ctjlewis on p-zombies and Hinton: LLMs made the 'perfect imitation' thought experiment real
ctjlewis · x · 2026-09-28
Developer ctjlewis revisits the p-zombie and qualia debate around Geoff Hinton, arguing the thought experiment was always incoherent: anything capable of perfectly emulating consciousness would simply have it, making the "hard problem" a paradox baked into its own setup.
In the LLM era the drift is stark — in 2010 you could only imagine a near-perfect imitator, now we interact with them daily. He also traces the terminological goalpost-shifting: when saying LLMs "reason" was itself controversial and reasoning was reserved for conscious beings, to today's "they reason but not really" / "real reasoning but no consciousness" positions. A critique of whether the hard-problem framework holds at all.
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