Rationality: From AI to Zombies

by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Why postulate an extramaterial soul, and then postulate that the soul has no effect on the physical world, and then postulate a mysterious unknown material process that causes your internal narrative to talk about conscious experience? Why not postulate the true stuff of consciousness which no amount of mere mechanical atoms can add up to, and then, having gone that far already, let this true stuff of consciousness have causal effects like making philosophers talk about consciousness? I am not endorsing Descartes’s view. But at least I can understand where Descartes is coming from. Consciousness seems mysterious, so you postulate a mysterious stuff of consciousness. Fine. But now the zombie-ists postulate that this mysterious stuff doesn’t do anything, so you need a whole new explanation for why you say you’re conscious. That isn’t vitalism. That’s something so bizarre that vitalists would spit out their coffee. “When fires burn, they release phlogiston. But phlogiston doesn’t have any experimentally detectable impact on our universe, so you’ll have to go looking for a separate explanation of why a fire can melt snow.” What? Are property dualists under the impression that if they postulate a new active force, something that has a causal impact on observables, they will be sticking their necks out too far? Me, I’d say that if you postulate a mysterious, separate, additional, inherently mental property of consciousness, above and beyond positions and velocities, then, at tha...