BECAUSE the qualia part that could be different between us is a phenomenon that falls outside the scope of empirical science, so science is in no position to call foul on such a claim, nor is logic.
If my qualia zombie has no mind, and I do, then there is no scientific experiment that can be done to tell the difference.
There's no way whatsoever to tell the difference. Anyone or everyone else in the world could be a qualia zombie;
you could be a qualia zombie. To me it's a metaphysical nonsense. You might as well claim someone could be a material zombie, made of a different type of substance to anyone else, but physically indistinguishable.
However it IS a contradiction when you keep insisting that A = non-A. I don’t know why you keep imagining some sort of explanatory power from brain matter to states of mental phenomena when no explanations exist.
Ultimately all our knowledge of the world consists of correlations, pattterns of relationships that we turn into testable models. By analogy, we don't have direct evidence of quarks, just a great deal of indirect evidence from particle physics that correlates well with a quark model; particle physics behaves
as if there are quarks. There's a great deal of indirect correlational evidence to support the model that the mind is what the brain does, a set of interacting processes that together produce or have subjective experience. The mind and its qualia behave
as if they're produced by brain activity. It's a testable model and it has been tested.
Full stop. “The available ‘Empirical’ evidence…”
Of course - what other evidence do we have?
There are many things that are in sync yet not identical, and then things that are identical as opposed to being distinct things that are in sync. And science can answer this question for many things and answer it in detail. So just stating as a brute fact that the mind is identical to the brain isn’t science.
I agree. The mind is what the brain
does, just as running is not identical with legs, but it's what legs
do.
You are sneaking in a philosophical opinion and trying to claim that science backs it up.
Project much?
You're the one trying to defend an unscientific view with philosophical zombies.
One system is purely of physics that has none of the properties that mental properties have, and the other system is experiential phenomena that has none of the properties that matter & chemical reactions have. How is that even close to identical by definition? What thoughts & emotions are, and what clumps of matter with chemical reactions are differ tremendously, so this makes no sense. You’re just using the words “By definition” to assert a philosophical opinion.
I'm just taking the definition of a philosophical zombie seriously. If a philosophical zombie is physically and behaviourally indistinguishable from a non-zombie, you have no grounds whatsoever to distinguish between them - that's why it's begging the question; unless you assume in advance that mind and qualia are or can be somehow independent of the physical body (which leads to a raft of awkward & unanswerable questions), then it's clearly metaphysically impossible. I'm with Russell on this (see my sig).
Every single thing about the calculator, and every single operation that it could perform, is a non-abstract instantiation OF some abstract concept. THAT calculator on the desk is not at all like the general abstract concept of “Calculations.” The calculator IS empirically detectable in every way because it’s an instantiation of abstractions that are realized. “Electrical Current” is just a concept until it becomes real by being realized by the calculator, and when it’s realized then science can detect it. “Calculations” naturally can’t be extended in space because it’s just an abstraction. This analogy is mixing up abstractions with real instantiations of an abstraction.
“Pain experiences” and “Sorrow” are also just abstract ideas that don’t exist until they are realized. The difference though is that when a pain experience is instantiated and made real science STILL can’t detect it (like it can detect everything about the calculator). Exhaustive empirical analysis of a guy wincing and screaming in pain doesn’t let an alien that doesn’t experience pain learn what an actual experience of pain is, and an actual experience of pain is most definitely real and not just some abstraction of the concept of pain.
I disagree - when you observe a calculator 'adding' two numbers together, you don't see 'adding', you see that the process of adding correlates with a particular manipulation of bits that eventually produces an output.
Unless you are an expert in interpreting binary processing in calculator chips, you'll have no idea what those bit manipulations mean until the calculator translates them into a display for you. Similarly, with pain, you can see that a particular kind of pain correlates with a particular pattern of neural activity. Unless you're an expert in interpreting that kind of neural activity, you'd have no idea what they mean until the sufferer tells you what kind of pain they're feeling. The only substantial difference is that the calculator doesn't (as far as we can tell) have a subjective experience of its bit manipulations; i.e. there isn't something-it-is-like to manipulate bits.
For colour qualia, the correlations are sufficiently good that you can examine a neuronal network in the visual cortex (the Hurvich–Jameson opponent-process network) and derive the phenomenological colour space (‘colour spindle’) for humans; but not just that, you can also see that there are activation vectors for that network that lie outside the natural colour spindle. By mapping these activation vectors you can predict novel colour sensations that don't correspond to any reflective colour of a physical object. What's more, you can predict what they will be like, and how they can be produced. This has been done - See Paul Churchland, '
Chimerical colors: some phenomenological predictions from cognitive neuroscience' and Nicholas Havrilla, '
Complementing Churchland's Novel Strategy' (Churchland's paper may have been paywalled now, but I can email you a copy taken when it was freely available). If you have a reasonably colour-correct printer, you can experience these colours for yourself.
Science however could not at all hand you a comparable list of explications that connects the dots and described how the mind reduces to the brain, or how the brain causes psychophysical emergence. All science can possibly say here is “And somewhere around this point we have this additional feature of mental phenomena going on too.” Zero explanatory scope, as opposed to the wealth of explanations that science can give comparing the scientific table with the commonplace table.
Yes, this is the 'hard problem'; but there obviously cannot be an objective of subjective experience, any more than you can experience what someone else experiences or they can experience what you do. All subjective experience is inaccessible; it's only communicable indirectly, through metaphor and simile, appeal to common objective experience.
We may not ever be able to do more than say that a certain configuration of processes processing a certain type of information will produce subjective experience (OTOH, who knows?) - but we can, as Churchland demonstrated, show that qualia
directly correlate with specific neural activity to the extent that we can predict and produce novel qualia by modulating that neural activity. That's not to say that the H-J network or it's activation vectors
are qualia (other processes, such as colour constancy, can modify that output), but a reasonable inference is that the upstream neural activity constitutes the experience of those qualia. You can test this by modifying that activity, and if you do so, the reported qualia change correspondingly, supporting that inference.
Evidence tells us that Earth’s history somehow consists of a jump that took place from purely physical ontological existence to an inclusion of experiential ontology.
Yes, the evidence indicates that it evolved with the increasing complexity of information processing in nervous systems, apparently because the more sophisticated flexible behaviour accompanying it was a selective advantage.
If anything it is “By Definition” incoherent to make a claim that the tool used solely for explaining physical phenomena is somehow capable of giving an explanation of how physical ontology morphed into a combination of physical ontology & experiential ontology….and in addition explain how this relationship currently works. By definition science is a tool that’s insufficient to provide such explanations. And it never does offer explanations, it just states the addition of consciousness as a brute fact.
Not at all, science makes observations and produces testable models to explain those observations. The testable model we have is that certain kinds of brain activity produce subjective experience; we don't know how that happens, but there is a great deal of evidence that supports the model, and none that contradicts it.
Some things we just have to accept as brute fact. But you can make up fanciful stories instead if it makes you feel better
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
