Follow-up on P-Zombies @nytimes
Recall from last week, ZombieLaw mentioned a column in the Stone at NYTimes by Gary Gutting about zombie thought experiments hypotheticals regarding philosophical p-zombies. Now, Gutting has a follow-up piece addressing the over 800 comments received on the first one. See “Mary and the Zombies: Consciousness Revisited” by Gary Gutting:
Many comments found both arguments utterly and obviously inadequate. But the dismissive comments often missed important points, as other comments pointed out. In any case, there were a remarkable number of intelligent and perceptive discussions. I can cite only a very small sample of what was said and apologize to the vast majority whose contributions I don’t mention.
He goes on to mention Daniel Dennett and before concluding with link to Robert Kirk’s “Zombies” in Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Gutting writes:
Reflecting on the discussion overall, my conclusion is that neither the Mary nor the Zombie Argument makes a decisive case against physicalism. But the arguments do not make obvious, stupid mistakes. They are based on premises with a great deal of intuitive appeal (that science can’t tell us what red looks like subjectively and that a zombie is logically possible), and these premises seem to lead quite directly to the conclusion that consciousness is non-physical.
