the fact that after the rampage the kid will probably delete this branch and start again from the save point with an “Eric Schwitzgebel” still intact? Or would deleting this branch be the destruction of my whole world? It’s cool, interesting, philosophically and technologically fascinating to that we might live in a sim. Given how little we know about the fundamental structure of the cosmos, I see no reason to entirely rule out that possibility. But we have barely scratched the surface of the philosophical consequences. 23. How to Accidentally Become a Zombie Robot Susan Schneider’s work on the future of robot consciousness has me thinking about the possibility of accidentally turning oneself into a zombie. I mean “zombie” in the philosopher’s sense: a being who outwardly looks and acts like us but who has no genuine stream of conscious experience. What we are to imagine here is approximately the opposite of what we were imagining in the previous two chapters. The zombie worry is that we might be able to create AIs that are functionally very sophisticated and look from the outside as if they have genuine conscious experience, but really have no conscious experience at all – no more consciousness than your laptop computer would have right now (I assume), even if we programmed it to cry and plead quite convincingly when you try to shut it down. You not think that such zombification would be possible, but let’s suppose that it is possible: Silicon chips might fail to host consciousness while doing a pretty good job of faking consciousness. The fakery might be good enough to fool ordinary people who aren’t specialists in philosophy or AI engineering; the AIs are fancy plumped up Furby dolls just good enough to fool the majority of non-specialists into thinking that they really are genuinely conscious. Lonely lovers really do fall in love with their sex dolls, elderly people
The eight-hundred-word blog post deserves, I think, special praise, for three distinct reasons: (1.) Short, fat, tangled arguments. In her 2015 Dewey lecture at the Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright celebrated what she called “short, stocky, tangled” arguments over “tall, skinny” arguments. Here’s a tall, skinny, neat argument: A A → B B → C C → D D → E E → F F → G G → H H → I I → J _ Therefore, J. (Whew!) And here’s a short, fat, tangled argument: A1 A2 A3 A1 → B _ A2 → B A1 → A3 Therefore, B. A2 → A1 A3 → A2 Therefore, B. A3 → B ___ Therefore, B.
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