Comment by tim333
6 days ago
I know I'm not a philosophical zombie based on
>For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object, it would not feel any pain, but it would react exactly the way any conscious human would.
in the Wikipedia article because I don't get on well with the sharp poking. On the basis of Occam's razor I assume all other humans and higher animals are similar. It would be odd if evolution had made me different from all the others.
I am not denying the fact that you feel pain.
What I am denying is that there's anything metaphysical about the whole process.
The opponents of physicalism like Chalmers start from the axiom that consciousness is, in fact, separated from the physical world. Then they use the zombie to "demonstrate" (using circular logic, in my opinion) that physicalism is not possible.
I do believe that your (our) feelings, emotions, and our sense of self all emanate from the physical world. So in that sense "we are all the zombies that Chalmers talks about".
I think we're looking at different definitions of philosophical zombie. I was going with the Wikipedia article's
>For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object, it would not feel any pain
You are omitting the second part:
"but it would react exactly the way any conscious human would"
So the pain would be registered, and reacted to.
The only difference is in how the world "feel" is interpreted.
For Chalmers, the difference between a "zombie" and a "regular human", according to Chalmers, is that for the "zombie" is just "meat reacting to things". The "human" on the other hand is "meat somehow connected to something outside of the meat called consciousness that is the only thing that really feels".
I (and the author of the article) disagree. Consciousness can be "just meat". No need to add an "external thing".