 The problem of epistemic contact. Just now it seemed that if zombies are conceivable, then epiphenomenalist and parallelist worlds are also conceivable. In that case the friends of zombies must explain how the epiphenomenal qualia in such worlds could possibly be objects of acquaintance, or indeed make any sort of intimate contribution to people’s lives; and here Kirk (2005; 2008) suggests the zombie idea faces a further difficulty. This emerges when we consider such things as attending to, thinking about, remembering, and comparing our experiences: activities that bring us into ‘epistemic contact’ with them. Such activities involve cognitive processing, which in turn involves changes causing other changes. Since epiphenomenal qualia are causally inert, they themselves could not do that processing; so if they actually constitute our experiences (as epiphenomenalism and parallelism imply) then the necessary processing must be done by the body. The trouble is that the zombie story makes it impossible for such processing to put us into epistemic contact with epiphenomenal qualia. This is because the only resources it can appeal to for that purpose are the assumed causation of qualia by neural processes and their isomorphism with them: factors which (Kirk argues) cannot do the necessary cognitive work. If that is right, the notions of epiphenomenal qualia and zombies lead to a contradiction. They imply a conception of consciousness which requires people to be in epistemic contact with their qualia, while at the same time ruling out the possibility of such contact.