Zombies Must Be Dualists: Zombies and Our Philosophy of Mind
I think the author is confusing two different issues: the problem of disproving solipsism and the problem of proving or disproving dualism. It is not true that we must think of zombies as being absolutely identical to &quot;real people&quot; in order for them to be useful in thinking about dualism. They do not have to do exactly what real people do in a given situation. For example, a civilization of zombies might have speech, might even have philosophy, but would probably not talk about consciousness in any form. The author is right that you can&#x27;t think of zombies as acting exactly the same as the corresponding human and yet not being conscious, because consciousness is surely a cause as well as an effect (else we wouldn&#x27;t talk about it, for example). He&#x27;s wrong that you need to think of them that way in order to bear fruit for dualism.<p>I can postulate a universe in which my molecules and everyone else&#x27;s have been precisely duplicated from this universe in physical terms. I can postulate that in that universe there is no such thing as conscious experience; no qualia or whatnot. I can imagine that universe continuing from the moment of duplication onward, proceeding as dictated by the laws of physics. My duplicate in that universe would probably not act exactly as I will, but will certainly act in some way.<p>Simply the act of postulating, of conceiving, of that kind of zombie universe is enough to strongly suggest that consciousness is something outside of the physical. The zombie universe doesn&#x27;t have to be identical in behavior, only identical physically. Because what you&#x27;ve now done is to recognize that a universe in which physical objects and laws are the only elements is a universe in which mental (experiential) phenomena are unaccounted for. You can imagine that those mental phenomena magically, mysteriously re-emerge from the physical, but have given absolutely no reason why they should. Therefore you can equally imagine that they <i>don&#x27;t</i> re-emerge. So whether zombies behave identically with real people or are merely constituted identically with real people, their conceived existence is enough to show that the mental universe—so to speak—is conceptually detached from the physical and therefore a separate domain.