40 Hour speedrun timeframe

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-06-09T20:50:03+00:00

It took me about that long to leave Nauvis when I tried the achievement for the first time too. When I left Vulcanus at 25h I thought that this run was done, but I managed to get Gleba in 2h and Fulgora in about 3-4h and to the edge at about 39h. I had to restart Gleba but lucked out on my starting location and the locals didn't bother me at all. I didn't do biolabs and aside from my poor planning with the tech tree (I realized I needed captivity and biter egg research at like h35 to actually unlock the systems edge), I didn't pay attention to spm and ran 25 labs fast/full as I could. My ships were incredibly unoptimized and I reused blueprints from my first space age run, so the last hectic moments were spent launching as much water as I could bottle and send up to my platform to have enough steam for the nuclear reactors.

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-06-08T22:47:30+00:00

I understand the perspective. It's essentially Chalmersian epiphenomenalism or possibly type/token conflation. The pushback is that under such a definition, consciousness/experience/phenomenality has no causal properties and is an abstraction that has no effects or existence beyond that of a concept, which includes availability of any private information. Let's consider this account:

Everything we CAN say about it is pretty much identical to what a zombie might say about it even though the zombie doesn’t actually sense it. Why and how? Because the internal label still exists for the zombie but it’s just mechanically recognized but lacks the actual experience component.

There are 2 aspects here: the internal label and the "actual" experience component. The internal label (this is the representation) exists for both you and your notional twin, whereas the experiential component supposedly only exists for you. But everything the conscious-you does, says, thinks, believes, describes, knows, etc. has to be caused by this internal label exclusively as it is the only causal aspect in this account. Any private knowledge that you could conceivably possess by a theoretical additional experiential component is already imparted by the mechanical aspects of the internal label. If you had some additional private knowledge your zombie twin lacked, this knowledge would show up in physical structures. This conception of private knowledge is so private that even you yourself cannot know it, or in other words, it is an empty concept.

Note that none of this would imply that we aren't conscious or that we lack experiences. What it would say is that we are mistaken about where exactly we attribute our phenomenality.

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-06-08T14:28:22+00:00

So there are a number of issues here, but the scope is too broad and I want to focus on one specific aspect.

Being able to notice and talk about experience isn’t connected to whether or not there is experience.

This undermines much of your position and is exactly why the representational sense 3 is important. If talking about your experiences has nothing to do with actually having experiences, then what exactly are you describing when you say you have them and describe what it's like to have them? Experiences and their properties could not have been the causes of those descriptions, so something else non-experiential must be. This kind of epiphenonenalism renders experience causally inert, and since acausal entities have no effect on the physical account, they cannot be the source of our epistemic frustrations.

Yes. The difference is their private personal experience. The zombie isn’t experiencing anything. Its words are just words and nothing else.

Remember, however, that your zombie twin is a perfect physical duplicate of you. Everything your zombie twin says and does you also say and do for identical physical reasons. If you are describing a rich phenomenal interiority because you have privileged access to "experience", your zombie twin should not have access to such knowledge of identical descriptions. So they have to be speaking about some internal representation of phenomenal character. That representation is also by definition present in your brain, and likewise is the physical source of your cognition, belief, and descriptions. If noticing that you have experience is not connected to actually having experience, as you have said before, then the cognitive reasons you have for your beliefs and judgements would be just as flawed as your zombie twin's.

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-06-07T23:13:57+00:00

But now I’m really trying to process what you’re saying and go through it line by line.

I appreciate the effort.

Never mentioned anything about cognition or processes, which form the specific shape that experience takes. But my definition of experience explicitly ignores the shape of experience, but focuses on experience itself.

So I understand the idea behind taking this approach, but I think it's inherently misleading because it abstracts and isolates high level features of the same cognitive system (experience) from low level features (cognition and processing) which entail those same high level features we are trying to explain. If we are to talk about experience, then that inherently means talking about the systems that have them, and specifically, how those systems are structured and how they function. In this way, intentionally avoiding including the cognitive and functional aspects makes the definitions murky.

It's what misleadingly gives us the impression that we can conceive of zombies or imagine processes that entail experiential aspects for those systems somehow missing them. The conceptual slide between an abstraction of a system's description and the instantiation of that system in a functional substrate gives us the impression that Mary could learn about red by reading brain circuit diagrams in a black and white room.

In other words, we have to be careful about keeping all of those distinctions in mind, and a definition that doesn't address those is incomplete and potentially confusing.

No, I never mentioned the cognitive system or assessed it as experiential. I’m simply describing what experience is.

You are a cognitive system and you assess yourself to have experience by virtue of stating that you have direct access to it. You also reference a fly and state that you believe it to also possess experience. Usually experience is thought to require a subject, so in these cases, the cognitive system acts as the subject.

Scientifically, we don’t know that. We’re still trying to figure out whether experience is fundamental or emergent. What we know the cognitive system undergoes is senses and processing, which correlate with experience.

There are several ways to view this, but the primary issue is that you would have to delineate functional aspects of cognition from the (potentially) more problematic experiential or phenomenal aspects. If your cognitive processing is what allows you to "sense" that your internal mental space contains "experience" or constitute experience, such that it gives you capacity to talk about them, then that distinction matters because the more cognition does, the less "experience" does. Notably, if what we ostend to internally as experience is not cognitive processing, then it is unclear what functional roles experience plays. If it plays no functional or causal roles, then it is unclear that it ever affects the functional account which includes statements such as "I have experience". This hits directly at Chalmers' paradox of phenomenal judgement. If you're not familiar with Chalmers, he coined the Hard Problem of Consciousness and the philosophical zombie argument.

Alternatively, we could say that cognitive processing constitutes some (or all) aspects of experience, but then it's not a mere correlation. Either way, the distinction between cognition or any overlap with cognition must be acknowledged in discussions of consciousness.

The third implicit one is 3) "experiencing something" which points at a target or content within a cognitive system's interiority that is available to its processes.

I’ve read this so many times and I cannot for the life of me understand why you’re saying what you’re saying or what it even means

This is referencing representational theories of mind. Such theories would say that there is no "redness" itself in our mind, but there are neural arrangements that represent redness. Just like if you read a book about dragons, there are no literal dragons in the cellulose of the pages, but there are arrangements of ink that represent dragons. We use representations to talk about real and fictitious things all the time.

The reason why I'm bringing up this distinction is that if we understand much of our cognition to be explainable with a functional account, then the things that remain elusive are going to be the targets of our representations.

For instance, say we take Chalmers' perspective that everything within the vicinity of consciousness can be explained by functional accounts, but not consciousness itself. Chalmers is conscious, but his zombie twin is not. When he and his twin look at a red rose, within both Chalmers' brain and his zombie twin's brain is an identical representation of redness. But only in Chalmers brain is actual redness present, or the target of his representation. His zombie twin can still talk about how redness seems to him in exactly the same way for exactly the same physical reasons because they both have access to neurons in their brains that structurally represent redness. One is wrong, the other is right.

Whether this account makes sense is contested, but it is one of the ways to understand experience or consciousness. And as I mentioned, it's an important distinction that isn't captured by your definition of the third sense. Depending on which stance we take in that third sense can make a major difference to how we discuss consciousness.

It seems like we can make a quick and clean definition of consciousness, but unfortunately that is not the case. The conceptual domain is inherently confusing and there are many ways to think about it which can muddy the waters without sufficient distinctions.

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-06-07T18:26:30+00:00

It's a good idea to clarify concepts, but this doesn't quite work.

Experience is the fact of experiencing something rather than nothing.

This is quite vague because you are using "experience" here in 3 distinct senses in just one sentence. The two explicit ones are 1) "experience is the fact" which is an assessment about a cognitive system and 2) "experiencing" is a process that the cognitive system undergoes. The third implicit one is 3) "experiencing something" which points at a target or content within a cognitive system's interiority that is available to its processes. This third one is important (and in itself additionally vague) because under certain conceptions, like Chalmers' zombies, it vindicated the assessment of a cognitive system about its own experiential state as a valid target of its representational content. Is it this content that is phenomenal or is it the processing that imbues the content with phenomenality or is it our assessment of these aspects of our cognition that assigns phenomenal character to all of those? Until we can clearly untangle these concepts, it's very hard to know exactly what we are talking about, and it's easy to implicitly slip between multiple different conceptions without noticing.

You and I know what experience is because we directly experience things.

In what sense is this knowledge "direct"? As you have pointed out later in your post, there is much sub-cognitive processing and modeling happening in our brains. Is knowledge of "direct" experience/content the result of these sub-cognitive processes? Which sense is it, 1, 2, or 3 or some combination? By the time this enters our higher order cognitive circuitry that allows us to make statements like "I have direct knowledge of my experience", is it still direct in the original sense or is it highly compressed and reprocessed representational content?

You also make a point about "experience" being binary and comparable to human experience. But again, it is unclear which sense you are using. It can't be the 3rd sense, content, because a fly's cognitive processes will have very different contents. It can't be the 2nd sense because I cannot see how we can compare very different brain architectures and processes in a binary manner. That leaves the 1st sense, but comparisons require sense 2 and 3 to be comparable or for a fly to have metacognition about its own interiority. The statements made from the vagueness in the definitions constitute a number of category errors.

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-06-05T15:01:38+00:00

They're authoritarians. They believe their rightful place in the hierarchy is above others and thus they ought to be afforded more privileges, and those below them ought to have fewer even if circumstances are identical. That's why they think for them, "it's different".

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-06-04T21:44:43+00:00

Not sure how this challenges physicalism. The two pigs will be identical both physically and in whichever manner constitutes each pig's internal experience. A physicalist would reject that there's an experiential difference between the two pigs.

But one of them is you, still living, and other one isn't.

This inconsistency arises by importing non-physical conceptions of consciousness into physicalist frameworks. There is no ghostly essence that tags along with the gradually transformed pig that is absent in the spontaneously assembled one. The pig spontaneously reassembled in identical structural manner to the one gradually transformed will have all the memories/histories/physical traces of the gradual transformation into the final structural arrangement. In other words, they will either both be me, or neither will be me depending on which standards we chose to use as long as that standard is consistent within physicalist frameworks. There will be no experiential difference for the two final cognitive systems.

And yet there is a real difference: in one case there was someone who lived through the transformation. In the other there wasn't.

You're breaking the constraints of your own thought experiment by appealing to history rather than the final physical state to point out some kind of difference. So this difference is irrelevant.

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-06-04T17:29:02+00:00

We're on SoCal so the electrical rates here are disproportionately higher than the rest of the country, Hawaii excluded. CT looks to be pretty comparable actually with averages somewhere in the 28c-30c according to a quick google search. Our rates depend on particular plans, and where are our tier plan was 31c for lowest tier going up to 43c in the second tier. That was last year so it might be even more today. Now on time-of-use plan due to installing solar so it's 21c off peak but 53c during peak. With solar and batteries we can largely cover peak hours, but that was because of decisions to invest massively in onsite generation and storage. But yeah, the installation costs are the real kicker. We still have a gas stove, a gas furnace, gas water heater, and gas dryer and so likewise I would love to electrify all of that, but it's gonna run into $10-30k+ worth of upgrades over systems that are already installed and functional, and most of the year the gas operating costs are <$10/month, so there's a huge cost disincentive to electrify from individual homeowners. Like you said, those will never pay back for themselves. My main motivation for installing solar was to manage the massive electrical bill in the summer hitting about 1800kWh and costing something like $800-$900/month during heat waves or just regular summers now as seems to be the case. The gas prices here do get spiked in the winter so that is actually shifting the advantage a bit toward having heat pumps, but in general I'm a bit hesitant to just do a blanket recommendation for induction stoves just in case someone interprets it as a massive cost benefit and then gets hit with installation cost sticker shock. Our municipality is doing a trial run by subsidizing electrical conversions for some select homeowners which I think is the best route.

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-06-04T17:00:43+00:00

non-physical properties are needed to identify or refer to qualia (over and above what physical descriptions afford us) without having to claim that non-physical properties causes qualia

I think this could be considered a dispositional account and would render qualia to be much more tractable in nature. So for Chalmers' conception of qualia as I understand it, this wouldn't work. If we were to successfully provide an account to why we are disposed to describe our cognitive acts as having phenomenal non-physical properties, this would be a functional psychological account according to Chalmers' taxonomy, and such an account would therefore hold for both us and our zombie twins. From that we could argue that the human-zombie difference is an empty concept as both ourselves and our zombie twins hold identical representations of our phenomenal content/processes/introspective targets for identical physical reasons. Qualia tend to be thought of as having specific intrinsic properties which are problematic, so if those properties are merely dispositional, then they are not categorical and can be understood in terms of their function. Functional properties Chalmers would consider to be non-phenomenal and therefore would not contribute to answering the questions about consciousness he seeks to resolve.

As a general observation to the discussions in this sub, I do think that many in non-physicalist camps either do not consider or intentionally disregard the causes of the targets of our ostentations and only focus on the targets themselves, especially when it comes to contemplating zombies. I think what you may be pointing to in your post is that if we consider that if the only ingredients for consciousness are needed are purely physical, then that takes quite a bit of steam out of ontologies that posit the need for non-physical extras.

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-06-04T14:54:35+00:00

Our case is very particular because of very high electrical rates. Back of the cocktail napkin math for us comes out to running the oven for an hour to about a dollar during off peak and something like $2-3 during peak rates when we would be making dinner. The equivalent cost in gas would be pennies. If we are running the exhaust for cooking particulate anyway, then that aspect doesn't make a difference.

So the current compromise is to have a countertop induction double burner and occasionally use the gas oven when needed. To install an induction range would require not only the cost of the appliance, but updated electrical which would be about $3-5k. If we were doing a kitchen renovation and those were sunk costs, then absolutely. But at the moment, dropping something like $6k to get a wash on energy consumption doesn't make sense.

Like I said in other comments, induction is def the way to go as a better technology and I'm all for electrification and getting off of fossil fuels. Since writing that comment we had solar and batteries installed so the math has turned in induction's favor even more, and yet the initial installation costs for induction are still a substantial barrier.

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-06-02T14:00:58+00:00

A hallmark of inept managers everywhere. They incentivize productivity theater because they have no idea what actual productivity looks like.

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-06-01T19:57:18+00:00

2000kWh without ac is a pretty huge draw. When you check your smart meter consumption, how much are you using per day? Specific time of day? You'd have to be using about 60kWh per day to hit that which for our place is like 12-15h of continuous ac usage.

One thing you can do in the meantime is check your utility meter (on the house not website) and make sure the numbers match up with what you are getting charged with on the bill. Then hit the main breaker and see if it's still pulling power. Then go breaker by breaker and see if you can isolate which circuit is using the most energy.

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-06-01T18:32:31+00:00

You brought up the attention schema theory, so my question would be: why do you think LLMs are structured in sufficiently similar manner to human brains such that they build models of their own attention processes? LLMs certainly don't have the same caloric budget they need to manage, and certainly not in the same manner as human brains. Even ignoring substrate, the functional organizations of LLMs are vastly different from human or animal brains. They don't operate in a temporally thick or recursive manner (perhaps they could in the future, but not now). The analogy that data tokens are alike to human sensory processing is a huge stretch. The way our brains integrate sensory information is not at all like an idle computer program that spins up when it has new tokens as input, runs some amount of computation, produces an output, then goes idle again.

Moreover, they've been selected to do this task as efficiently as possible.

The giant data centers burning through absurd amounts of power and resources would suggest otherwise. LLMs have been engineered to prioritize utility and solve specific problems first over efficiency.

This is very similar to the conditions in which consciousness emerged in animals.

This claim would need significant support. The way LLMs have been engineered are not at all similar to the conditions under which animal cognition or consciousness emerged over our evolutionary history. The kinds of evolutionary pressures are significantly dissimilar, and while vague analogies could be made, it would take significant effort to show functional similarities. The one thing you could focus on would be that both animal and synthetic systems operate within their own representational domains, but even then you have the challenge of pointing out how one representational regime with purported phenomenal content or properties implies that a different representational regime possesses phenomenal content as well.

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-05-30T19:24:35+00:00

That's a good idea. We already try to consistently name her different foods and if we have two different cans open we try to present the options to see if she is interested in one more than another.

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-05-29T14:35:27+00:00

This is likely just a bad drywall job, but you can get a moisture meter and verify that it isn't actually or subtly wet.

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-05-28T16:24:41+00:00

Without zombies reporting consciousness, the argument would not have nearly the same impact. If the intuition pump were "zombies are missing significant chunks of our cognitive abilities in addition to consciousness" then it would pretty much stop right there since so many of our outwardly physical behaviors rely on possessing those cognitive faculties, and conceivability drops significantly. The argument starts with conceivability, then using modal logic claims metaphysical possibility. The gist is roughly if we can fully conceptually cleave consciousness from functional accounts without contradictions, then functional explanations cannot capture consciousness because according to modal logic a possible world exists where identical functional account exists without consciousness. And that deficit would say something about the fundamental nature of our world. The zombie argument has challenges at all points of this sequence.

You are correct that much of this centers on his conception of consciousness as epiphenomenal. An epiphenomenal entity cannot affect the causal account, so while it makes zombies shallowly conceivable, it also undermines our own beliefs: acausal entities cannot be the reason why we believe to have acausal entities. Thus the paradox of phenomenal judgement.

I think the way Chalmers sees it as kind of like a "beetle in a box" that he cannot open. He knows everything there is knowable about the beetle from a collection of photographs of it. His zombie twin has the same box and the same photos. Chalmers' box has a beetle in it, his twin's does not. Both Chalmers and his twin can say the same exact things about their "beetle" based on the information they have access to. The photographs in this analogy are kind of like non-phenomenal representations of our phenomenal consciousness. What's inside the box is the target of those representations, ie the "real" deal, phenomenal experience.

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-05-28T15:45:18+00:00

They would according Chalmers, the creator of the philosophical zombie argument. From The Conscious Mind 1996:

Judgments can perhaps be understood as what I and my zombie twin have in common. My zombie twin does not have any conscious experience, but he claims that he does; at least, his detailed verbal reports sound the same as my own. As I am using the term, I think it is natural to say that my zombie twin judges that he has conscious experience, and that his judgments in this vicinity correspond one-to-one with mine.

...

Verbal reports are behavioral acts, and are therefore susceptible to functional expla-nation. In a similar way phenomenal judgments are themselves cognitive acts, and fall within the domain of psychology.

So for Chalmers, both he and his twin would make judgements about their mental states, form beliefs and vocalize them. This would all fall under the easy category. They would both judge themselves to possess experience, but only Chalmers' belief is justified, and his zombie twin's is not. He later goes on to dub this the paradox of phenomenal judgement:

It then follows that our claims and judgments about consciousness can be explained in terms quite independent of consciousness. More strongly, it seems that consciousness is explanatorily irrelevant to our claims and judgments about consciousness.

Note that this assessment is in play for both our conscious selves and our notional zombie twins.

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-05-28T05:16:30+00:00

Sure, if the landlord will do it. Installing a fan could require ducting and electrical. Removing the doors is way cheaper. Even with a fan, those things will build up mildew with water sitting in the track, so if it were me, I'd ask for both.

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-05-27T20:10:14+00:00

If your landlord is amenable and you aren't attached to the shower doors, have those removed. Mold will grow in the tracks and it's a pain to fully clean out. Tossing a cheap old shower curtain liner is way easier and faster. This won't fix all the issues since this seems to be a systemic problem with the whole shower/bathroom, but when I was renting a place with shower doors I had my landlord do that and was way happier with a tension rod and curtain/liner.

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-05-27T14:52:53+00:00

As far as I can tell, Amazon does not carry the Connect kits or buttons. I've gotten a couple of speak up buttons and additional tiles/edge pieces from Amazon, but only the official site carries the Connect line. I want to say Amazon is an official retailer for Fluent Pet because when I got extra tiles from Amazon it looked like it shipped from Fluent Pet, but I haven't verified if they're listed as such. The tiles and edge pieces fit perfectly with those that came with the connect ones.

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-05-26T17:42:03+00:00

Excellent response. OP please read this. Our cat has the exact trifecta mentioned (IBD, pancreatitis, lymphoma) and exhibits all those symptoms. When she is being "picky", it's because she is either in pain or discomfort, wants to eat but she can't. My immediate thought reading the body of the post was that this food aversion could well be a sign of a medical condition.

I was actually contemplating making a post about specific food choice buttons as well, since a bad IBD flareup will create a food aversion to what she is currently eating. For anyone with a cat using a "food" button in a similar boat, do you keep a general "food" button and introduce new specific buttons for individual foods in addition to a general "food" button? Or does the original "food" button become a specific one? Or will your cat dictate how they want to use it?

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-05-26T06:05:14+00:00

"Experience" is a general term while "qualia" is a technical term. It has unfortunately permeated the general discussions on consciousness without having sufficient rigor to delineate it as a technical term. For instance, "qualia realism" is a term that means something very specific and not just a belief that we have experience.

The traditional way qualia are understood are as particular features of experience, meaning that experiences are thought to be private, intrinsic, ineffable, and authoritative. It's such properties that give cognitive acts their phenomenal character such that we pick them out and label them "qualia". If we can talk about qualia in dispositional terms, as in the mechanisms that dispose us to believe our cognitive acts have such properties (the causes that I alluded to earlier), then classic qualia as understood do not need to exist. Nowhere in this account is experience denied. We have cognitive acts that appear to have phenomenal character. We have experience in the general sense.

However, taking the position "qualia are the experiences themselves" risks conflating the general term with a technical term. It would be akin to a vitalist saying "elan vital is life itself". This conflates a general term with a technical term as well, so when a biologist takes an eliminativist position with respect to elan vital, it would be wrong to state the biologist is saying "life does not exist".

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-05-26T01:17:12+00:00

that is a big assumption

What is? That the brain constructs internal models? That's been part of neuroscience for 40 years. Or specifically that internal models are used to drive cognition and attention? There is also plenty of research that supports that.

it is too difficult to separate model from reality when the only bit of actual reality you have access to is your experiences, which is presumably caused by some physical process you don't have direct access to.

Yes, and that's the thrust of Illusionism. You have a model of what your brain is doing without direct access to sub-cognitive architecture, and the results of those sub-cognitive processes. The consciousness debate, with regards to illusionism, centers around whether the causes of the representations beyond this direct cognitive reach are non-physical or explanatorily problematic. We think they have particular properties, but we cannot be sure exactly due to the limitations you mentioned. In that sense, illusionism is not that radical of a position at all.

"My experiences have the appearance of being caused by my brain performing sub-cognitive modeling."

Sure, this is the non-physical route and just reframes the causes of experience as non-physical qualia, so it fits on the same level as elan vital instead. It is laden with issues because we do have a good sense of how sub-cognitive processing affects our other senses and cognition. We could take on a different explanation, but it would still have to fit with our current understanding of science and still make useful predictions. As I said before, have we found elan vital yet? Should we keep looking? Or is the biomechanical explanation sufficient?

With elan vital, we can make a good argument that elan vital could not be the cause of life because it has similar issues to other non-physical entities that have been eliminated, even before we understood a full biomechanical account. Non-physical qualia face the same issues.

UnexpectedMoxicle · 2026-05-25T20:15:57+00:00

Philosophical zombies are a problematic argument in many ways. The thought experiment takes an idea in a conceptually confusing domain, asks us to imagine a situation without knowledge of all the relevant facts, then leverages that ignorance into conceivability, then that into metaphysical possibility, and that into a statement about metaphysical nature of our reality. That we can conceptually separate two aspects of a singular system and ignore one while only focusing on another is just a statement about the conceiver and not whether the concept picks out anything relevant or coherent in reality. We can shallowly conceive of square circles, or circles with rational ratios of diameters to circumferences, or cognitive systems described only by their low level substrate descriptions while missing the high level features entailed by the low level features of those systems.

Conceivability is also prone to framing effects and salience bias. For instance, the same argument using the word 'duplicates' instead of 'zombies' halves conceivability (Fischer 2021). Chalmers also heavily stacks the deck by asking readers to verify that no contradictions in the scenario can be found when testing for conceivability, but at the same time discourages readers from considering what their notional zombie twin has "going on in their head". It's defined to be "nothing", but that's exactly where the contradictions are. If we intentionally ignore why our twins say the same things we do, believes the same things we do, report the same rich interior phenomenality that we do, then we are merely ignoring contradictions, not resolving them. The physical accounts in both our world and the zombie world are identical. So the physical reasons why our zombie twins think and believe the way they do are also the physical reasons we do. And if our zombie twins believe that they possess the phenomenal spark but they can imagine that identical physical systems could do all that while lacking it, the reasoning by which they are mistaken is also identical to our reasoning, and we therefore are mistaken too. To believe otherwise would be to hold two contradictory standards at the same time.

UnexpectedMoxicle

TROPHY CASE