(April 21, 2014 at 2:34 am)bennyboy Wrote:(April 21, 2014 at 1:52 am)Freedom of thought Wrote: I understand what you are saying, but assuming there can be no such thing as a philosophical zombie is slightly naive. I can easily imagine such a world where only one real mind exists, and the rest are just figments of the existing mind's imagination, it's certainly a possibility. I don't think I live in such a world though. Introducing philosophical zombies into the discussion is usually by theists who are trying to demonstrate that we don't have actual evidence of other minds, yet we still believe they exist.Right. In fact, there clearly IS such a world, and it is a large part of people's lives-- the world of dreams. In some dreams, a person's behavior can be so convincing that you are quite sure the person is real, even though upon waking you realize that probably is not the case. So even an apparent similarity to the self, including both viewed traits and behaviors, is not necessarily a guarantee of good source attribution.
Dreams lack persistence, otherwise we would assume the dream world was just another world. Since persistence is a trait of objects in this world, people in dreams don't display the same properties as people in this world. But it's a good objection. Why don't we treat the dream world as real?