For this week’s installment (woefully late) I am going to dive into the depths of the philosophy of mind. Namely I will be arguing against minds, at least as they have been conceived by many thinkers in the past. To that effect I will start with philosophical zombies.
Zombies were introduced into the philosophy of mind in the 1970’s (e.g. Nagel 1970, Kirk 1974) as an argument against materialism[1]. Current debates on zombies, however, stem from David Chalmers’ detailed exposition of the argument (Chalmers 1996). A simple definition of zombies can be given as follows:
- Zombie: A creature that resembles a human person […] in all physical and behavioral respects but lacks qualia (Kirk 2011).
From this definition it follows that it is not like anything to be a zombie. And what is a quale (pl. qualia), one might ask? Qualia are…
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