Tuesday, 11 May 2021
It's fully in line with the evolutionary origin of mind that it is always asking 'what is this?' - that is, classifying each new event according to its pre-existing schemes and modifying the latter whenever the degree of novelty exceeds some variable threshold. Further, such a mind at a sufficient level of sophistication has itself as an element in its schemes and hence experiences the event of its own awareness, the schemes always seeking as a matter of epistemological parsimony to draw out their internal implications as far as possible. Hence even a p-zombie would question its own existence in a self-conscious way. For example it would be subject to the effect of 'when I don't think about how I'm doing it (e.g. riding a bike) all is fine, but the minute I think about it, put attention onto how I am actually doing it, I can no longer do it as well, or at all.' This would be enough to make an experiential event of the mind's own experiencing. The p-zombie would presumably do all of this without any qualia, but it might speak of or think in terms of qualia just so as to have an appropriate language for taking this as a theme. Hence in a world of p-zombies we would find active philosophical discussion of qualia. How then could we tell that they 'really' didn't have them? How can we tell that we really do have them, outside of merely thinking about them?
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