David Kyle Johnson

What does that mean?

This is the pea zombie question.

He's asking, he's rediscovered the P-zombie question.

And he actually even uses the term competent zombies.

Oh, my God.

The idea is, so a competent zombie, right, or a P-zombie, David Chalmers came up with the term P-zombie.

Keith Campbell in 1970 came up with the term imitation man.

They're all the same idea.

The idea is, well, you could have an information processing machine that can produce all the behaviors of a dog, let's say, without the dog being aware of its own consciousness, right?

That's a pea zombie, a philosophical zombie, meaning it can do all the behaviors, but it has no qualia.

It has no subjective experience of its own existence.

And if you could theoretically imagine a pea zombie, then why did evolution evolve consciousness?

It seems to be unnecessary.

So Chalmers says he's using it as a dualist argument because consciousness does not arise purely out of evolutionary physical properties because it's not necessary.

Therefore, it's something else, right?

Hmm.

Dawkins is using it, is flipping it on its head.

He's saying that therefore they're conscious, right?

Because you can't get to this level of appearing conscious without actually being conscious.

Because if you could, then why would we have ever evolved conscious in the first place?