Group items tagged

"I have a plan. Other zombies -- good (qualia eating) zombies -- can battle their evil (behavior eating) cousins to a standoff. Perhaps even defeat them. Familiar zombies and supersmart zombies resist disqualefication, making the world safe, again, for materialism. Behavioristic materialism. Alas for functionalism, good zombies still eat programs. Alas for identity theory, all zombies -- every B movie fan knows -- eat brains."

"Zombies are hypothetical creatures of the sort that philosophers have been known to cherish. A zombie is physically identical to a normal human being, but completely lacks conscious experience. Zombies look and behave like the conscious beings that we know and love, but 'all is dark inside.' There is nothing it is like to be a zombie."

"The time honoured star of the B grade horror flick - the Zombie, the brain-eating living dead, a body without a soul - has entered the world of philosophy. The Zombie sits at the centre of a charged debate about the mystery of human consciousness. Whilst you can be confident that you're not a Zombie, how can you be sure about the next person? Your mother, neighbour or boss? Join two of the world's great philosophers of the mind, Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers, and a B grade movie maker...it's zombie mania."

"Zombies are exactly like us in all physical respects but have no conscious experiences: by definition there is ënothing it is likeí to be a zombie. Yet zombies behave like us, and some even spend a lot of time discussing consciousness. This disconcerting fantasy helps to make the problem of phenomenal consciousness vivid, especially as a problem for physicalism."

"I shall argue that, when certain implications of the zombie concept are carefully examined, zombies are revealed as either failing to support the zombiphile argument, or as simply impossible, conceptually contradictory. "

"Zombies are stipulated to be creatures that are in some way identical to human beings-and thus, in some sense, indistinguishable from human beings-but which lack consciousness. Zombies are at least behaviorally identical to human beings or other conscious creatures, and they may also be like us in other ways."

"I have argued that Kirk's efforts do not succeed, but perhaps there are other ways to show that zombies are no more possible than square circles, or colourless green ideas."

"A robot that is functionally indistinguishable from us may or may not be a mindless Zombie. There will never be any way to know, yet its functional principles will be as close as we can ever get to explaining the mind."

"The zombist fails to prove that materialism is untenable."

"The problem of `conscious inessentialism' is examined in the literature, and an argument is presented that the presence of consciousness is indeed marked by a behavioural difference, but that this should be looked for at the _cultural_ level of speech communities." Published in Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1 (2), 1994, pp. 196-200.

"Must we talk about zombies? Apparently we must. There is a powerful and ubiquitous intuition that computational, mechanistic models of consciousness, of the sort we naturalists favor, must leave something out-something important. Just what must they leave out? The critics have found that it's hard to say, exactly: qualia, feelings, emotions, the what-it's-likeness (Nagel) or the ontological subjectivity (Searle) of consciousness."