Talk:Philosophical zombie

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Oh man, memories...many drunken conversations about p-zombies...that was back in my youth before my hardcore logical positivism kicked in. tmtoulouse beleaguer 17:03, 23 July 2008 (EDT)

Despite the site founder loving this, what is this crap? ħumanUser talk:Human 05:56, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

There was a rather brilliant qwantz.com comic awhile back that mocked the arrogance of this philosophy and said it was much more likely that you were someone else's mental simulation than the universe revolved around you. Wish I could find it again. --Dr. Swordopolis (talk) 06:13, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

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[edit] Detecting differences

There appears to be a confusion between detectable differences and actual differences. If consciousness has a material basis there are certainly material differences between conscious and unconscious beings regardless of whether or not scientists can detect these differences.

Would anyone care to proffer a difference between "detectable" and "actual" differences here? If something has an actual effect then we can detect that effect. If the effect cannot be detected, i.e., experienced, directly or indirectly, it is not consequential, meaningful nor is it "actual". The ultimate gold standard test for an effect is the effect itself; so therefore "no detection" = "no effect" = "not existing". Or "no detectable difference between people and p-zombies" means that there is no difference between people and p-zombies. It's not that the difference is on a higher plane of existence, or outside of reality, or only visible to God, the difference is simply Not There. Scarlet A.pngpathetic 01:51, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

[edit] No big deal

I work with a bunch of them. --Q4 (talk) 18:35, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

[edit] Zombie politicians

Quite a few politicians #appear# to be p-zombies, or possibly robots: totally expressionless faces and backstories that have limited contact with reality. 82.44.143.26 (talk) 18:44, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

[edit] Does not require dualism

It's possible to conceive of a machine built to pass an arbitrarily extended Turing test, to the point that one could interact with it for an extended period of time without realizing that it is simply playing back canned behaviors and responses. This doesn't require there be a soul or spirit separate from the body, consciousness could still be created by some computational process that is merely excluded from this machine.

I personally don't find this argument convincing, but it is a viable one that doesn't require dualism. Examples of such p-zombies in literature include the members of Julian Jaynes' bicameral civilizations, Peter Watt's vampires, and Karl Schroeder's various explorations of non-human-like minds in Ventus, Permanence, and the Candesce trilogy. -- Resuna (talk) 14:09, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

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