Abstract

There is no question that zombie thought experiments exert a strong pull on the philosophical imagination. This may be an embarrassment to the profession, as Daniel Dennett complains, but it is not an effect that is likely to vanish soon. It is natural to wonder how something as unique as consciousness could be associated with physical systems and to wonder what it would mean if it were altogether absent. I cannot possibly address all of the questions raised by my commentators but I hope I can achieve some degree of clarification of what I was getting at in the original short article. Perhaps the simplest way to begin is to propose two `guiding questions' and consider where the answers lead us