The Scripture Is False And The Biblical God Is Dead.

[GrandizerII]

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

Emjay, having done a bit of research on this, from what I have read, it does not seem like Chalmers is saying that the zombie world is strictly identical to the actual world, only that it is physically identical (in the sense that it is exactly the same in all physical aspects). While Chalmers unfortunately doesn't decisively clarify this in any of the dozen articles I was reading earlier, he does seem to hint at the interpretation I'm suggesting. Here's an excerpt from an article written by Chalmers to illustrate this:

But zombies suggest that materialism must be false. To see this, note that because there is no contradiction in the idea of a zombie, it seems that it would be within God’s powers to create a zombie world: a world that is physically identical to ours, but without
consciousness. If this is right, then even after God ensured that all the physical truths about our world obtained, the truths about consciousness did not automatically follow. After creating everything in physics, God had to do more work to put consciousness into
the world. This suggests that consciousness is something over and above the physical, and that materialism is false

https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/...lmers1.pdf

So it seems we can allow for the zombie world to be different non-physically from the actual, enough so that the zombie world is blocked from allowing consciousness to be a thing in it. In this way, the zombie really is identical to us physically, but lacks qualia because, metaphorically speaking, God did the extra work needed for qualia in the actual world but not in the zombie world.

Basically, if I were to be thrown into the zombie world suddenly, I would then become a zombie. If a zombie were to be thrown into this actual world, they would cease to be a zombie. Or maybe not (if so, disregard this line).

For Chalmers, the point is that if such a world is metaphysically possible, then physicalism must be false because physicalism cannot allow (even as a metaphysical possibility) for a world in which something goes over and beyond the physical. Under physicalism, all possible worlds are strictly physical with nothing over and above the physical.