The Scripture Is False And The Biblical God Is Dead.

[emjay]

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.

I believe his point was that the worlds would have to be absolutely identical in every respect - ie no unobservable differences because that would not be identical... that would just put it into the 'other worlds' category of my third paragraph, even if only subtly - in order to fulfil the requirements the zombie argument, presumably as Chalmers defined it. If we're talking about something else, then that might be a different discussion (ie my zombie concerns didn't necessarily come from Chalmers, maybe yours didn't either... so if that's the case we'd have had different concepts but at the same time never would have been talking about the same thing as everyone else in the first place), but as regarding that, I think TGN has proved it to me that ep is logically incompatible with Chalmers' argument if identical really means in absolutely every respect, seen or unseen. Ie if ep states that x causes y, where x is physical and y is phenomenal, and the zombie argument requires that pz worlds must be identical to ours in every respect, then x must cause y in every pz world to be valid, and therefore there can be no zombies (ie nowhere where x does not cause y). And since I am an epiphenomalist, and can't, at the moment at least, see any other persuasive viewpoint on that score, then I think that's a pretty solid proof, that as far as ep is concerned, pz's are a dead end. Could there be creatures similar to us without qualia? Maybe. But identical to us? I think this proves no.

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.

This one's a bit too much for 1am in the morning so I think I'll think about that one tomorrow But off the top of my head, in my view a pz would report having consciousness, just the same as its consciousness-possessing counterpart, but would obviously not have that experience... so to talk about its 'perspective' is fraught with difficulty and paradoxes etc. That's part of my general confusion on the subject, and where if logical or semantic errors are seeping in, that's where I think they're most likely to be seeping in; in trying to conceptualise stuff like that. So long story short, no idea right now. But maybe tomorrow