Zombies, Epiphenomenalism, and Physicalist Theories of Consciousness

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 36 (4):481-509 (2006)
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Abstract

In its recent history, the philosophy of mind has come to resemble an entry into the genre of Hammer horror or pulpy science fiction. These days it is unusual to encounter a major philosophical work on the mind that is not populated with bats, homunculi, swamp-creatures, cruelly imprisoned genius scientists, aliens, cyborgs, other-worldly twins, self-aware Computer programs, Frankenstein-monster-like ‘Blockheads,’ or zombies. The purpose of this paper is to review the role in the philosophy of mind of one of these fantastic thought-experiments — the zombie — and to reassess the implications of zombie arguments, which I will suggest have been widely misinterpreted. I shall argue that zombies, far from being the enemy of materialism, are its friend; and furthermore that zombies militate against the computational model of consciousness and in favour of more biologically-rooted conceptions, and hence that zombie- considerations support a morereductivekind of physicalism about consciousness than has been in vogue in recent years.

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Citations of this work

Epiphenomenalism.William Robinson - 2003 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Russellian Monism and Epiphenomenalism.William S. Robinson - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (1):100-117.
Zombies and Epiphenomenalism.Andrew Bailey - 2009 - Dialogue 48 (1):129.

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References found in this work

Does conceivability entail possibility.David J. Chalmers - 2002 - In Tamar Szabo Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Conceivability and Possibility. Oxford University Press. pp. 145--200.
The content and epistemology of phenomenal belief.David Chalmers - 2002 - In Aleksandar Jokic & Quentin Smith (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 220--72.
Materialism and the metaphysics of modality.David J. Chalmers - 1999 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (2):473-96.
What Mary Didn't Know.Frank Jackson - 1986 - Journal of Philosophy 83 (5):291-295.

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