Om Vents Graciously

Please read Part II (click!) and Part I (click!) first! This is going to be the final (and most exciting) article in the series, because it all comes together! Here, we will use the concepts of p-zombies and Searle's thought-experiment about conscious machines, and try to think about the philosophical interplay between them - what happens when we put a zombie inside the Chinese Room? I will then go on to defend the theory following this logic. Before that, we will explore another haunting idea - is the algorithm that this allegory is meant to represent actually a zombie in disguise all along?! 1. Algorithms Are Moral p-Zombies: We can now restate the Chinese Room in the context of the anti-physicalist arguments laid out earlier. If we can conceive of p-zombies, we can use the same arguments that refute physicalism to refute computationalism. Recall that understanding is a qualia, which is in the realm of semantics in Searle’s terminology, while an algorithm is only allowed syntac...

Welcome back! We are continuing directly from Part I (click here!) , so please read that first! This article will explain the basic idea of "philosophical zombies", and why it is interesting to introduce them into the world of Searle's ideas and his Chinese Room thought-experiment. Let's get into it! The decades of work that followed Searle involved discussions about everything, from solipsism and Boltzmann brains to symbolic logic and existentialism, when it came to the effort of quantifying intelligence. Meanwhile, well-established theories in the philosophy of science made strides in attempts to solve fundamental questions such as the mind-body problem. That problem and the surrounding debate between physicalism and dualism was reinstated in the concept of “philosophical zombies”, a hypothetical creation whose conceivability itself poses a threat to the idea of physicalism (aptly named the Conceivability Argument) and confirms the existence of nonphysical “qualia” ...