The Zombie Argument (from David Chalmers) 

Surely this is a circular argument. By imagining an identical 'zombie' can exist you are assuming that consciousness is not produced by physical processes, then using the imagined zombie to prove that consciousness is not a physical process. (Great series of videos by the way - I'm hooked!)

Jeffrey: “you can’t conceive of a five-sided triangle” San Quentin inmate: “you calling me stupid?”

When you wrote "garbage ankles" I was like "where tf is this going" - turns out it's a FANTASTIC analogy! Your videos are awesome!

Under physicalism, If a zombie had the exact same molecules in the brain then his conscious experience would be the same. The fact that one can conceive of a concept of it, only means that ones understanding of consciousness presupposes that physicalism is false.

I would attack the zombie argument at step 1. A zombie copy of you would answer probing questions about its subjective experience exactly as you would. Yet it’s not having any subjective experience from which to draw upon for its answers. This is inconceivable.

Useful video, thanks! My objection is to premise #1: if conscious states are self-aware states, and an organism is interacting with its own thoughts about itself in order to generate its behaviors, then a zombie wouldn't act in the same way as a conscious person since it wouldn't have access to that behavioral feedback that consciousness generates.

Thank you so much for making these videos! They really help me to understand theories and arguments that are completely foreign to me otherwise

A five sided triangle can't be imagined because it violates the definition of what a triangle is. I can imagine a five sided figure that I could say was a triangle.

If this guy was my ethics and philosophy teacher in secondary school, i would have a PHD by now

Such an interesting concept I've heard about before, but I love the breakdown you give these topics beyond surface level!

I'm currently failing my philosophy course in college and your video just helped me understand so much! I'm currently writing a paper and will be linking your video for the professor. Thank you!

I have a feeling that finding out what creates consciousness would come with many other answers to our entire reality, the universe and everything

Your videos are so good. They deserve more views.

I'm not a professional philosopher so I don't get much chances to discuss this kind of issues with others, but for the past 20 years since I read David Chalmers' zombie argument I've been wondering how in the world such nonsense received so much attention. The argument you present here is pretty much what I thought the first time I read it (including the "five sided triangle" idea). In my opinion the zombie argument could be praised if coming from a high school student, but beyond that it's just idiotic.

I don't know much about philosophy but your videos are great, I'm just a biotechnology student who wants to know more about philosophy, so thank you very much sir.

Excelent work! I'm really thankful for your lectures.

i reject the premise that such a thing is conceivable. if it is molecularly identical to me it must therefore have the same conscious experience as me. by saying that the zombie is molecularly identical but lacks the conscious experience it assumes by definition that consciousness isn't physical

The jurors in the Toronto murder trial of Kenneth Parks, who killed his mother-in-law in 1987, could conceive of unconscious actions that mimic willed, self-aware behavior. Parks was acquitted on the grounds that he was actually sleep-walking, and therefore not conscious of his actions, when the incident took place. Really, the zombie argument is just another way of framing the other minds problem. We all leap across an epistemological gap when we attribute something like our own inner awareness to other people. This is sometimes referred to as forming a theory of mind about other actors, or in Dennett's terminology, taking the intentional stance. The Turing Test is a technological variation on this same problem and question.

Thanks for the video, had a question about the zombie argument on my test, helped me alot!!

Wow thank you so much for this! This is so well put and you make it easy to understand! When will you start making theology videos?

Keep making these videos!! You are helping me so much and I need you to keep going 😊 Can you make a video of Frank Jackson’s view ?

The Zombie Argument sounds a lot like the modern NPC meme. People who don't think for themselves, merely regurgitate common talking points. Leading to the meme that they aren't conscious.

"We can coherently imagine zombies" is carrying a lot of weight. It really seems to be begging the question by sneaking in the presumption that consciousness is an optional addition to physicalism. That's the conclusion Chalmers wants to reach ... but it's in his first premise.

Because I am a random viewer (not following the lectures in series), I got a little lost. But I think the presenter (lecturer) is brilliant and in the end I was able to make sense of it and simply loved it. I will tactfully throw this Zombie argument into a social conversation some day to earn some social points.

Even for AI there's no such thing as 'bodyless consciousness', their mind exist in the form of code that is stored in a hard drive somewhere

For the argument to work, we would have to change how we think of consciousness. I think everyone, regardless of whether they believe in libertarian free will or in hard determinism, will agree that consciousness (whatever it is) has SOME impact on the agent's physical body. Be it their behaviour or psychological state. (and psychological states have physical effects, see the placebo effect). This precludes us from imagining a zombie without consciousness, that behaves identically to a human with consciousness. Precisely because the human's consciousness impacts their behaviour or psychological state, which is observable. So, we instead have to accept that consciousness isn't relevant to someone's behaviour or psychological state. In other words, it isn't observable by any means whatsoever. It is no different to a soul at that point. So how are we to accept anyone's claims about said consciousness, if we've never truly observed it? Not even subjectively? Whatever the argument for it being physical or non-physical is, how can it possibly be correct when we don't have experience with it existing it all?

Great series on philosophy of mind. I have a video request. Could you please make a video explaining the different versions of dualism (property, substance, interactionism)?

5 sided triangle: 1) cut a triangle (any type) from a piece of paper. 2) label each edge (so, “1”, “2”, “3”). 3) label the side facing you “4”. 4) turn the triangle over. 5) this unlabeled ‘side’ is “5”. Do this exercise in abstract Euclidean space. The kind of space you use anytime you sketch on paper. The space you learned about in geometry where points are dimensionless, lines such as the edges “1”, “2”, & “3” have only length, and planes such as faces “4” & “5” have only length and width. If you can sketch a box, a cube, then you can conceive Euclidean space, and now you can conceive a five-sided triangle, a six-sided square, a seven-sided pentagon, and so on. And you didn’t even need to wrap your mind around additional dimensions and projecting between them. Inconceivability/conceivability have more to do with manufactured constraints of thinking than with actual constraints of reality. It’s unnecessary to personally experience (know) something to understand it. Likewise, you have little to no problem conceiving the non-existent, even the impossible. Sherlock Holmes, Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, Harry Potter and Hermoine Granger are not actual people but fictional characters. They have no consciousness. You can understand this without having to exhaustively search (personal experience) the planet for them. Yet you’re likely to have been personally influenced by one, or more, and you thought of those as if they were actual people. We do this - treat the conceptual as though it is actual in reality - effortlessly, unconsciously, naturally. We fall into narratives, theories, stories, conjectures, movies... You likely accept that sound travels in the vacuum of space. That you can hear lasers blast and objects hundreds, even thousands, of kilometers distant explode loudly. You readily think about re-animate corpses walking-dead or barely living infected, brain-dead critters trying to eat you. Taking the philosophical zombie - a complete, particle-for-particle doppleganger lacking “consciousness” - as possible IS NOT the problem. Seeing the ‘philosophical zombie’ for being a red herring IS. Arguing in any serious manner either for or against the ‘philosophical zombie’ concept prevents understanding the category error of treating episteme (knowledge, conception being a kind along with imagination; sense-perception, therefore hallucination; empiricism; and so on) as having the same status in reality as the ontic/ontological (fundamental grounding of existence). To bring all this abstraction into focus consider how it is that any possible knower can know. Another way to get at this is to ask, “How can episteme (knowledge and knowing knowers) exist without an ontically physical reality? Can physical reality exist without knowers and their knowledge? If humans and all other knowers ceased to exist would there still be stuff they made? Or things they named like rivers, oceans, plankton..? Or entities, processes, being that no knower ever knew? And wouldn’t plankton qualify as a knower?” The same immense, automatic conceptual ability that allows us to navigate our experience so successfully also allows us to treat that ability and its conceiving/knowledge as existentially prior within reality. That is, we can and do treat our ability to conceive and our conceptions as arbiters of existence. Hence, one quickly arrives at some form of Idealism. Dualism is an Idealism. Kant, Hegel, Marx, Weber, Sassier, Horkheimer all Idealists. The “social construction” of ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ is an Idealistic trope, which is but a step away from nihilism and/or solipsism. I’m not advocating for the abject dismissal of thought experiments or ideals any more than for the abandonment of knowledge and reason. I am advocating for a pedagogical change. Teaching early, repetitively, and integratively that each of these along with language, philosophy, science, theory, belief, established “laws of nature” like those of thermodynamics and evolution by selection, all thought, and most unconscious behavior are attempts to model, or map, reality. No map is ever going to be the territory. A map, a method, rule, procedure... will ever be only a guide. And since the territory-universe-reality will ceaselessly, indeterminately change; all maps, all models are both necessarily incomplete and reductive. That is, no model can capture all or even enough of reality to avoid being wrong in some way to some degree. To model all of reality with fidelity would require all of reality, at least twice: the original reality (R1) and the model (r2) running within R1. This would require all the energy to run R1 and an equal amount for r2. If r2 is expected to predict R1 an unknowable additional energy demand will have to be met to continuously run-revise-run an unknowable number of anticipatory scenarios (r2 * n) within R1. So, a meta-physically plausible scheme to model reality within itself is conceivable yet absurdly impossible. To obtain realistic models means accepting reduction. Such trade-offs have long been reasonably understood, yet the principle is rarely acknowledged, much less taught - even poorly.

Prof Kaplan - great video, but I wish you had spent a bit more time on the various objections. It seems like the conceivability premise is the one that is most often attacked. It does appear that the very premise pre-supposes that physicalism is false.

Just like in game Soma, your or anyone's zombie (exact copy) will be conscious, and zombie and original will be thinking of themselves identically

Man! This was really damn good! Gonna have to check out some of your other videos, pronto!

"I'm going to make an exact copy of your leg, except for the problem part of it." "Well that's impossible. Either it has the problem, or it isn't an exact copy." "Right. That's what the word 'except' means."

There is a huge problem with this argument How do you know that "zombie" ("clone" would be a better term) does not have consciousness?

When you have to create a literal straw man to argue against an idea

Why the ankles argument doesn't apply for the Zombies? In the first case we say, no, no, if the ankles are exactly the same molecule for molecule it means they have to be bad, but in the Zombie case we say that it's exact copy of the human, but we make room for the difference - lack of consciousness. Everyone who thinks physicalism is true would say that if the zombie is exactly the same then it will have consciousness and can't be the same molecule for molecule and doesn't have it, just like with the ankles. I'm missing something in this argument, may be I need to look more into it.

Every argument against physicalism requires a certain amount of faith in my opinion. When I replace the word consciousness with soul I can’t help but think consciousness is thought of as something “other” merely because it’s a creation of humans. An illusion perhaps, or at the very least a fabrication we’ve created to explain phenomena with a tidy label.

I had my paper ripped off in the mid 70s by a greedy philosophy prof. It was related to split brain experiments. In my opinion this philsophical argument is mathematically equivalent to quantum physics principles about quantum entanglement. But there is a flaw in this video - please write it down in math nomenclature. It's called logic 101 - there is a gap that needs to be explained

A pyramid is not a triangle.

The Zombie revision that comes to mind: if we mapped every aspect of your brain into a computer, which would perfectly produce its function, would this be close to the Zombie proposition? It would respond to stimuli exactly as you would, it would identify "pink" just as you would, but would it experience qualia or would it be nothing more than a mechanical mimic, a simulation of you? I think this question revolves around "freedom" and it takes two forms, 1) Freedom from mechanical function, and 2) Freedom of mechanical function. AI Alpha Zero will play the same piece with the same board orientation every time and for the same reason because 1+1, no matter how many times it runs the sequence, will necessarily always = 2, as such, it hits its freedom limit of the 2nd kind. But, but are you merely mechanical, bound to the limits of your programming, and as such, are your evaluations and decisions necessary, determinate? Or do you exhibit freedom of the 1st kind? Now we see issues with Alpha Zero, particularly as it competes with Stockfish, and we can abstract a model of AZ which addresses these issues, producing AZ v2 and v3 and v4… 1) Mechanical constructs cannot abstract itself (imo, the essential criterion for “self”) 2) I can 3) therefore I am not mechanical Programming AZ’s view of itself or leveling up (Godel); seeing one’s self from a third party position context, would be necessary for it to have that capacity, but this would only beg the question by pressing the same 2nd kind objection of the first on to the second level. This is the paradox of self reflection leading to an infinite regression, thus driving any potential resolution beyond the bounds of this Universe and founding the repudiation of physicalism.

I would love to see Jeffrey Kaplan explaining Chalmers "Subsymbolic Computation and the Chinese Room". That would be a great and fitting addition to his course, touching a very pertinent topic right now. I am also hooked!

The problem of course with understanding consciousness as something non-physical is: How can this non-physical phenomenon be formed or captured in a physical body?

"Garbagenous" is now officially a word.

Very good, thanks. Interesting and entertaining as well. Thumbs up thanks also to Amy Kind and David Chalmers, obviously (and to the poor zombies without consciousness...)

Premise 3 is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition to reach conclusion 2. The best we can do with this on is to modify conclusion 2 to say that it is possible that physicalist is false. But this doesn’t move the discussion forward

Loved the video! By the way a triangle cut out of a piece of paper has 3 sides and a front and back side. A five sided triangle.

Please do a video on Kripke “Naming and necessity”!! It would be so helpful

Excellent explanation. Thank you!

thank you this has really helped mw with my univesity paper on philsophical zombies

Never underestimate people's ability to conceive of stuff. Imagine a pentagon, where two of the angles between its sides are exactly 180°. You got yourself a five-sided triangle! Of course, people will immediately object that this shape is either not really a triangle or not really five-sided, but at this point the argument devolves into semantics. A three-sided square can be more of a challenge, though 🙂

Even if the first two premises from Chalmers argument were sound. i think all its proving is that physicalism is not necessarily true, not that it is false.

Wait, this is the last lecture in this course? I'm sad! I want more!

Not sure how precise Mrs. Kind is when Ive only ever heard Chalmers call them P-zombies, the P denoting "philosophical".

This argument is entirely just begging the question. It's doesn't show or prove anything.

Imagine there is a soccer game going on and you are watching with a friend. The friend is a huge fan and wants to prove, that soccer is something supernatural, fundamental, not reducible to physical stuff. So he proposes a thought experiment: let's say that there is a zombie soccer game, it looks and goes exactly as a normal soccer game, there are players and ball and all that stuff, you couldn't distinguish it from a normal game from outside. But: There is no soccer game there! Hm. For me is sounds like BS... And the soccer example too😂

I just sprained both my ankles and can barely put pressure on my left ankle while being able to put almost full pressure on my right ankle. Any advice?

I think many would say: “A perfect copy of me would have my ‘soul’ but still neither of us would contain any spirit. We’d be equally misunderstood and mislabeled along with all humans as having a ‘consciousness’ and ‘soul’. We’d then see spiritualists fighting over how it is that we can both (appear to) have souls when a soul is indivisible. Then one of us would be burned at the stake.” Philosophers make irritating assumptions. The casual assumption that consciousness is one thing and it’s on or off like a switch is the first whopper. I’d ask anyone if they know of an animal that has no consciousness. If so, are they certain its unreadable nature means it actually lacks something? There’s no reason to think my clone would appear to have no consciousness. Rounding that up to ‘I can’t imagine a zombie’ is just false. I regard consciousness as yet another construct we use to explain a familiar blur of (physical) processes.

I can say that I have met my fair share of zombies in life, so Chalmers is definitely right on argument 2.

Chalmers seems to be saying two things: that a perfect clone of a human being would necessarily be devoid of consciousness (he forgets that it would also be deprived of life) and/or that what is feasible, as it belongs to the mental realm of conceived possibilities, cannot be physical. As these two points are extremely simple to the point of triviality, he weaves a convoluted argument in which he uses zombies as a marketing gimmick. The physicalist would remain unfazed since she could always argue that we have a narrow idea of the things her matter can do. Being a reductionist principle, materialism can never be refuted. It is a kind of protean god to the extent that no matter what you say, it can always reply that X "is nothing more than a process or property of Z" (matter). The only thing that you can do is to pin your interlocutor down to a definition of matter that shows it simply cannot do all the things she ascribes to it. The idea that imagined things are somehow entities that cannot have a physical existence with physical reality is patently false. We would not have computers or planes if that were the case. Therefore triangles must a riddle both for physicalism and Chalmers.

We know that we can't imagine the 5 sided triangle because we have the precise definition of what makes a shape a triangle. We do not have a precise definition of what makes a body conscious, therefore we do not know whether we can "imagine" the zombie. I certainly can't imagine the zombie, but this is just because my definition of consciousness already makes it incoherent. The zombie argument really is circular.

I just drew a picture of a five-sided triangle. Everyone who's seen it has been freaked out.

I can’t believe I passed the philosophy of mind course in college, this argument was tough lol

i think a good way to imagine this theory is the following: Imagine if you have a box of loose atoms, just atoms of different kinds, kind of like a unsorted, messy lego set. Now you take these atoms which on their own are just matter, they are not conscious, and you start aranging a person or just a brain. You start with one atom, stick another atom to it, boom, you have two atoms, you just keep going and keep going until you have assembled a full person/brain. What is really interesting in this perspective, if physicalism is true, at some point in this assembling, a consciousness would arise. Like consciousness could just be one more atom apart. You take that one atom away - no consciousness, put it back again - conciousness. Mind blowing.

Could you please do a video on logical supervenience and how this relates to the p-zombie argument? I am reading Chalmers book and his argument for P-zombies existing seems far more sophisticated. But I just can't, for the life of me, understand why p-zombies would be logically supervenient but not nomically.

I don't understand the difference between shit ankles and consciousness. If we cannot imagine molecule for molecule ankles that aren't shit, why can we imagine molecule for molecule zombies without consciousness? It seems to be assuming consciousness is non-physical from the start.

The first principle of teaching anything is not to criticize it before you have presented the argument for whatever. Mixing in possible criticisms as you present the premisses to an argument makes it much more difficult to follow the argument. Only present criticisms AFTER you have presented the entire argument with its conclusion.

It doesn't matter how better you make the ankle, someone would find a task that is so intense that the ankle would be regarded as a bad ankle. The only option left is making it perfect which is making the limited object unlimited => contradiction

Hi i need some help checking if this idea makes sense! Would an argument in reverse refute the zombie argument? e.g in a zombie world, it would be impossible to conceive of a physically identical world in which conscious beings exist (because it is impossible to conceive of anything in a world without consciousness) so in such a world, it is metaphysically impossible for conscious beings to exist. yet the fact that we know that conscious beings exist shows that logic is flawed and cannot be used.

When you strip away the 'zombie' language this whole argument becomes: "you can conceive of physicalism being false, therefore it is possible that physicalism is false, therefore physicalism is false." You can also "prove" the existence of 5-sided triangles if the argument starts out with "imagine that a shape with 5 sides is called a triangle." Because that's the same thing. We don't know how many sides the metaphorical shape of consciousness has, so the premise "imagine that consciousness has 5 sides" only **seems** less ridiculous than "imagine a triangle has 5 sides". But they're still the same thing.

Wow, great explanation dude. You are also hilarious in the way you introduce the problem, well done

I always thought there was more to this argument. It wasn't merely that philosophical zombies are conceivable. It was that if you can account for all behavior by reference solely to the third person properties of physical stuff, then there is nothing for first person mental stuff to do. It doesn't explain anything. Since first person mental stuff is unnecessary to explain behavior, philosophical zombies are possible and physicalism is false. Or something like that.

I heard another philosopher describe metaphysics as "a personal set of beliefs about the most basic rules of reality". For instance that gravity is an attraction between objects with mass.

First I thought of Star trek tOS, and that temperamental transporter, putting out metaphysical zombies all over the galaxy. Then, at 9:40, when "you" said "The zombie will say " I see the pink colour" but it really doesn't", it struck me that the 'person' I was watching and listening to, was not really seeing the pink! I believe Dr. Kaplan said those things and saw the colour pink back some two years ago! I was being lectured to by a metaphysical zombie! - an un-self-aware copy of Dr Kaplan (except the zombie is left-handed) You cannot appreciate this, but please pass my thanks for another good lecture to the real Dr. Kaplan.

In my humble opinion, if something that we don't understand can interact with matter and matter can interact with this 'something' we could say that this 'something' cannot be radically different from matter. Alcohol can change our conscience and my conscious willing to move chair can change chair position it means that conscious should be part of knowledge of matter world.

I had thought about this before but I didn't know this argument already existed and had a name. Cool

Surely the interesting question is: does consciousness inevitably arise from certain arrangements of molecules? This is not easy to answer but just imagining that it does (or not) doesn't seem to help.

Read the description everyone. You are misunderstanding one thing about the argument, which is that it claims that zombies could exist. Of course it’s somewhere just an assumption, but it’s not completely unfounded.

In the same way that having 3 sides is an inherent property of a triangle, I could just make the claim that having consciousness is some inherent property of the microphysical arrangement of the brain. Also if you make two sides of a pentagon very small, you can make it look superficially like a triangle (but with 2 corners 'chopped off'). But just because I can superficially 'conceive' of something doesn't mean that's how it actually is, even in theory. It may look like a triangle, but it's not. It may look like philosophical zombies are conceivable, but I don't know that they are.

Could someone point me towards Amy Kinds article, please?

Ha ha! Five sided triangle popped right into my mind when at 4:30 you asked us to think of one. Cut a triangle out of a pc of paper. That is 3 cut edges, so: a triangle. But there is a side of the paper facing you, and the other side of the paper, on the other side. Total, 5 sides. And all together, 3 angles (pointy bits) to your construction Which is all just a fun semantics thing, does not detract from what your are getting at.

5-sided triangle: 3 sides, plus the in-side, and the out-side

I watched the whole video and listened intently and I still do not understand this. :(

People "coherently imagine" false and contradictory things every day. It's really dumb to use that as a logical axiom.

"It doesn't see the pinkness" reminded me of that dude talking about "ebola assness" in his spaghetti

The problem with the argument is, that we don't know enough about consciousness (yet?). It could well be that consciousness is emergent from a sufficiently complex system for processing information. In that case the molecule by molecule copy would also become conscious. It could also be, that the arrangement of molecules is incomplete without consciousness, and couldn't reproduce human behavior, although that would be more of an argument against physicalism. From a physics perspective there is a problem with making an exact copy in the first place, since an unknown quantum state can't be copied exactly without destroying the original quantum state, but maybe just putting all the atoms and electrons in the right places is a sufficiently faithful copy. Most arguments against physicalism very much remind me of the "god of the gaps", only here it's not god, but some mystical quantity: Take something not yet understood and argue that it must result from some higher/other plane of existence.

I'm not well-versed in those topics, or for that matter philosophy in general, but your videos are both entertaining and informative. Keep up the good work! Speaking about the argument at hand, I don't understand why it's impossible to conceive of a molecule for molecule copy of your legs without garbage ankles, but we can coherently imagine zombies, copies molecule for molecule of a person without being conscious. If consciousness is an emerging property like the flimsiness of your ankle , then I can't conceive of a zombie. Why does the ankle instance violate metaphysical/conceptual laws? And why the zombie does not? The first premise states that zombies are conceivable. This is true only if consciousness isn't contingent upon the physical world. It's true that consciousness can be contingent upon something else or can be a transcendental, that is to say not contingent upon anything, property of the universe. However, I'm not aware of an argument or method by which we can determine the correct answer. I think is more parsimonious to assume physicalism, at least until a world beyond the physical one is demonstrated to exist.

so cool keep going

I can imagine a 5side triangle, with a triangle very long long sides and two ends’ points looked like very tiny tiny sides. Seeing it from a very far distance you’ll say it’s a triangle however it owns five sides.

Let's say we travelled to an alien planet and discovered that on that planet, some objects exhibit a previously unknown property: glorpiness. We even discovered that our hair exhibits glorpiness when on that planet. Our scientist have made many attempts to figure out how it is that the objects exhibit glorpiness; however an explanation has so far eluded us and what is worse, our hair seems to be microphysically identical to regular hair outside the planet. After spending a few years on the planet, we have an intuitive understanding of glorpiness and what it is like, but we have not gotten any closer to explaining it in a physicalist sense. With these assumptions, we make the following thought process: P1. We can conceive of our hair, being microphysically identical to the same hair, but not exhibiting glorpiness. This is in fact our observation. P2. If hair without glorpiness is conceivable, then it is metaphysically possible. C1. Hair without glorpiness is metaphysically possible. (of course we didn't even need to derive this, we know it's real so it must also be metaphysically possible by any definition of metaphysically possible) P3. If hair without glorpiness is metaphysically possible, then glorpiness is nonphysical. This is where we get a problem. It seems that if P3 about conciousness is plausible, then P3 about glorpiness seems to be even more plausible! But in this case, it seems pretty clear to me that it's just a "nonphysicality of the gaps", so to say.

I can coherently imagine person with magical powers and an identical person (molecule by molecule) without magical powers, therefore a person with magical powers is possible, therefore physicalism is false because of magic?

About being able to conceive of something and it being possible for that thing to exist: one can conceive of a starship called Millennium Falcon capable of hyperspace travel, but it doesn't mean it can exist.

Hi! Um, this might be from having HFA, but I can envision a 5-sided triangle and you drew one on the transparent screen in front of yourself. The original three sides are the ones you drew, then the fourth is the side you are on, and if you go on the other side of the screen will be the 5th side. It might not be an accurate way to see it, but I -can- see a triangle with 5 sides this way. I apologize for how stupid it sounded.

They should have called it a clone rather than a zombie.

my philosophy professor at NCState was a fantastic banjo-player. we'd bring our banjos to class. philosophically speaking, we were pretty good banjo players. but i remember talk like this inbetween tunes...

The refutation of Chalmers' leap from proposition one to proposition two is found in a more precise (updated) view of epiphenomenon. In this view, feedback is considered. It is posited that any perfect physical copy CANNOT be constructed that will not also experience consciousness. Chalmers' premise number one is then held to be false. Chalmers has effectively "missed the forest for the trees" by adopting an antiquated, outdated understanding of how epiphenomenon actually operate in the real world, thus setting up his own metaphysical impossibility.

You need to put an additional constraint about how molecules are organized. There could be many configurations of the same molecules that are different from the original but have the same quantity of molecules loosely reorganized to fix the bad ankles.

I feel that you are describing a golem rather than a zombie. A zombie is a reanimated corpse, and there can only be one copy of the person existing at any time, either alive, or reanimated. Whereas a golem is an animated, anthropomorphic being created entirely from inanimate matter, (more along the lines of what you are talking about). However, both require the application of magic, so both can be dismissed as being possible anyway. And this leads us back to where we started.

I don’t at all how you could make and atom for atom copy of something else and not have it work exactly the same thing. For me, a zombie as used in this philosophical way is equally the same as a 5-sided triangle. I can imaging the words: five-sided triangle, I can imagine the words:a haircut for a green light, I can imaging the words: atom-for-atom zombie without consciousness, but I can’t imagine the thing itself. I suppose people can think this about real people and this leads to slavery and genocides, but those who had thought that way are wrong, there could not be a atom-for-atom copy of a human that was not in fact a human in every way.

"The garbagenous" Instant sub! I love people who make up words to explain something 😂

Hope he's prepared for an unforgettable luncheon

If we can conceive of the zombie, then physicalism _may_ be false. Just because we can conceive of it doesn't mean it's real, any more than unicorns are real just because I can conceive of them. This seems a silly argument, so I probably missed something...