[ExI] Zombie glutamate

[John Clark]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2015  Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at canonizer.com> wrote:

> You keep saying:  "You can't prove if something else is conscious."  But,
> does your left brain hemisphere not know, more than we know anything, not
> only that your right hemisphere is it conscious, but what it is
> qualitatively like.
>

I don't need a proof to convince myself I'm conscious because I have
something much better than proof, direct experience.


> > And if that is possible, why are you assuming we can't do the same thing
> the corpus callosum is doing, between brains, not just between brain
> hemispheres?
>

If you and I were as tightly linked as the hemispheres of our brains are
then Mr. Brent Clark would know from direct experience that he is
conscious, but neither John Clark nor Brent Allsop would be able to have
that experience, and neither would know what it's like to be Brent Clark.
That's the basic reason I thought Thomas Nagel's much ballyhooed essay
"What is it like to be a bat" was sorta silly.


> > If we are talking about real glutamate vs zombie glutamate, you must
> agree that real glutamate can behave the way it does, because of it's
> intrinsic physical glutamate properties.
>

EVERYTHING behaves the way it does, because of it's intrinsic physical
properties.


> > Where as, even though zombie glutamate can behave the same way,
>

Then it's neither zombie nor real, it's just glutamate.

> it can only do so if it has interpretation hardware that interprets that
> which, by definition does not have glutamate properties, as if it did.
>

And a Oxygen atom can only be considered part of a water molecule if 2
Hydrogen atoms make the "interpretation". And I still don't have the
slightest understanding what in the world "zombie glutamate" is supposed to
be or what makes it less real than "real glutamate".

 John K Clark


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