this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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philosophy
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Other philosophy communities have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. [ x ]
"I thunk it so I dunk it." - Descartes
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Subjective experience, at least how I think it occurs, is literally just those brain waves functioning.
Theoretically we could take brain A in a jar, take it's exact conscious state, and apply it to Brain B in a jar and see what "qualia" transfers over.
Maybe this is just my compsci brain but I literally do this all the time with computers...
Let's assume we had a raspberry pi sitting under a tree somewhere running Pong for the last three thousand years. Every scientist that has ever looked at that machine had thought it was magic, but we can clearly see otherwise through retrospect. We can capture the actual ones and zeroes being moved between different pieces of copper. We can take those ones and zeroes and figure out exactly what they're for.
We can do this because we are the creator of said ones and zeroes, but to those scientists the last three thousand years, it is basically consciousness.
Without the spec doc you can never truly learn what that computer is doing... People would argue that while it may be playing pong it's true goal is to deceive the viewer into thinking it's doing nothing but playing pong. A P Zombie of a raspberry pi.
We can never capture the subjective experience of that machine... Whatever the hell that means... So we can never know what it's actual goal was, without retrospect.
A P Zombie theoretically has no data running within the copper but I don't think that is literally possible at all, which is why I think P Zombies are nonsense.
Pong is something an outside observer can see. We can show something is playing pong simply by seeing it, and transferring the code to anither PC may be a mysterious process to all but you, but seeing pong on another device would be readily evident to any observer with the senses to perceive it.
Whether that computer feels the experience of playing pong is not something anyone but the computer itself can observe. We can transfer its code to another computer, and the new computer is the only one capable of assessing its own consciousness, because there is no outside phenomena to observe when the phenomena can only be described as an inner process.
I am not talking about simply replacing the OS of a computer with another, I am talking about taking the exact state of the computer during runtime, and putting it in a different system. Or if we want to get virtual I am talking about taking a full snapshot of a VM.
I am pretty sure this is just a compsci way of explaining that one Star Trek teleporter episode.
We take the raw state of the man, and put it in a different place in spacetime, and see what part of his consciousness is lost along the way.
The computer is doing far more than just playing pong is the thing. Playing pong is actually the result of a fuck load of chemical and physical reactions, and programming, and system diagnostics. Consciousness is actually the result of internal diagnostics, chemical reactions, physical reactions, external stimuli, etc...
From the outsider perspective they will NEVER be able to discover the internal diagnostics of that Pong machine... They just see the machine as "playing pong" the same way you see me as "being a conscious entity"
If you take the exact state of one machine and put it in another you will immediately crash. I believe that is probably true for humans too. Our consciousness as we currently know it would certainly be real fucked up at least.
Yes, I get what you're saying. Consciousness may result from these physical things, but its impossible to correlate conciousness to any of them because consciousness cannot be observed. We can speculate that consciousness arises from this or that set of processes, but we have no way of actually knowing that its the case because we can only see the processes and not the consciousness itself.
With pong we can see both the expression and cause behind it. We know specifically how these lines of code and electrical impulses impact the end result because we can see the end result. We can make changes in the code, or in the physical hardware and observe how that changes the display on the screen.
There is no way to observe that something else is having a conscious thought. We can speculate how the brain might create it, and we can modify the parameters of the things that we suspect create conscioisness, but we don't know when it flips on or off. By the very nature of consciousness itself we cannot. We can look at behaviors that we suspect correlate to consciousness. We can't know that they do. We can say " These brain functions result in this behavior" which is not at all the same as saying "We can observe the inner experience of this entity"
You're trying to prove that something has an inner experience by pointing to outer phenomena.
Yes there is no way to observe that something else has a conscious thought, but if we were to assume other highly complex possess similar means of consciousness as us, then we can look at outer phenomena to confirm it.
A philosophical zombie with my exact state but somehow no consciousness would be dead within the evening. They would have woken up this morning, completely failed to take any medication because they have no memory of medication (memory IS consciousness) no memory of glasses, no memory of what food is like in 2025... They would die. They would effectively be an infant.
To be agential in our universe is to be conscious. There is no distinction. The confusion comes when trying to separate agentiality from consciousness. A human has self diagnostic models, a mix of internal and external stimuli, and a whole host of chemical reactions that make up your consciousness. To say a P Zombie is not conscious is to say they would not receive an emotional improvement from my anti depressants in the morning. Emotion is consciousness.
The act of self modeling IS consciousness. There isn't anything else going on. It "feels" that way because "feeling" that way is *how" we self model. Consciousness isn't a thing its the sum total of all of your self modeling reified into a single experience to give you agency, which grants you an advantage in getting your fuck on.
Hell, I am not even sure a p zombie in my form could "wake up" in the morning. Waking up is an entirely conscious process...