Assertion: zombie | /r/HasProperty | possible
Facets:
value: genuinely
type: DEGREE
value: in some broader sense
type: OTHER
value: in order to support some form of dualism
type: PURPOSE
value: metaphysically
type: DEGREE
value: really
type: DEGREE
Source sentences:
text: Zombie arguments often support lines of reasoning that aim to show that zombies are metaphysically possible in order to support some form of dualism – in this case the view that the world includes two kinds of substance (or perhaps two kinds of property); the mental and the physical.
text: Zombies might not actually be conceivable or, if they are, just because they are conceivable, that might not mean that they are possible.
text: Stephen Yablo's (1998) response is to provide an error theory to account for the intuition that zombies are possible.
text: It seems that if zombies really are possible, then physicalism is false and some kind of dualism is true.
text: It was claimed that zombies are a counterexample to physicalism in general, and arguments were devised to back up the intuition that they are possible (Kirk 1974a, 1974b: he argued that physicalism commits one to the ‘Entailment Thesis’, by which the purely physical truths about the world entail mental truths by logical or conceptual necessity).
text: The central question, however, is not whether zombies can exist in our world, but whether they, or a whole zombie world (which is sometimes a more appropriate idea to work with), are possible in some broader sense.
text: Therefore zombies are possible.
text: Kirk (1974a, 1974b) attempted to provide such justification, in the form of arguments intended to show that zombies are possible (hence conceivable).
text: The conceivability argument — which assumes physicalism entails that zombies are impossible — purports to refute it by showing they are possible.
text: As we saw, the simplest version of this argument goes: (1) zombies are conceivable; (2) whatever is conceivable is possible; (3) therefore zombies are possible.
text: So we have a parallel argument: (1*) anti-zombies are conceivable; (2) whatever is conceivable is possible; (3*) therefore anti-zombies are possible.
text: If zombies are genuinely possible, then not only is physicalism problematic, so are some widely held views on other topics.
text: But if zombies are possible — requiring the physical world to be causally closed
text: Still supposing zombies are possible, it then becomes hard to see any alternative to parallelism or epiphenomenalism, with the radical revision of common assumptions about mental causation that those views entail.