doctorlogic

I think what you are saying is that if we possessed detailed understanding of a mind, we might discover a reductive explanation of qualia.

I think I'm saying more than this. We might find that it is impossible for beings like ourselves to not have qualia. By analogy, consider the Goldbach conjecture. It's possibly try but not provable with a finite proof. But it's also possibly false, and possibly provably so with a finite proof. It's conceivable that the Goldbach conjecture is true, and conceivable that it is false, but only one of the two cases is logically possible.

On the other hand, in the Mary thought experiment Mary has an incredibly large

The first, as I think Yudkowsky states, is that qualia are not very well defined. Human introspection is unreliable in many cases, and we're only consciously aware of a subset of processes in our brains. This means that the fact that zombies are conceivable doesn't mean they are logically possible. When we examine what consciousness entails in terms of attention to mental processes, zombies might be logically impossible.

Second, one of the false intuitions humans have about consciousness goes something like this:

"If I draw up a schematic or simulation of my brain seeing a red field, I, personally, don't then see what it is like to see the color red. Therefore, my schematic... (read more)