In Peter Watts’ superb novel Blindsight, vampires are animals that function intelligently but lack consciousness. The lack of a detour of information processing through consciousness systems allows them to react with superhuman speed to stimuli.
It seems to me to be logically possible to have beings that have no consciousness but have knowledge and intelligence. After all, there are many things I currently know that I am not currently conscious of, and probably a lot of our thinking is unconscious. I don’t see why this couldn’t happen all the time.
If we want to allow this possibility, we have an interesting variant of the Mary thought experiment. Vampire Mary knows all of physics. But she has never experienced anything. Whatever we say about the original Mary and the quale of red, it seems plausible that vampire Mary has no idea what it is like to have an experience of red, or of anything else. And hence experience goes beyond physics.
Plausible, yes, but I am not satisfied with just that...
