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Zombies, Epiphenomenalism, and Physicalist Theories of Consciousness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Andrew Bailey
Andrew Bailey*
Affiliation:
The University of Guelph Guelph, ONN1G 2W1, CANADA
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Extract

In its recent history, the philosophy of mind has come to resemble an entry into the genre of Hammer horror or pulpy science fiction. These days it is unusual to encounter a major philosophical work on the mind that is not populated with bats, homunculi, swamp-creatures, cruelly imprisoned genius scientists, aliens, cyborgs, other-worldly twins, self-aware Computer programs, Frankenstein-monster-like ‘Blockheads,’ or zombies. The purpose of this paper is to review the role in the philosophy of mind of one of these fantastic thought-experiments — the zombie — and to reassess the implications of zombie arguments, which I will suggest have been widely misinterpreted. I shall argue that zombies, far from being the enemy of materialism, are its friend; and furthermore that zombies militate against the computational model of consciousness and in favour of more biologically-rooted conceptions, and hence that zombie- considerations support a more reductive kind of physicalism about consciousness than has been in vogue in recent years.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , December 2006 , pp. 481 - 509
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2006

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