not unrelated ideas, and in fact, the ability of an organism to survive is closely tied to this kind of behavior.

That's what I'm saying, consciousness is not a "kind of behavior". There is nothing behavioral about your inner experience as a conscious entity.

[TeMPOraL]

I think the TL;DR of the argument against p-zombies goes like this: if you have two things that are by definition indistinguishable by any possible measurement even in principle, they are by this very definition the same. Since there is, by definition, no way to tell if someone is a p-zombie or not, the introduction of the term "p-zombie" doesn't make any sense at all, and therefore why would you ever do that?

The people who argue p-zombies often do this because they want to keep consciousness as something fundamentally different than the material world, something inaccessible to science. But it's wrong. Even magic is accessible to science. By the very definition and idea of science, anything that has any causal influence on the observable universe can be studied and is in the domain of science.

[Retra]

>I don't understand how you can be so confident of this. [...] How are you measuring it? What makes you believe with such emphatic certainty that I am a conscious being and not a p-zombie?

Because p-zombies are self-contradictory. The definition of a p-zombie is a contradiction. It's like saying "suppose 1 = 2 and 1 != 2. Call this a p-zombie quality."

When you suppose that the behavior of a thing is separate from the reality of a thing, you are failing to account for how the words 'behavior' and 'reality' acquire meaning -- through observation. They cannot be different because the processes that establish their meaning are identical.

To suppose that a p-zombie could be different from a person, yet measurably identical in all aspects is a contradiction.

>How are you defining consciousness?

There is a big difference between meaning and definition. I don't have to define consciousness, I only need to know what it means. I only need to identify the use-cases where it is appropriate.

>There is nothing behavioral about your inner experience as a conscious entity.

Yes there is: behavior is the activity that you measure, and you can measure brain activity.