Along with the hard problem of consciousness, Chalmers presents the philosophical zombie, which is a zombie that behaves like a human with all the same information processing, but has none of the inner consciousness of a human.
Daniel Dennett opposes is this, claiming this distinction between behavior and feeling makes no sense. Goff introduces this idea of a pain-pleasure invert zombie to show that perhaps we ought to reject this initial distinction between the easy and hard problems of consciousness.
A pain-pleasure invert zombie feels great pleasure when they are stabbed with a knife, but this pleasure makes them kick and scream. It seems nonsensical, but what would this really even look like? Does their feeling of “pleasure” just become pain? No, it doesn’t seem so, it seems you can feel the pleasure but become averse to that feeling somehow, evolutionarily. Moreover, evolution does not explain why we are not pain-pleasure inverts.
Psychophysical harmony: the need to explain how and why consciousness and behavior come together in the human brain
- Why are we not pain-pleasure invert zombies?
References
The Mystery of Consciousness is Deeper Than We Thought by Philip Goff