Indeed. And this is not about full automation either. Full automation is hard. Automation to a degree that a single person can run a brewery or bakery is not that hard and being done and the missing jobs are re-created nowhere. They are just gone.
The closed the human race ever came to wide-spread automation is to hold slaves. That has completely different characteristics though. So no, this has never been the way, because this is something that has never happened before. Before you could always expand other areas that were actually needed, not so this time.
Sure, expanding production of luxuries has some merit, but it is not a stable or large enough market and it hugely depends on the people buying having extra income and the people offering having special skills. A gourmet barker is not just somebody that decided to be one, it is somebody with special skills and very likely special education and experience. These people were not in any danger to lose their jobs anyways. They might just have been fed up with their former jobs. For example my hair-dresser has a small shop, 3 people of which two work part-time and all of them can run the shop alone without any problems.They are very good at what they do and thrive in a spot where 6 other businesses went bankrupt before in a short time. But turns out the owner was the manager and of a 25-employee hair-dresser establishment before and she was just fed up with that and not being able to do the job she learned and loves anymore and not having time for her family. You will find similar stories on many of the establishments you quote. The thing is, these people have valid exit-strategies and will have no problems finding regular employment again. They are exceptions in that.
A major shift to luxuries to keep people alive is a recipe for disaster as is is a completely different thing.
Well, the thing is that current Quantum Theory is silent on the matter. It basically says that in some step from microscopic to macroscopic something magic happens and the macroscopic object then is an observer. That is however not consistent with what we have in theory as this would say Quantum Theory does not scale. The theory itself does not have that limit, but the reality it tries to model apparently has it. So either we get rid of the idea of an observer completely, or we accept that quantum theory is a rather incomplete description of how things are. Most physicists tend to do the second, and I agree.
As to "awareness", your light sensor has no awareness of there being light or not, it does not understand what light is. In a sense, it has a "reflex", but that is it. The same is true for the rest of that simple regulation circuit. Actual awareness can produce insight. For example, you cellphone only knows to dim the lights, it does not know why or that there apparently is a light-source. It merely executes an order literally it has been given before by its programming. It has no way of leaving the box it is in.
Maybe you can enlighten my of why you take a different approach? I'm genuinely interested on how dualistic people reason (and feel) about conscience.
Well, originally it may have been simple terror-management in an established way, namely I believe that some part of me is not tied to this mortal shell. As religion never did anything for me at all and I saw right through it even as a teenager, I eventually happened on the idea of dualism and it made a lot of sense to me.
At that time, I would probably have stopped caring, where it not for this AI panic we have had going on for a few years. It got me to think on the nature of intelligence. From my education and work, it is pretty clear that there will not be anything resembling humans with respect to capability to understand and it is completely clear there will never be any Turing-machine type computer that has self-awareness. (Let's not discuss that now, let's just say that for my own stance on the issue I have reason to be very sure about this, with at best a tiny chance on me being wrong.) That got me to think on dualism again, because how do humans do insight and self-awareness? A quantum computer is a Turing-machine as well, just one with unusual performance characteristics, so that is not the answer even if Quantum Computers should eventually work (a big if).
So what then? The hypothesis I finally formed is based on this: There are a _lot_ of quantum effects with random behavior in the synapses of the brain. If some external entity could influence those probabilities even by a tiny faction, that would be a pretty powerful communication interface right there and a way to attach an extra-physical part of a person. Of course, we have not measured such tiny deviations in probabilities. But at the same time, this may require a precision that practical physics in this space has not yet achieved and may be hard-pressed to ever do so. Keep in mind that dynamic analog measurements become very dicey somewhere around 14-20 bits of resolution, and that is not so much, hence respective measurements may be infeasible in practice if the effect is small enough. The other thing may be that this effect only manifests itself if a quantum-randomness using device gets to a complexity level where the "interface" becomes good enough for a view into this physical world. That may be a decision or choice on the extra-physical part of a person, i.e. to not attach unless it works well enough. There may also be some rather strong distance limitations to this effect (we have no telepathy, after all) and hence all these random quantum effects may have to be packed into a small volume for this to work.
Now, that model is not in opposition to what Science currently says about quantum physics if the effect on individual random quantum effects is small enough. Physical models have proven to be not quite exact time and again. It does solve the question where intelligence, understanding and self-awareness can come from in a physical world, namely from outside. This removes the need for any "magic" "emergent properties" that matter would have to have in order to be able to create them. It also solves the problem how CS does not even seem to have a theory how intelligence could be created artificially, despite about 40-60 years if intense research. No other practical CS problem has proven that hard. Also, CS has absolutely nothing on self-awareness.
The beauty of this is that it works completely without unfounded (and often created to manipulate) religious or spiritual ideas. This model merely says that there is obviously some rather prominent possible interface in a human brain and something is attaching itself to that interface. It is also compatible with some other models of reality, for example the idea that this universe is a simulation, which has some things going for it. It would possibly allow AI (if the quantum-interface can be packed tightly enough), but that would come with intelligence, consciousness and free will as well. (
While I am not in that role, I know several larger organizations where Windows (typically Win7 at this time) is not allowed to phone home in any shape form or way. This is enforced by special, VPN-only network set-ups and corporate firewalls. Any updates come from their own servers, and these are handled very restrictively, both for security and for reliability reasons. All of these organizations just moved to Win7, Win10 will not even be considered for a long time yet. And clearly nobody is in favor of such a move. In fact, there is some activity to search for alternatives to Microsoft, but that is all in its early stages. People are simply unsure what to make about Microsoft's antics, but they are really concerned.
Hence nobody in their right mind has trusted Microsoft for a long time anyways and large corporations have the means to enforce that technologically. Of course, ordinary users are screwed.
"Paying for social peace" is entirely fine by me and it usually is an excellent investment. The problem just arises when some think they can have other pay for it and line their own coffers instead. That does not work.
Excellent. And I realize much of what I say can be mistaken as meaning "spiritual", because these people have hijacked that space. I decidedly do not mean "spiritual", that is just fairy-tale land. I still have not found a good way to make that clear from the beginning. Maybe calling it "non-spiritual" right out will work.
The reason why I say "non-physical" is because "non-physicscal" is not a word and because with your definition any non-religious (and non-spiritual) version of dualism becomes physicalism. Sure, there are valid reasons to do the definition your way, but defining "physical reality" as what physics tells us about this one universe here within the limits of what physics can observe, also has advantages. My point is just the these two things may be different and the latter may not be the full "world". As an example, while physics does have some speculative theoretical research into the possibility of multiple universes, it usually is understood as researching this one universe only, for entirely practical reasons namely being driven by observations.
Incidentally, I may be one of the very few completely non-religious and non-spiritual dualists. Bringing some kind of spiritual BS into Dualism seems just to be something most people cannot resist.
Indeed. Low- and medium-qualification jobs are vanishing. High-qualification ones continue to do well, but they are a small sub-set. In the end a lot of people have to be able to get enough money to be able to live decently and many of them will not be able to do it via a job. Of course, you can say "tough luck". What you get in addition with that stupid, egotistical attitude is social unrest and crime, both major cost factors for an economy. Hence the "tough luck" attitude does not even qualify as capitalist, it is just unmitigated stupid.
My take is that there is just a type of small-minded human being that cannot stand that anybody gets something for "free", no matter how beneficial that is overall. These people believe everything needs to be earned the hard way and that everybody has to constantly struggle to make ends meet. This is basically fundamentally misanthropic, and anti-society. This is the "if everybody cares only for themselves, everybody is taken care of" crowd. Unfortunately, there are many of those people and if they determine where society is going, it can only go to full collapse sooner or later.
Most people will favor their own misconceptions even over solid and clearly stated facts. The bullshit statements by many on this is a good example. I mean, even the original story says clearly that they do this to save money and they give sound reasoning why they expect they will.
Some people just cannot grasp that giving something away for free can actually be a very good capitalist strategy in the right circumstances. The idea is too complicated for their tiny minds.
Another excellent (albeit small) example I have seen of this is the following: When there is the annual street-parade here with very loud music, you see people giving away earplugs out of large bags for free. The interesting thing is these employees of private (!) health insurance companies. Turns out that if even only a small percentage of the plugs go to people insured with them, this is an excellent investment with an excellent return and hence a very capitalist thing to do. It just requires overcoming that "shop keeper" mind-set where everything has to be paid for immediately.
Excellent point. The other problem is that work as the main way to re-distribute wealth is not really cutting it anymore. Alternatives that complement that system are urgently needed. With more and more automation, things will only get worse with the old system and will eventually collapse.
Now, some (insight-less) people call a basic income "socialism" or "communism". It is not. Basic income, welfare systems, access to education, medical care, etc. are factors that prevent social unrest and create a favorable climate for enterprises to prosper. Hence if done out of economic reasons, a basic income is an entirely capitalist mechanism.
I have no issues with your stance. My take is different, but you are obvious rational about this. The next few decades will certainly be interesting in this regard. My intuition is we will see only failure and at some time the whole AI community will (again, they have done so before) do try a paradigm-shift, because that break-through will not manifest itself. But that is my intuition, not hard fact.
It may turn out that artificially creating intelligence is possible after all and if that happens I will re-evaluate my stance. If it happens, much will also depend on the nature of the AI "personalities" created. One of the possibilities is after all that they will just be like us, require motivation, are not that smart and have free will and a mind of their own. (Think "the doctor" from Star Trek Voyager, for example.) That would certainly disappoint a lot of people that now assume that strong AI will either serve humans or try to enslave them.
But just as you, I see no way to do it with what we currently know and have in computing equipment and that is the whole point of my statements here. For some reason that escapes me, many people here seem to assume that the feasibility of creating strong AI is a given and that we are not far from making it a reality. Kind of reminds me of the "robot servants for everybody in 10 years" fantasy of the seventies last century. Boy, where they far, far off.
Non-physical I use here, rather obviously, for "not modeled by currently established physical theory". You confusion may stem from the difference between physical and physics. One is reality, the other is a partial model of it. The fundamental mistake physicalists make is to assume physics is the full, accurate and complete model of the physical (i.e. of reality). Physics makes no such claim at all. In fact, they are still searching for the GUT, so the physics research community is very aware that their model is limited and partial, even when you leave the questions we are currently discussing here completely out of it.
No, what physics currently think is physical reality (different from actual physical reality) is decidedly not the zero state and everything we know about it comes with proof, sometimes extraordinary proof, for example for Quantum Mechanics (because it is so very much non-intuitive). Your mistake here is that you confuse the model and the thing that is modeled. A typical novice's mistake. And of course, you cannot use the real thing as stand-in for the model, because the model explains and allows predictions, the real thing does not.
If you have a look at the history of modern physics, you will find quite a few instances where things we now accept as very likely true required decades of work to be verified well enough to be even considered possible models. We also know that we do _not_ know a lot about it. For example, Quantum Mechanics is not fully verified by a far cry. Even some relatively simple to describe problems in classical mechanics have no closed-form solutions, which means we can only approximate models for them.
Seriously, stop misusing "Science!" as religion-surrogate and learn how it works before making completely wrong statements. Actual Science makes far less grand claims than you do.
Sorry, sarcasm is very difficult to recognize on/.
And no, I am not. Just like many Neuro-"scientists", you mistake what an fMRI shows. There is actually no way to interpret the measurement from these and from psychological experiments reliably, as the base mechanism generating them is not understood. Think of it as making fine-grained heat measurements on a running PC. First, that gives you a massive loss of detail. You can still find the CPU (for example), but what it does is completely out of reach. And second, that PC may have a network connection that actually controls part of what it does and heat measurement cannot even detect that unless you know it is there already.
Other example: Some psychological experiments "show" that people make decisions before becoming aware of that. However there is no way to measure when people actually become aware of it, you can just ask them and assume what they say is accurate and then compare with the timing of an fMRI or the like. There is no way to correlate the time people say they became aware of the decision and the time they actually did. No self-respecting engineer or scientist would accept such data as having the accuracy needed for the claim, the measurement set-up just does not give you that.
Incidentally, I am completely fine with you thinking that you do not exist as a person. (And that is what Physicalism amounts to.) Just do not expect me to give you any respect for that messed-up fundamentalist belief.
Indeed. But only IQ, not actual intelligence or skills. IQ-test like questions have gotten pervasive enough that everybody has some experience with them, and that is known to boost scores.
Interesting point and right on the mark, I think. I agree that you can even ask not too small children philosophical questions and questions about reality and every child can answer some of them. A chatterbot is however completely out of its depth and has to resort to some misdirection.
You are completely missing that any kind of perception is only something an "observer" can do. (Physical matter cannot supply an "observer", as observers can and will collapse the wave-function.) Hence you are completely missing that in your model there is nobody that has the perception of self-awareness.
Or put differently: Calling self-awareness a "perception" is correct, but it doges the question by abstracting one step. Perception requires awareness (not necessary self-awareness), and that is, again, not something physical matter is known to be able to do.
As a result, your model does only allow p-zombies (i.e. for this discussion entities that claim to be self-aware but are not), and these are not observers.
I like the comparison to intelligent design! Rational on the surface, but once you look at what is actually known and how they justify it, dissolves into irrational mysticism that is a complete perversion of Science.
It is really quite obvious: We are self-aware. Self-awareness is not something physical matter can do (and we are more sure of this than ever in human history), hence if Physicalism is right, self-awareness must be an illusion. But then _who_ has that illusion? Exactly! The whole idea that self-awareness is something magically ("emergent property") stemming from matter is completely absurd. That is another way in which Physicalism resembles fundamentalist religion: It ignores the obvious.
Of course, it is always possible that you all are p-zombies and I am the only one with actual self-awareness. But the argument works even for that extreme case. Sometimes I wonder whether some of the Physicalists are actually p-zombies, but most can certainly be explained by old-fashioned human stupidity and willingness to believe complete nonsense as long as it sounds logical enough.
Your explanation is deeply flawed. The mistake you are making is assuming Physicalism as the zero-state, when it is clearly the more restrictive model by an extreme amount and hence would actually need extraordinary proof in its favor. What you are doing is junk-science. And hence it is a pure belief without rational basis. In fact, it also has some rather strong aspects of a mental illness as it denies individual existence.
As to effects surgery, drugs, or even a simple blindfold, dualism does not say a persons existence is entirely outside of physical reality at all. Concrete memory, for example, is clearly mostly or completely physical. Dualism just says that a part of what we perceive as ourselves is non-physical. Incidentally, that the brain is somehow connected to thought is trivially obvious. It does act as interface to the world, after all. That does tell us exactly nothing about where that though happens and what the nature of the person having it is. Seriously, you are like a child claiming that her iPhone is intelligent, because Siri lives in it.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. And this is not about full automation either. Full automation is hard. Automation to a degree that a single person can run a brewery or bakery is not that hard and being done and the missing jobs are re-created nowhere. They are just gone.
The closed the human race ever came to wide-spread automation is to hold slaves. That has completely different characteristics though. So no, this has never been the way, because this is something that has never happened before. Before you could always expand other areas that were actually needed, not so this time.
Sure, expanding production of luxuries has some merit, but it is not a stable or large enough market and it hugely depends on the people buying having extra income and the people offering having special skills. A gourmet barker is not just somebody that decided to be one, it is somebody with special skills and very likely special education and experience. These people were not in any danger to lose their jobs anyways. They might just have been fed up with their former jobs. For example my hair-dresser has a small shop, 3 people of which two work part-time and all of them can run the shop alone without any problems.They are very good at what they do and thrive in a spot where 6 other businesses went bankrupt before in a short time. But turns out the owner was the manager and of a 25-employee hair-dresser establishment before and she was just fed up with that and not being able to do the job she learned and loves anymore and not having time for her family. You will find similar stories on many of the establishments you quote. The thing is, these people have valid exit-strategies and will have no problems finding regular employment again. They are exceptions in that.
A major shift to luxuries to keep people alive is a recipe for disaster as is is a completely different thing.
Well, the thing is that current Quantum Theory is silent on the matter. It basically says that in some step from microscopic to macroscopic something magic happens and the macroscopic object then is an observer. That is however not consistent with what we have in theory as this would say Quantum Theory does not scale. The theory itself does not have that limit, but the reality it tries to model apparently has it. So either we get rid of the idea of an observer completely, or we accept that quantum theory is a rather incomplete description of how things are. Most physicists tend to do the second, and I agree.
As to "awareness", your light sensor has no awareness of there being light or not, it does not understand what light is. In a sense, it has a "reflex", but that is it. The same is true for the rest of that simple regulation circuit. Actual awareness can produce insight. For example, you cellphone only knows to dim the lights, it does not know why or that there apparently is a light-source. It merely executes an order literally it has been given before by its programming. It has no way of leaving the box it is in.
Maybe you can enlighten my of why you take a different approach? I'm genuinely interested on how dualistic people reason (and feel) about conscience.
Well, originally it may have been simple terror-management in an established way, namely I believe that some part of me is not tied to this mortal shell. As religion never did anything for me at all and I saw right through it even as a teenager, I eventually happened on the idea of dualism and it made a lot of sense to me.
At that time, I would probably have stopped caring, where it not for this AI panic we have had going on for a few years. It got me to think on the nature of intelligence. From my education and work, it is pretty clear that there will not be anything resembling humans with respect to capability to understand and it is completely clear there will never be any Turing-machine type computer that has self-awareness. (Let's not discuss that now, let's just say that for my own stance on the issue I have reason to be very sure about this, with at best a tiny chance on me being wrong.) That got me to think on dualism again, because how do humans do insight and self-awareness? A quantum computer is a Turing-machine as well, just one with unusual performance characteristics, so that is not the answer even if Quantum Computers should eventually work (a big if).
So what then? The hypothesis I finally formed is based on this: There are a _lot_ of quantum effects with random behavior in the synapses of the brain. If some external entity could influence those probabilities even by a tiny faction, that would be a pretty powerful communication interface right there and a way to attach an extra-physical part of a person. Of course, we have not measured such tiny deviations in probabilities. But at the same time, this may require a precision that practical physics in this space has not yet achieved and may be hard-pressed to ever do so. Keep in mind that dynamic analog measurements become very dicey somewhere around 14-20 bits of resolution, and that is not so much, hence respective measurements may be infeasible in practice if the effect is small enough. The other thing may be that this effect only manifests itself if a quantum-randomness using device gets to a complexity level where the "interface" becomes good enough for a view into this physical world. That may be a decision or choice on the extra-physical part of a person, i.e. to not attach unless it works well enough. There may also be some rather strong distance limitations to this effect (we have no telepathy, after all) and hence all these random quantum effects may have to be packed into a small volume for this to work.
Now, that model is not in opposition to what Science currently says about quantum physics if the effect on individual random quantum effects is small enough. Physical models have proven to be not quite exact time and again. It does solve the question where intelligence, understanding and self-awareness can come from in a physical world, namely from outside. This removes the need for any "magic" "emergent properties" that matter would have to have in order to be able to create them. It also solves the problem how CS does not even seem to have a theory how intelligence could be created artificially, despite about 40-60 years if intense research. No other practical CS problem has proven that hard. Also, CS has absolutely nothing on self-awareness.
The beauty of this is that it works completely without unfounded (and often created to manipulate) religious or spiritual ideas. This model merely says that there is obviously some rather prominent possible interface in a human brain and something is attaching itself to that interface. It is also compatible with some other models of reality, for example the idea that this universe is a simulation, which has some things going for it. It would possibly allow AI (if the quantum-interface can be packed tightly enough), but that would come with intelligence, consciousness and free will as well. (
While I am not in that role, I know several larger organizations where Windows (typically Win7 at this time) is not allowed to phone home in any shape form or way. This is enforced by special, VPN-only network set-ups and corporate firewalls. Any updates come from their own servers, and these are handled very restrictively, both for security and for reliability reasons. All of these organizations just moved to Win7, Win10 will not even be considered for a long time yet. And clearly nobody is in favor of such a move. In fact, there is some activity to search for alternatives to Microsoft, but that is all in its early stages. People are simply unsure what to make about Microsoft's antics, but they are really concerned.
Hence nobody in their right mind has trusted Microsoft for a long time anyways and large corporations have the means to enforce that technologically. Of course, ordinary users are screwed.
Quite possibly, yes. Also remember that Watson requires a massive amount of hardware to perform.
Kurzweil is one of those. The sheer lack of understanding whenever he makes predictions is staggering.
"Paying for social peace" is entirely fine by me and it usually is an excellent investment. The problem just arises when some think they can have other pay for it and line their own coffers instead. That does not work.
The first one is nice! I think something like Watson or a close successor may be able to handle the second one without too much trouble though.
Excellent. And I realize much of what I say can be mistaken as meaning "spiritual", because these people have hijacked that space. I decidedly do not mean "spiritual", that is just fairy-tale land. I still have not found a good way to make that clear from the beginning. Maybe calling it "non-spiritual" right out will work.
The reason why I say "non-physical" is because "non-physicscal" is not a word and because with your definition any non-religious (and non-spiritual) version of dualism becomes physicalism. Sure, there are valid reasons to do the definition your way, but defining "physical reality" as what physics tells us about this one universe here within the limits of what physics can observe, also has advantages. My point is just the these two things may be different and the latter may not be the full "world". As an example, while physics does have some speculative theoretical research into the possibility of multiple universes, it usually is understood as researching this one universe only, for entirely practical reasons namely being driven by observations.
Incidentally, I may be one of the very few completely non-religious and non-spiritual dualists. Bringing some kind of spiritual BS into Dualism seems just to be something most people cannot resist.
I completely agree to that. In fact, this is a very, very interesting direction for things.
Indeed. Low- and medium-qualification jobs are vanishing. High-qualification ones continue to do well, but they are a small sub-set. In the end a lot of people have to be able to get enough money to be able to live decently and many of them will not be able to do it via a job. Of course, you can say "tough luck". What you get in addition with that stupid, egotistical attitude is social unrest and crime, both major cost factors for an economy. Hence the "tough luck" attitude does not even qualify as capitalist, it is just unmitigated stupid.
My take is that there is just a type of small-minded human being that cannot stand that anybody gets something for "free", no matter how beneficial that is overall. These people believe everything needs to be earned the hard way and that everybody has to constantly struggle to make ends meet. This is basically fundamentally misanthropic, and anti-society. This is the "if everybody cares only for themselves, everybody is taken care of" crowd. Unfortunately, there are many of those people and if they determine where society is going, it can only go to full collapse sooner or later.
Most people will favor their own misconceptions even over solid and clearly stated facts. The bullshit statements by many on this is a good example. I mean, even the original story says clearly that they do this to save money and they give sound reasoning why they expect they will.
Some people just cannot grasp that giving something away for free can actually be a very good capitalist strategy in the right circumstances. The idea is too complicated for their tiny minds.
Another excellent (albeit small) example I have seen of this is the following: When there is the annual street-parade here with very loud music, you see people giving away earplugs out of large bags for free. The interesting thing is these employees of private (!) health insurance companies. Turns out that if even only a small percentage of the plugs go to people insured with them, this is an excellent investment with an excellent return and hence a very capitalist thing to do. It just requires overcoming that "shop keeper" mind-set where everything has to be paid for immediately.
Nice one! (But I am sure there are lots of US citizens that do not realize the numbers of the US are even worse than those of Greece....)
Actually, this step will save money and that is why they do it. So no impact on that solid gold humvee.
Excellent point. The other problem is that work as the main way to re-distribute wealth is not really cutting it anymore. Alternatives that complement that system are urgently needed. With more and more automation, things will only get worse with the old system and will eventually collapse.
Now, some (insight-less) people call a basic income "socialism" or "communism". It is not. Basic income, welfare systems, access to education, medical care, etc. are factors that prevent social unrest and create a favorable climate for enterprises to prosper. Hence if done out of economic reasons, a basic income is an entirely capitalist mechanism.
I have no issues with your stance. My take is different, but you are obvious rational about this. The next few decades will certainly be interesting in this regard. My intuition is we will see only failure and at some time the whole AI community will (again, they have done so before) do try a paradigm-shift, because that break-through will not manifest itself. But that is my intuition, not hard fact.
It may turn out that artificially creating intelligence is possible after all and if that happens I will re-evaluate my stance. If it happens, much will also depend on the nature of the AI "personalities" created. One of the possibilities is after all that they will just be like us, require motivation, are not that smart and have free will and a mind of their own. (Think "the doctor" from Star Trek Voyager, for example.) That would certainly disappoint a lot of people that now assume that strong AI will either serve humans or try to enslave them.
But just as you, I see no way to do it with what we currently know and have in computing equipment and that is the whole point of my statements here. For some reason that escapes me, many people here seem to assume that the feasibility of creating strong AI is a given and that we are not far from making it a reality. Kind of reminds me of the "robot servants for everybody in 10 years" fantasy of the seventies last century. Boy, where they far, far off.
Non-physical I use here, rather obviously, for "not modeled by currently established physical theory". You confusion may stem from the difference between physical and physics. One is reality, the other is a partial model of it. The fundamental mistake physicalists make is to assume physics is the full, accurate and complete model of the physical (i.e. of reality). Physics makes no such claim at all. In fact, they are still searching for the GUT, so the physics research community is very aware that their model is limited and partial, even when you leave the questions we are currently discussing here completely out of it.
No, what physics currently think is physical reality (different from actual physical reality) is decidedly not the zero state and everything we know about it comes with proof, sometimes extraordinary proof, for example for Quantum Mechanics (because it is so very much non-intuitive). Your mistake here is that you confuse the model and the thing that is modeled. A typical novice's mistake. And of course, you cannot use the real thing as stand-in for the model, because the model explains and allows predictions, the real thing does not.
If you have a look at the history of modern physics, you will find quite a few instances where things we now accept as very likely true required decades of work to be verified well enough to be even considered possible models. We also know that we do _not_ know a lot about it. For example, Quantum Mechanics is not fully verified by a far cry. Even some relatively simple to describe problems in classical mechanics have no closed-form solutions, which means we can only approximate models for them.
Seriously, stop misusing "Science!" as religion-surrogate and learn how it works before making completely wrong statements. Actual Science makes far less grand claims than you do.
Sorry, sarcasm is very difficult to recognize on /.
And no, I am not. Just like many Neuro-"scientists", you mistake what an fMRI shows. There is actually no way to interpret the measurement from these and from psychological experiments reliably, as the base mechanism generating them is not understood. Think of it as making fine-grained heat measurements on a running PC. First, that gives you a massive loss of detail. You can still find the CPU (for example), but what it does is completely out of reach. And second, that PC may have a network connection that actually controls part of what it does and heat measurement cannot even detect that unless you know it is there already.
Other example: Some psychological experiments "show" that people make decisions before becoming aware of that. However there is no way to measure when people actually become aware of it, you can just ask them and assume what they say is accurate and then compare with the timing of an fMRI or the like. There is no way to correlate the time people say they became aware of the decision and the time they actually did. No self-respecting engineer or scientist would accept such data as having the accuracy needed for the claim, the measurement set-up just does not give you that.
Incidentally, I am completely fine with you thinking that you do not exist as a person. (And that is what Physicalism amounts to.) Just do not expect me to give you any respect for that messed-up fundamentalist belief.
Indeed. But only IQ, not actual intelligence or skills. IQ-test like questions have gotten pervasive enough that everybody has some experience with them, and that is known to boost scores.
Interesting point and right on the mark, I think. I agree that you can even ask not too small children philosophical questions and questions about reality and every child can answer some of them. A chatterbot is however completely out of its depth and has to resort to some misdirection.
You are completely missing that any kind of perception is only something an "observer" can do. (Physical matter cannot supply an "observer", as observers can and will collapse the wave-function.) Hence you are completely missing that in your model there is nobody that has the perception of self-awareness.
Or put differently: Calling self-awareness a "perception" is correct, but it doges the question by abstracting one step. Perception requires awareness (not necessary self-awareness), and that is, again, not something physical matter is known to be able to do.
As a result, your model does only allow p-zombies (i.e. for this discussion entities that claim to be self-aware but are not), and these are not observers.
I like the comparison to intelligent design! Rational on the surface, but once you look at what is actually known and how they justify it, dissolves into irrational mysticism that is a complete perversion of Science.
It is really quite obvious: We are self-aware. Self-awareness is not something physical matter can do (and we are more sure of this than ever in human history), hence if Physicalism is right, self-awareness must be an illusion. But then _who_ has that illusion? Exactly! The whole idea that self-awareness is something magically ("emergent property") stemming from matter is completely absurd. That is another way in which Physicalism resembles fundamentalist religion: It ignores the obvious.
Of course, it is always possible that you all are p-zombies and I am the only one with actual self-awareness. But the argument works even for that extreme case. Sometimes I wonder whether some of the Physicalists are actually p-zombies, but most can certainly be explained by old-fashioned human stupidity and willingness to believe complete nonsense as long as it sounds logical enough.
Your explanation is deeply flawed. The mistake you are making is assuming Physicalism as the zero-state, when it is clearly the more restrictive model by an extreme amount and hence would actually need extraordinary proof in its favor. What you are doing is junk-science. And hence it is a pure belief without rational basis. In fact, it also has some rather strong aspects of a mental illness as it denies individual existence.
As to effects surgery, drugs, or even a simple blindfold, dualism does not say a persons existence is entirely outside of physical reality at all. Concrete memory, for example, is clearly mostly or completely physical. Dualism just says that a part of what we perceive as ourselves is non-physical. Incidentally, that the brain is somehow connected to thought is trivially obvious. It does act as interface to the world, after all. That does tell us exactly nothing about where that though happens and what the nature of the person having it is. Seriously, you are like a child claiming that her iPhone is intelligent, because Siri lives in it.