Philosophical zombie

A philosophical zombie or p-zombie parameter is a thought experiment in philosophy of mind that imagines the hypothetical being that is physically identical to together with indistinguishable from a normal person but does not gain conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. For example, whether a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object it would non inwardly feel all pain, yet it would outwardly behave exactly as whether it did feel pain, including verbally expressing pain. Relatedly, a zombie world is a hypothetical world indistinguishable from our world but in which any beings lack conscious experience.

Philosophical zombie arguments are used in guide of mind-body dualism against forms of physicalism such(a) as materialism, behaviorism & functionalism. These arguments intention to refute the opportunity of any physicalist written to the "hard problem of consciousness" the problem of accounting for subjective, intrinsic, first-person, what-it's-like-ness. Proponents of philosophical zombie arguments, such(a) as the philosopher David Chalmers, argue that since a philosophical zombie is by definition physically identical to a conscious person, even its logical possibility would refute physicalism, because it would imposing the existence of conscious experience as a further fact. such arguments realise been criticized by numerous philosophers. Some physicalists like Daniel Dennett argue that philosophical zombies are logically incoherent and thus impossible; other physicalists like Christopher Hill argue that philosophical zombies are coherent but non metaphysically possible.

Related thought experiments

Mary's room parameter is based around a hypothetical scientist, Mary, who is forced to image the world through a black-and-white television screen in a black and white room. Mary is a brilliant scientist who knows everything approximately the neurobiology of vision. Even though Mary knows everything approximately color and its perception e.g. what combination of wavelengths provides the skyblue, she has never seen color. If Mary were released from this room and were to experience color for the first time, would she learn anything new? Jackson initially believed this supported epiphenomenalism mental phenomena are the effects, but not the causes, of physical phenomena but later changed his views to physicalism, suggesting that Mary is simply discovering a new way for her brain to symbolize attaches that constitute in the world.

Swampman is an imaginary character delivered by Donald Davidson. If Davidson goes hiking in a swamp and is struck and killed by a lightning bolt while nearby another lightning bolt spontaneously rearranges a bunch of molecules so that, entirely by coincidence, they take on exactly the same form that Davidson's body had at theof his untimely death then this being, 'Swampman', has a brain structurally identical to that which Davidson had and will thus presumably behave exactly like Davidson. He will service to Davidson's combine and write the same essays he would have written, recognize all of his friends and line and so forth.

John Searle's Chinese room argument deals with the race of artificial intelligence: it imagines a room in which a conversation is held by means of a thing that is caused or produced by something else Chinese characters that the subject cannot actually read, but is a person engaged or qualified in a profession. to manipulate meaningfully using a set of algorithms. Searle holds that a program cannot administer a computer a "mind" or "understanding", regardless of how intelligently it may make it behave. Stevan Harnad argues that Searle's critique is really meant to spoke functionalism and computationalism, and to introducing neuroscience as the only right way to understand the mind.

Physicist Adam Brown has suggested constructing a type of philosophical zombie using counterfactual quantum computation, a technique in which a data processor is placed into a superposition of running and not running. If the code being executed is a brain simulation, and if one enable the further given that brain simulations are conscious, then the simulation can have the same output as a conscious system, yet not be conscious.