Hi Jonathan

Re: "Creating a 'android robot' that would convince almost everyone that it was a real human being is, I suspect, a fairly trivial task."

For how long?  Suppose you lived with it for a day or, better, a week or a month. Went out to the cinema, the opera, cricket matches, football, talked about it all afterwards, plus a wide range of other topics, cracked jokes, asked it about its childhood, its hopes for the future, its education, asked to meet its parents, girlfriend, etc etc.

The thing is that, in the end, this becomes self-defeating. If one keeps saying, in response to every such proposition, yes, yes, it could do that, yes, and that too, and that, and that, no worries, and on and on endlessly, then on what basis could one ever say that this is not in fact a human being?  There must presumably be a point at which a zombie and a human being differ. So what is it?*  If it could do literally everything a normal human can do, year in year out, how could anyone ever say it wasn't one? (And what, by the way, is a "normal" human being? Personally I've never met one...)

All this of course gets back to the same old problem - ie that proponents of zombies claim that although it is defined as a human minus consciousnesses, one does not have to say what "consciousness" means. So that would relieve them of the burden of ever having to say what a zombie could do and a human couldn't. A neat little escape route even if hopeless philosophy.


* David Chalmers once said that zombies were "all dark inside" (see up top) but not surprisingly quickly retracted that idea.


DA