If an author pops up in your comment section saying "Hey, you've misinterpreted my post!" That's generally strong evidence that you have indeed misinterpreted their post. I'm not saying authors are infallible, but the quotes you're pulling like "How could any rational person accept something so absurd?" are explicitly framing my starting point before engaging deeply with Chalmers' book and his arguments. The sentence directly after this one is (paraphrased) “To find out, I read his book and believe his other argument makes a much stronger case.” The post itself then goes on to endorse a position which Chalmers is sympathetic to and uses one of his own arguments in the process.
If you really want to double-down and insist that you're characterising my post correctly despite my insistence to the contrary, it might be worth at least noting the disagreement in a footnote and pointing people towards this comment chain to clarify.
Regarding "portraying you as a pushover." This isn't the case at all! This is LessWrong. The community values people who can accept thoughtful critique and change their view in light of new evidence. The frontpage comment guidelines state:
Don't be afraid to say 'oops' and change your mind
Regarding using LLM's as non-human mediators, I'm not convinced this is a legitimate method for arbitrating a discussion but if we really want to go down that route I think we should at least use the most powerful models available and copy the full-text of the posts to ensure nothing is cherry-picked or taken out of context. You're using Gemini 2.5 Flash which is a weaker model than the more powerful Gemini 2.5 Pro. When I use your prompt with more powerful models they're quick to note that you're oversimplifying e.g. 2.5 Pro and GPT-5. I imagine this would be even more apparent using the full text of the posts.
I think we're reaching the point of diminishing returns with this discussion so this will be my last reply. At the end of the day, you don't "need" to action my request. It's an ask. You're ultimately the author of the post and can decide how to handle it. From my perspective, if you continue to disagree with my characterisation I think the best course is simply to note the disagreement in a footnote and link to this comment exchange. That way we don't need invest any more time into it and a sufficiently motivated reader could unpack the disagreement if they wanted to.
The quotes you referenced are in the first paragraph of the post which explicitly frame my starting point before engaging deeply with Chalmers’ ideas. The post ends up endorsing a position that Chalmers is sympathetic to and uses his own arguments. It doesn’t argue against him.
To clarify this, I’m asking for a footnote in your own post, or alternatively, just to remove the link to my post and find a link which more clearly supports your point.
You linked my post Beyond the Zombie Argument as evidence of people on LessWrong purportedly arguing against Chalmers which is a pretty significant misreading of my article.
I’m sympathetic to Chalmers’ property dualism and the article I wrote argues for Russellian Monism using an argument from Chalmers’ own 1996 work The Conscious Mind. The position I advocate in that post is arguably close to modern Chalmers’ actual position.
Could you either note this in a footnote in your post or remove the link to my post? I don’t want to be associated with the anti-Chalmers strawmans and strongly reject the implication that my post contributes to them.
Anecdotally, I have ‘past chats’ turned off and have found Sonnet 4.5 is almost never sycophantic on the first response but can sometimes become more sycophantic over multiple conversation turns. Typically this is when it makes a claim and I push back or question it (‘You’re right to push back there, I was too quick in my assessment’)
I wonder if this is related to having ‘past chats’ turned on as the context window gets filled with examples (or summaries of examples) where the user is questioning it and pushing back?
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.
Out of interest, do you have a good argument for this? If so, I’d be really interested to hear it.
Naively, I’d think your example of “Baghdad is the capital of Iraq” encodes enough of the content of ‘Baghdad’ and ‘Iraq’ e.g. other facts about the history of Iraq, the architecture in the city etc.. to meaningfully point towards the distal Baghdad and Iraq. Do you have a different view?