The zombie argument attempts to argue from the conceivability of zombies to the possibility of zo... more The zombie argument attempts to argue from the conceivability of zombies to the possibility of zombies, and from the possibility of zombies to the falsity of physicalism. Although the argument has been around for a relatively long time, it was not until David Chalmers published The Conscious Mind in 1996 that philosophers started to take zombies seriously again. In a bid to furnish independent support for key premises in the zombie argument, Chalmers published a paper in 2002 attempting to establish an entailment from one kind of conceiving to one kind of possibility. In this thesis, I raise concerns with Chalmers’s conceivability apparatus, and attempt to render his zombie argument against physicalism toothless. It should be noted from the outset that I do not intend to engage in metaphysical debates about the nature of consciousness; I intend only to show that Chalmers’s version of the zombie argument fails to bring a convincing case against physicalists, even with his conceivability apparatus in place.
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Papers by Eugene Yao