Author's Conclusion
- The zombie argument provokes for the same reason that the larger puzzle of consciousness provokes: it forces us to confront problems that stymied everyone from the ancient Greeks to Descartes and Galileo. Even the most hardened of the hardcore physicalists admit that the puzzle of consciousness is, well, puzzling. The zombie argument, flawed as it is, deserves credit for helping to bring difficult questions into sharp relief, even if it’s not the knock-down argument against physicalism that its proponents imagine it to be.
Author Narrative
- Dan Falk is a Canadian science journalist. His books include The Science of Shakespeare (2014) and In Search of Time (2008). He also co-hosts BookLab, a podcast that reviews popular science books. He lives in Toronto.
Notes
- This is a useful summary of the state of play on Consciousness1 and the Zombie Argument2
- The author seems supportive of Sean M. Carroll, in contrast to Philip Goff & Keith Frankish, and rejects the notion – as do I – that philosophical zombies are really conceivable.
- He also rejects the view – as do I – that consciousness has no physical effects.
- He also introduces an epistemological argument – again one that I agree with – that if some philosopher claimed to have proved that some supposed human person (or an alien that acted like us) was a zombie, we’d have no reason to believe him as we’d be more sure of the consciousness of that individual than of any philosophical argument.
- There are extensions of this argument to Animal Consciousness3, but the author admits that this gets difficult for animals with very different neural configurations to ours – eg. octopuses, which have distributed neural structures. They look conscious to me!
- I wasn’t so sure of the ‘Zombies are liars’ argument: they would claim to have internal phenomenal states when they don’t (otherwise we could tell from their responses that they were Zombies). I just wondered whether words would have different meanings in their world than in ours.
- Also, I don’t think the author agrees with the subtitle, as normally understood. The Zombie TE may make us stop and think, and may remind us that we don’t yet have a mechanism thereby matter generates conscious experience; but the author is a physicalist and expects that it is just a matter of time before physics explains consciousness.
- There were lots of references:-
- Aeon - Frank, Etc. – The blind spot
- "Koch (Christof), Tononi (Giulio), Etc. - Neural correlates of consciousness: progress and problems"
- "Wertheim (Margaret) - I feel therefore I am"
- Aeon: Video - Chalmers: The philosophy of virtual reality
- "Hanlon (Michael) - The mental block"
- "Chalmers (David) - The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory"
- "Frank (Adam) - Minding matter"
- "Goff (Philip) - Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness"
- "Carroll (Sean M.) - Consciousness and the Laws of Physics"
- Euclid's Proof of the Infinitude of Primes (introduced to show that what might seem to be conceivable – for instance that there’s a greatest prime number – can be proved to be impossible, and therefore inconceivable).
- Pigliucci - How to make up philosophical problems and then “solve” them (to show that ‘conceivability establishes nothing’).
- "Falk (Dan) - Armchair science"
- "Dennett (Daniel) - Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking"
- Searle - The Chinese Room - From: Minds, Brains, and Programs (1980) (see "Searle (John) - Minds, Brains, and Programs")
- Philosophy Bites - Daniel Dennett on the Chinese Room
- YouTube: Goff, Frankish & Carroll - Is Consciousness Emergent? (very long and chatty, but looks interesting as it involves the three primary characters mentioned in this paper; the consciousness stuff starts around 17:30, and goes to about 2:04:20).
- Goff & Frankish - Mind Chat
- Carroll - The Zombie Argument for Physicalism (Contra Panpsychism) (this sounds interesting as it seems to be taking the Zombie argument seriously and using it for the opposite purpose than that for which it was designed)
- "Frankish (Keith) - The Consciousness Illusion"
- "Koch (Christof), Tononi (Giulio), Etc. - Neural correlates of consciousness: progress and problems"
- "Goff (Philip) - Panpsychism is crazy, but it’s also most probably true"
- "Carroll (Sean M.) - The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself"
- "Goff (Philip), Seager (William) & Allen-Hermanson (Sean) - Panpsychism"
- Sean Carroll's Mindscape Podcast
- "Martinho-Truswell (Antone) - The minds of other animals"
- "Finn (Suki) - Bun or bump?"
- "Graziano (Michael) - Build-a-brain"
- "Aeon - Video - The odd tale of the clever octopus"
Comment:
- Sub-Title: "The infamous thought experiment, flawed as it is, does demonstrate one thing: physics alone can’t explain consciousness"
- For the full text see Aeon: Falk - The philosopher’s zombie.
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)
- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2026
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)