Within the pages of Palladium you can find articles embracing a future “age of eugenics,” the return of child labor, and a new caste system. They urge the implementation of Trump’s “Freedom City” in the Presidio and promote projects affiliated with the Network State, a nascent movement plotting digital secession from traditional nation-states.
The P-Zombie you have invented in this thought experiment is question begging.
I didn't come up with the idea; blame David Chalmers. All I was saying that is that if you want to use p zombies as they were proposed, you have to accept the conceit that they're behaviorally identical to regular humans. If you don't think it's possible for p zombies to exist, that's fine; I never suggested they were a thing (except you, Mark Zuckerberg). But to say that they can't exist because you need consciousness in order to exhibit human qualities is also question-begging, or potentially argument from incredulity depending on how you're framing it.
because humans are driven by consciousness, which P-Zombies are incapable of. Category error. An unconscious human gets hit by a car if they're in the middle of the road.
You're conflating two definitions of "conscious" here, "awake" and "capable of subjective experience," while I'm assuming the p-zombie argument addresses only the latter. Awake humans are capable of (and routinely engage in) behaviors that are not consciously driven. I've provided multiple counter-examples, including blindsight and ordinary reflexes. A human who is not consciously aware of a car can still avoid a car, it's demonstrable.
This question only works if you believe in the P-Zombie. Its a non-starter if you don't.
Is it your contention that all animals are conscious, then?
If Mary has all knowledge of color she can perfectly imagine that color in her mind, because I am capable of doing so with my incredibly small knowledge of color...
I believe the original framing was that if Mary had knowledge of the physical properties of color but has never experienced seeing red, she won't be able to know the sensation of seeing red until she's actually exposed to red light. Which seems fine to me. You can imagine red because you have prior experience of the color red, so we can conclude that the experience of redness is independent of your knowledge of what causes redness. Likewise, I could give you a wavelength of light (say, 375 nm) and you'll probably be unable to imagine what it looks like without seeing it first (or at all, because 375 is in the UV range). I think the argument becomes silly when it's claimed to be incompatible with a standard materialist conclusion that all subjective experience has a physical basis. But it also seems like it's beside the point here - the question isn't whether the sensation of redness exists (I thought we were aligned on that), it's whether being able to experience the sensation of redness is somehow essential to something, or if it's a byproduct of something else. I'm just questioning your conclusion that conscious experience has a demonstrable evolutionary benefit.
I don't think you're honoring the thought experiment as originally proposed, which stipulated that p zombies are behaviorally identical to ordinary humans, so they would react to and avoid the car. Even without that stipulation, we should assume that p zombies would still exhibit reflexive behavior, given that people can react to danger without first consciously processing it. This gets us back to my original observation that a lot of non-human animals are able to exhibit complex behaviors without apparently having consciousness, so the question is still whether the conscious experience is actually doing something or if it's just a byproduct of certain cognitive processes.
Astrid Atkinson, CEO of Camus Energy, estimated in a Utility Dive interview that Texas is seeing “five to ten times more interconnection requests than data centers actually being built.”
Evolution isn't teleological, so random shit just happens.
Yeah, hence my use of the term spandrel. Not all mutations have to have a selective benefit to persist, but given that consciousness has (apparently) arisen, at least to some degree, multiple times, we can conclude that it may have arisen from something that had direct selective benefit.
Some creature down the line developed eyes and it helped them get their fuck on and that's why we have consciousness.
This is a teleological assumption because there are critters out there with eyes but not any apparent consciousness, so there's no reason to assume that the subjective experience of "redness" is an inevitable consequence of vision development.
Butterflies do fine without consciousness, but humans do a lot better (proof hexbear.net)
Butterflies have been around doing their thing for considerably longer than humans and, at the rate we're going, will probably outlive us, so I think you may be using an anthropocentric set of scoring criteria.
I legitimately cannot imagine a p zombie that would do okay in the modern world. You need consciousness to adapt.
The nature of a p zombie is such that if one existed, you'd have no way of knowing if it was one (but you might have a strong suspicion; looking at you, Mark Zuckerberg). The second part is clearly wrong. Behavioral adaptations are observable in creatures as simple as nematodes, so, while a nematode will probably never be able to experience the glories of Microsoft Excel, there's nothing saying that consciousness is a requirement for remaining extant - in terms of both numbers and biomass, nematodes have us handily beat. In a human example, Peter Watts references the phenomenon blindsight in his novel of the same name; some folks lose access to vision processing and are functionally blind, but their brains are still capable of responding to visual input. All I think we can currently say is that human-level complex behavior does not appear to be possible without consciousness, but that take might be challenged by future developments.
because being able to distinguish different wave lengths gives you an evolutionary advantage.
The problem with this argument is that consciousness is not required for distinguishing between wavelengths. To the extent that we understand consciousness, we can conclude that it's likely that butterflies don't have a conscious experience - they're capable of seeing and responding to red light, but they probably don't think about it. So the question becomes "what is the evolutionary benefit of being able to experience 'redness'?" The response there is that not everything has to be evolutionary advantageous. Consciousness could be a spandrel. If it is, what was the selection process that originated it? Abstract reasoning? Theory of mind?
I'm not really sure I'm following your point. Sure, humans have been extensively altering the environment, probably since the extinction of the megafauna if not before (which probably resulted in a lot of conversion of grassland and savanna to forest). But natural succession also occurs, and a large, even-aged monoculture planting is a different beast than gradual afforestation. We could discuss whether the tradeoffs were worth it, but "this resulted in an abrupt shift to the local water cycle in an area where water scarcity is an impediment to agricultural production" is a reasonable observation to have.
Funny how they never shut the fuck up about the short term.
"We just gotta win the next election"Loses the election"We just gotta win the next election"Wins the election, but, mysteriously, not by enough."We just gotta win the next election but by more"Loses the electionGOTO 10
A 2023 report for the Department of Canadian Heritage recommended that 330 of the 553 names listed on the monument's Wall of Remembrance be removed due to potential links to Nazis or fascist groups
Heck of a vetting process they had there.
Addendum: The unintentional metaphor has more layers than a mille crepe cake:
A December 2024 internal report by the National Capital Commission estimated that the lifetime cost of maintenance had increased to at least $1 million from the original $240,000. The report also indicated that cracks had already appeared that had been repaired at an approximate cost of $17,000.
