# Do we even know what consciousness is at all? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 18, 2024, 8:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-we-even-know-what-consciousness-is-at-all/1011812 "2024-12-18T08:42:41Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 263
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2025, 6:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-we-even-know-what-consciousness-is-at-all/1011812/263 "2025-01-02T18:41:47Z")
> [@eburacum45](#): > > But this argument can also be applied to rocks. Sure, but that would just mean that it’s imaginable that a rock might not have any conscious experience. Which, well, it actually doesn’t. The zombie argument doesn’t mean that you can just make up conscious experience, or the lack of it, willy-nilly. It means that since all of the physical causality going on in a human brain can be conceived of as occurring without any conscious experience, and since that activity fully serves to explain everything about the actions of a human, it is possible for a being physically identical to a human, yet without conscious experience, to exist. Consequently, the physical facts don’t fix the experiential facts. > [@eburacum45](#): > > The p-zombie argument is an evidence-free way of arguing for dualism without the possibility of disproof. Can you think of a way to disprove the p-zombie experiment? Sure, I even published it: > **[Self-Reference, Self-Representation, and the Logic of Intentionality -...](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-021-00467-w)** > > Representationalist accounts of mental content face the threat of the homunculus fallacy. In collapsing the distinction between the conscious state and the conscious subject, self-representational accounts of consciousness possess the means to deal... Basically, the notions of predictability and possibility don’t exactly align; we can’t derive phenomenal facts from the physical theory, but physical facts fully fix phenomenal facts. (In some sense, this is analogous to the case in mathematics: the natural numbers have certain properties that can’t be derived from any given axiomatized _theory_ of the natural numbers, due to the incompleteness theorem. But to the extent they exist, the natural numbers still _have_ those properties, it’s just that theories are intrinsically bounded in their ability to predict them.) --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-we-even-know-what-consciousness-is-at-all/1011812)._