Why Phenomenal Zombies Are Conceivable Whereas Anti-Zombies Are not

In this article, I discuss Keith Frankish’s attempt to neutralize the zombie argument against materialism with a closely parallel argument for physicalism, the anti-zombie argument, and develop David Chalmers’ reply to this species of arguments. I support Chalmers’ claim that the conceivability of situations like the existence of an anti-zombie is problematic with an analysis that makes it plausible that the idea of an anti-zombie is incoherent, and argue that to counter this, a materialist should deny the absence of a priori entailment from the physical to the phenomenal; however, this would involve the denial of the conceivability of zombies and so make the anti-zombie argument superfluous.

Is the Theatre a Zombie? On the Successful Failures of Émile Zola

Naturalist theatre, in its late-nineteenth-century incarnation, and particularly in the work of Émile Zola, is often seen as advancing a physicalist view of the mind, where all mind states can be reduced to brain states. The novels and the plays do not uniformly or unambiguously support this analysis, so is the theory or the practice wrong? Physicalism is an idea that has had a recent renaissance, helped by the discoveries of neuroscience. Nevertheless I express some caution about the claims made for the eradication of free will. A range of thought experiments in the philosophy of mind have cast doubt on physicalism, culminating in David Chalmers’s much-debated zombie argument. I argue that zombies and their analogues represented deep social anxieties in the late nineteenth century, and make repeated appearances in Naturalism. The essay goes on to suggest that Naturalism should be considered to have conducted thought experiments, rather than just to have attempted to embody the theory on stage. Turning to John Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’ thought experiment, I suggest that theatre-making itself may be a kind of thought experiment model of the mind.

Ideal reasoners don’t believe in zombies

The negative zombie argument states that p&~q is ideally negatively conceivable and, therefore, possible, what would entail that physicalism is false (Chalmers, 2002, 2010}. In the argument, p is the conjunction of the fundamental physical truths and laws and $q$ is a phenomenal truth. A sentence phi is ideally negatively conceivable iff phi cannot be ruled out a priori on ideal rational reflection. In this paper, I argue that if its premises are true, the negative zombie argument is neither conclusive (valid) nor a priori. First, I argue that the argument is sound iff there exists a finite ideal reasoner R for a logic x with the relevant properties which believes <>(p&~q) on the basis of not believing p->q on a priori basis. A finite reasoner is a reasoner with finite memory and finite computational power. I argue that if x has the relevant properties and R is finite, then x must be nonmonotonic and R may only approach ideallity at the limit of a reasoning sequence. This would render the argument nonconclusive. Finally, I argue that, for some q, R does not believe <>(p&~q) on the basis of not believing p->q on a priori basis. For example, for q=`someone is conscious'. I conclude that the negative zombie argument (and, maybe, all zombie arguments) is neither conclusive nor a priori (the choice of q relies on empirical information).

Access granted to Zombies

In his ?Access Denied to Zombies?, Gualtiero Piccinini argues that the possibility of zombies does not entail the falsity of physicalism, since the accessibility relation can be understood so that even in S5 system for modal logic worlds inaccessible from our world are allowed (in the case in which the accessibility relation is understood as an equivalence rather than as universal accessibility). According to Piccinini, whether the zombie world is accessible from our world depends on whether physicalism is true in our world, which is something that cannot be answered in a non-question-begging way. In order to show this, he recalls a well known strategy of making a parody of the zombie argument. After pointing out that Piccinini?s strategy of parodying the zombie argument renders his former strategy, based on the distinguishing between the two notions of accessibility, redundant, I recall the two ways of handling parodies of the zombie argument. In addition, I argue that persisting on the distinction between accessibility understood as an equivalence and universal accessibility in dealing with the zombie argument relies upon accepting modal dualism (a view that there are two spaces of possibilities rather than one), which is something usually dismissed for methodological reasons (simplicity in particular). Given that Piccinini has not provided new arguments neither in favour of modal dualism nor in favour of parodying the zombie argument, the conclusion he infers remains unsupported by the premises he uses.

Zombies Slap Back: why the Anti-Zombie Parody Does Not Work

In his “anti-zombie argument”, Keith Frankish turns the tables on “zombists”, forcing them to find an independent argument against the conceivability of anti-zombies. I argue that zombists can shoulder the burden, for there is an important asymmetry between the conceivability of zombies and the conceivability of anti-zombies, which is reflected in the embedding of a totality-clause under the conceivability operator. This makes the anti-zombie argument susceptible to what I call the ‘Modified Incompleteness’, according to which we cannot conceive of scenarios. In this paper I also argue that conceiving of the zombiesituation is a good starting point for rendering the zombie argument plausible.