The “zombie” argument does what it is supposed to do: Shows that consciousness, the motivating force in our lives, is not really a material thing.
Tag: David Chalmers
At Mind Matters News: Chalmers and Penrose clash over “conscious computers”
Holloway: There are hard, practical reasons why computers cannot understand concepts like “infinity” and “truth” and therefore cannot be conscious.
At Mind Matters News: Why physicalism is failing as the accepted approach to science
Essentially, panpsychism offers a way for scientists to address human consciousness, as currently understood, without explaining it away as an illusion. It would allow us to say that if Zombie-Jane existed, she would be missing something critical that Jane has (and so does everything else, to some extent). Whether that makes panpsychism a better explanation of reality than idealism or dualism is a separate question. Like all points of view, they have their own issues but the Zombie isn’t one of them.
At Mind Matters News: The day philosophers started to take consciousness seriously
Of course, once they did, they found themselves deep in huge conundrums.
Science writer John Horgan explains how he came to doubt the AI apocalypse
Takehome: Horgan finds that, despite the enormous advances in neuroscience, genetics, cognitive science, and AI, our minds remain “as mysterious as ever.”