PicoBlog

A p-zombie, or philosophical zombie, is a hypothetical entity defined as follows, per wikipedia: “a hypothetical being that is physically identical to and indistinguishable from a normal person but does not have conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. …For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object it would not inwardly feel any pain, yet it would outwardly behave exactly as if it did feel pain, including verbally expressing pain. …Philosophical zombie arguments are used in support of mind-body dualism against forms of physicalism such as materialism, behaviorism and functionalism. These arguments aim to refute the possibility of any physicalist solution to the "hard problem of consciousness" (the problem of accounting for subjective, intrinsic, first-person, what-it's-like-ness). Proponents of philosophical zombie arguments, such as the philosopher David Chalmers, argue that since a philosophical zombie is by definition physically identical to a conscious person, even its logical possibility would refute physicalism…”

I see several problems with this formulation. It seems clear to me that the existence of p-zombies is a concept closely related with solipsism, in that solipsism would necessitate the existence of p-zombies. I don’t remember where I read this, but I remember a very interesting argument that marshalled Wittgenstein’s private language argument against solipsism. A sketch of the argument goes something like this:

The first objection one might raise is that this only works as an argument against “hard solipsism”, where there is only one mind that exists. It is consistent with what I’ve called “soft solipsism”, in which some people are p-zombies and some aren’t.

The second objection might be formal. It’s not immediately clear to me that our conclusion, (4), must be that there exists some mind M such that it’s possible M understands language L, as opposed to the weaker conclusion that if there exists some other mind M then it is possible M understands L. If anyone thinks it is clear let me know why.

I think the stronger objection to p-zombies is that the very concept is incoherent and question-begging. It’s purportedly an argument against materialism, but it seems to me you have to already reject materialism to accept the idea that something physically indistinguishable from a normal person could lack qualia.

Maybe we’re just not digging far enough into the hypothetical for that to be obvious. On what basis do we know the thing in the thought experiment lacks consciousness? I suppose it’s possible to imagine people that are actually cleverly disguised automatons, but let’s suppose we’re particularly rude people and we kidnap our supposed p-zombie and strap him down and put him into an MRI machine. The brain scan comes out normal, but we’re still not convinced the thing in front of us is conscious. So we dig around in his brain and find a totally normal human brain (otherwise, remember, it wouldn’t be a p-zombie; they’re supposed to be indistinguishable from proper people). I’m hard-pressed to say I can imagine the thing isn’t, in fact, conscious if it behaves as if it’s conscious and has a normal nervous system. I think you have to reject materialism a-priori to imagine such a thing.

And the thing is, even if you do reject a strict materialist solution to the hard problem of consciousness, it doesn’t preclude us from finding physical correlates of consciousness, even if we can’t explain how exactly they cause consciousness. If we can find the exact physical conditions that produce consciousness, then even if we don’t know how or why it happens, we have to either suppose our p-zombie doesn’t meet those conditions (in which case it’s not a true p-zombie, being distinguishable from a proper person with qualia on that basis) or it does and somehow consciousness is just failing to happen (which strikes me as incoherent).

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