(January 24, 2023 at 7:01 pm)emjay Wrote:(January 24, 2023 at 6:19 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: The zombie proposition explicitly states that the zombie is physically indistinguishable from us. Same is true of zombie worlds. All pz's and z worlds must be physically identical to us and our own, if any such thing exists. That's the entire point of the excercize.
If different worlds and different creatures and different causes obtain different effects, well.....yeah...right? None of those worlds or creatures or causes is a logically conceivable pz or a z world, though. You nailed it, yeah, just by definition of what it means to be an ep, but specifically so in the case of proposed pzs or z worlds.
Okay, I think you've proved your point; pz's are not possible in any world from an ep viewpoint by definition and using the given, identical everythings, definition of the zombie argument.
I'll have to think on whether I still have pz concerns from other perspectives, but yes, that looks pretty solid logic against the possibility of pz's.
And like you say, other worlds with other creatures and other causal structures, would be something else. Maybe interesting in their own right, but not an example of pz and pz worlds as defined.
I disagree. There may be a big bullet to bite here for epiphenomenalists when considering the implications of p-zombies and p-zombie worlds, but I'm not seeing what's logically impossible about them. P-zombie worlds will look physically the same to us, but could have unobservable differences from our world, leading to no qualia in the case of p-zombies.
One difficulty, though, for epiphenomenalists (and perhaps other dualists) here might be that, from the p-zombie's "perspective", they could be really confident that they have qualia (as confident as many of us in the actual world may be), but will nevertheless be wrong. So what then would stop us from being wrong? Especially for epiphenomenalists, this might force them to reconsider whether consciousness don't have any impact on our cognitive states.