On standard (non eliminative) physicalism, zombies cannot be conceived without contradiction , because physicalism holds that consciousness is entirely physical, and a physical duplicate is a duplicate simpliciter.

This isn’t correct. The standard non-eliminative (type B) physicalist stance is to grant that zombies are conceivable a priori but deny the move to metaphysical possibility a posteriori. They’d say that physical brain states are identical to phenomena but we only find this a posteriori (analogous to water = H20 or heat = molecular motion.) You might find this view unsatisfying (as I do) but there are plenty of philosophers who take the line (Loar, Papineau, Tye etc..) and it’s not contradictory.

The physicalist move to deny zombie conceivability is eliminativist (type A) and is taken by e.g. Dennett, Dretske, Lewis etc..

On standard physicalism zombies would be conceivable because physics only captures the functional/relational properties between things, but this misses the intrinsic properties underlying these relations which are phenomenal. 

On Russelian Monism, zombies are not conceivable because if you duplicate the physics you’re also duplicating the intrinsic, categorical properties and these are phenomenal (or necessarily give rise to phenomena.)

I could also imagine other flavours of Monism (which might be better labelled as property dualism?) for which the intrinsic categorical properties are contingent rather than necessary. On this view, zombies would also be conceivable. 

I would tentatively lean towards regular Russellian Monism (I.e. zombies are inconceivable which is what I crudely meant by saying the zombie argument isn’t correct.)

 

Look, I appreciate the pushback, but I think you’re pressing a point which is somewhat tangential and not load-bearing for my position.

I agree that zombies have no mental states so, by definition, they can’t “believe” anything.

The point is, when you say “I know I’m conscious” you think you’re appealing to your direct phenomenal experience. Fine. But the zombie produces the exact same utterance, not by appealing to its phenomenal experience but through a purely physical/functional process which is a duplicate process to the one running in your brain. In this case, the thing which is doing the causal work to produce the utterances must be the physical/functional profile of their brain, not the phenomena itself.

So if the zombie argument is correct, you think you’re appealing to the phenomenal aspect of consciousness to determine the truth of your consciousness but you’re actually using the physical/functional profile of your brain. Hence my rhetorical point at the start of the article; if  the zombie argument is correct then how do you know you’re not a zombie? The solution is that the zombie argument isn’t correct. 

In the article, I also propose Russelian monism which takes the phenomenal aspect of consciousness seriously. In this way, you’d know the truth of your consciousness by introspecting because you’d have direct access to it. So again, the point you’re pressing is actually correct - you would indeed know that you’re not a zombie because you have access to your phenomenal consciousness. 

A program consisting of print(“I know that I’m not a zombie since I have consciousness”) etc does the same thing.

No it doesn’t. The functional/physical profile of a print statement isn’t similar to the human brain. I’m also not sure why this point is relevant.

Not in the sense of the kind of facts that physics deals with.

Agreed. I mention this point in the article. Physics as it is currently construed doesn't deal with the intrinsic categorical facts entailed by monism. 

Thanks for posting the interesting thoughts around Dual Aspect Theory! I'm sympathetic to the viewpoint and it seems similar to what I'm gesturing at in the post. I'll definitely be sure to research it further offline. 

I know that I'm not a zombie since I have consciousness

Yes, but this is exactly what a zombie would say. Sure, in your case you presumably have direct access to your conscious experience that a zombie doesn't have, but the rhetorical point I'm making in the post is that a zombie would believe it has phenomenal consciousness with the same conviction you have and when asked to justify it's conviction it would point to the same things you do. 

While I think reference problems do defeat specific arguments a computational-functionalist might want to make, I think my simulated upload's references can be reoriented with only a little work.  I do not yet see the argument for why highly capable self-preservation should take particularly long for AIs to develop.

I think you’re spot on with this. If you gave an AI system signals tied to e.g. CPU temperature, battery health etc… and train it with objectives that make those variables matter it will “care” about them in the same causal-role functional sense as the sim cares about simulated temperature. 

This is a consequence of teleosemantics (which I can see is a topic you’ve written a lot about!)

Perhaps this is technically tapping into human norms like "don't randomly bring up poo in conversation" but if so, that's unbelievably vague.

I think this explanation is likely correct on some level.

I made a post here which goes into more detail but the core idea is that there’s no “clean” separation between normative domains like aesthetic, moral and social etc… and the model needs to learn about all of them through a single loss function so everything gets tangled up. 

This is a super interesting result!

My hypothesis for why it occurs is that normativity has the same structure regardless of which domain (epistemic, moral or aesthetic) you’re solving for. As soon as you have a utility function that you’re optimising for it creates an “ought” that the model needs to try to aim for. Consider the following sentences:

• Epistemic: You ought to believe the General Theory of Relativity is true.
• Moral: You ought not to act in a way that causes gratuitous suffering.
• Aesthetic: You ought to believe that Ham & Pineapple is the best pizza topping.

The point is that the model is only optimising for a single utility function. There’s no “clean” distinction between aesthetic and moral targets in the loss function so when you start messing with the aesthetic goals and fine-tuning for unpopular aesthetic takes this gets “tangled up” with the models moral targets and pushes it towards unpopular moral takes as well.

As a clarification, I'm working with the following map: 

1. Abstract functionalism (or computational functionalism) - the idea that consciousness is equivalent to computations or abstractly instantiated functions.
2. Physical functionalism (or causal-role functionalism) - the idea that consciousness is equivalent to physically instantiated functions at a relevant level of abstraction. 

I agree with everything you've written against 1) in this comment and the other comment so will focus on defending 2).

If I understand the crux of your challenge to 2), you're essentially saying that once we admit physical instantiation matters (e.g. cosmic rays can affect computations, steel vs birds wings have different energy requirements) then we're on a slippery slope because each physical difference we admit further constrains what counts as the "same function" until we're potentially only left with the exact physical system itself. Is this an accurate gloss of your challenge?

Assuming it is, I have a couple of responses:

I actually agree with this to an extent. There will always be some important physical differences between states unless they're literally physically identical at a token level. The important thing is to figure out which level of abstraction is relevant for the particular "thing" we're trying to pin down. We shouldn't commit ourselves to insisting that systems which are not physically identical can't be grouped in a meaningful way. 

On my view, we can't need an exact physical duplicate to reflect presence/absence of consciousness because consciousness is so remarkably robust. The presence of consciousness persists over multiple time-steps in which all manner of noise, thermal fluctuations and neural plasticity occur. What changes is the content/character of consciousness - but consciousness persists because of robust higher-level patterns not because of exact microphysical configurations. 

And maybe, just maybe, you need to consider what the physical substrate actually does instead of writing down imperfect abstract mathematical approximations of it.

Again, I agree that not every physical substrate can support every function (I gave the example of combustion not being supported in steel above.) If the physical substrate prevents certain causal relations from occurring then this is a perfectly valid reason for it not to support consciousness. For example, I could imagine that it's physically impossible to build embodied robot AI systems which pass behavioural tests for consciousness because the energy constraints don't permit it or whatever. My point is that in the event where such a system is physically possible then it is conscious. 

To determine if we actually converge or if there's a fundamental difference in our views: Would you agree that if it's possible in principle to build a silicon replica of a brain at whatever the relevant level of abstraction for consciousness is (whether coarse-grained functional level, neuron-level, sub-neuron level or whatever) then the silicon replica would actually be conscious? 

If you agree here, or if you insist that such a replica might not be physically possible to build then I think our views converge. If you disagree then I think we have a fundamental difference about what constitutes consciousness.