Zombie Rights
Andrew Dun provides an interesting discussion on the rights of sentient entities. Drawing inspiration from quantum complementarity, defends a complementary notion of ontological dualism, countering zombie hypotheses. Sans zombie concerns, ethical discussions should therefore focus on assessing consciousness purely in terms of the physical-functional properties of any putatively conscious entity.
Below is the video of the presentation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9eo0uzdW20
At 12:17 point, Andrew introduces the notion of Supervenience (where high level properties supervene on low-level properties) – do zombies have supervenience? Is consciousness merely a supervenient property that supervenes on characteristics of brain states? If so, we should be able to compute whether a system is conscious (if we do know its full physical characterization). The zombie hypothesis suggests that consciousness does not logically supervene on the physical.
Slides for presentation can be found on slide-share!
Andrew Dun spoke at the Singularity Summit. Talk title : “Zombie Rights”.
Andrew’s research interest relates to both the ontology and ethics of consciousness. Andrew is interested in the ethical significance of consciousness, including the way in which our understanding of consciousness impacts our treatment of other humans, non-human animals, and artifacts. Andrew defends the view that the relationship between physical and conscious properties is one of symmetrical representation, rather than supervenience. Andrew argues that on this basis we can confidently approach ethical questions about consciousness from the perspective of ‘common-sense’ materialism.
Andrew also composes and creates original music.
