Response to Thought Experiment 93: Zombies

5/18/2017

Zombies - totally not scary at all.

As an evolutionary philosopher who looks at the entire history of evolution and only sees evidence for physical, natural, non-supernatural things in the universe, I read the following lines from Philosophy Now's article The Zombie Threat to a Science of Mind and I began to get worried:

Many look forward to the day when physicists will resolve these niggling issues and present the public with the Holy Grail of science: a Grand Unified Theory of everything. The hope of many philosophically-inclined scientists and scientifically-enthused philosophers is that this theory will explain the existence and nature of everything there is. Let us call this kind of view ‘physicalism’. Physicalism is a grand and ambitious project, but there is a thorn in its side: consciousness. The qualities each of us encounters in our conscious experience – the feeling of pain, the sensations of biting into a lemon, what it’s like to see red – stubbornly refuse to be incorporated into the physicalist’s all-encompassing vision of the universe. Consciousness seems to be the one bit of left-over magic that refuses to be physicalized. And it’s all the fault of the zombies.

Did that make me worried about the fate of physicalism? Heck no! Instead, it made me worried about the field of philosophy yet again. Let's take a look at this week's thought experiment and then hunt these zombies down.

--------------------------------------------------
Lucia lived in a town where the lights were on, but nobody was ever home. She lived among zombies.
This was not as scary as it might sound. These zombies were not the flesh-eating ghouls of horror films. They looked and behaved just like you and I. They even had exactly the same physiology as you and I. But there was one key difference: they had no minds. If you pricked them they would say "ouch" and wince, but they felt no pain. If you "upset" them they would cry or get angry, but there would be no inner turmoil. If you played them soothing music they would appear to enjoy it, but in their minds they would hear nothing. On the outside, they were ordinary humans, but on the inside, nothing was going on.
This made them easy to get along with. It was easy to forget that they didn't have inner lives as she did, since they spoke and behaved just like ordinary people and that included references to how they felt or what they thought. Visitors to the town would also fail to notice anything strange. Even when Lucia let them in on the secret, they refused to believe her.
"How do you know that they have no minds?" they would ask. "How do you know that other people do?" would be Lucia's reply. That usually shut them up.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 277.
---------------------------------------------------

Baggini didn't cite any sources for this problem, but the greatest popularizer of the idea, David Chalmers, gives us this brief history of philosophical zombies:

As far as I know, the first paper in the philosophical literature to talk at length about zombies under that name was Robert Kirk's "Zombies vs. Materialists" in Mind in 1974, although Keith Campbell's 1970 book Body and Mind talks about an "imitation-man" which is much the same thing, and the idea arguably goes back to Leibniz's "mill" argument. After Kirk's paper, there was hardly any explicit discussion of zombies in the philosophical literature for a long time (although there was quite a lot on "absent qualia", i.e. functional zombies). When I wrote my 1993 Ph.D. thesis, in which zombies played a central role, there was hardly anything out there. But for one reason or another, zombies have risen from the grave in the last few years; and they turn out to be unaccountably well-represented on the web.

Unaccountable is right!

Now, it's mildly fun to go down the path of exploring consciousness and trying to prove that zombies can't possibly exist and therefore prove that consciousness is only a physical phenomenon. I thought about using this post to look into medical conditions where people already act sort of like zombies and see how that might inform us. If you look into the psychological literature on topics such as unconscious phenomena, sleepwalking, automatism, highway hypnosis or, dissociation, you find a whole host of actions where people appear to exhibit normal behavior but they have no memory of doing so. They acted, as it were, with their "lights out." Such behaviors point to at least the transient existence of real life zombies, but because these activities actually all have traceable physical causes or effects, they do not produce philosophical zombies. The subjects never show loss of consciousness without some corresponding change in physical activities.

All of that would lead me to believe there is a strong case to be made for the physical nature of consciousness, but still, can we really rule out ALL possibilities of philosophical zombies? No. Of course not. But that's okay. There are an infinite number of things that we can't rule out as impossible (gods, flying teacups, spaghetti monsters, etc., etc.), but we don't fret about each and every one of them. Chalmers, however, thinks this one is different for some reason. Going back to the Philosophy Now article on this subject, we see why in this summary of Chalmers' points. He says:

We can break down this zombie argument against physicalism as follows:
1. Philosophical zombies are possible.
2. Therefore, human brain states could possibly exist without human conscious states.
3. Therefore, human brain states cannot be identical with human conscious states.
4. For physicalism to be true, human brain states must be identical with human conscious states.
5. Therefore, physicalism is false.

Seriously?? Premise number one has to be allowed because we don't have a full definition of consciousness yet and anything is possible to discover when we don't know the future. That doesn't mean physicalism is false though. It just means physicalism may be false. Conclusion 3, must be rewritten "Therefore, human brain states*may not* be identical with human conscious states." We just don't know yet.

Once again, we see philosophers getting bogged down due to an inherent contradiction with their epistemology. Chalmers starts his argument by saying that our epistemological uncertainty allows zombies to maybe just possibly exist. That's fine. We cannot know what the future will bring. But then he wants to use that inherent uncertainty to arrive at an epistemologically certain statement that "physicalism is false." But if Chalmers were to play by the same epistemological rules from start to finish, he would only ever get to the conclusion that physicalism is possible. Just like zombies. Except, you know, there's all the evidence in the universe so far for physicalism.

I'm not exactly the first person to point this out. Too many physicalists like Daniel Dennett have gone after Chalmers by claiming his physiological zombies are logically incoherent and thus impossible, but that's a fools errand while the science is in its infancy. When you look at those competing arguments for the possibility or impossibility of philosophical zombies, it becomes obvious that both sides are using circular / begging the question fallacies. To claim zombies are possible is just claiming that consciousness isn't physical. To claim zombies are impossible is just claiming consciousness is only physical. So you can't use zombies to say anything new about consciousness. Richard Brown showed this, by proposing "the existence of "zoombies", which are creatures nonphysically identical to people in every way and lack phenomenal consciousness. If zoombies existed, they would refute dualism because they would show that consciousness is not nonphysical, i.e., is physical. Paralleling the argument from Chalmers: It's conceivable that zoombies exist, so it's possible they exist, so dualism is false."

That's very clever, and it hints at the fact that philosophical zombies are neither TRUE nor FALSE yet, which is why the form of Chalmers' argument can be used in either direction. Cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad managed to point this out specifically in his 1995 article, "Why and how we are not zombies." He wrote:

This is ordinary scientific underdetermination: You can always predict and explain a small body of data in lots of ways, most or all of which have nothing to do with reality. But as you predict and explain more and more data, your degrees of freedom shrink and your theory gets more powerful and general. The hope, in all areas of science, is that when it is complete, and predicts and explains all observable data, then your theory will have converged on reality; it will be the true theory of the way things are. [But] it might not be.

So if Brown and Harnad refuted the argument so well, why are zombies still a hot topic? Maybe it's because their arguments didn't follow up with a call for a revolution in epistemology (like I have done), which ultimately allows philosophers to just keep on playing games. I guess that's why philosophers aren't scientists—because they enjoy speculating about the unknown and fighting about what may or may not be there while the evidence is gathered by others. I often find that tedious and pointless though. How many similar conundrums could be imagined about dark matter, abiogenisis, life on other planets, or any of the other great mysteries science has identified but so far been unable to solve? One can imagine an infinite variety of debates about these, all just waiting to fill up philosophical journals. But none of these merely potential occurrences have any weight whatsoever to actually affect our current knowledge. They are observations with an n of zero. So to me, there's really no need to continue running around moaning about them. That'd just be brainless.

14 Comments

Disagreeable Me link

5/23/2017 12:02:32 pm

Hi Ed,

I agree with your analysis for the most part, but I would be a tad more charitable to Chalmers.

It is not exactly that Chalmers is saying that philosophical zombies are possible because we don't know that they are not. Rather, he assumes they are possible because he personally finds it implausible that there could be any sort of hidden logical contradiction in the idea, and he is assuming his audience will agree. He would be the first to admit that the argument does not go through if you do not share his intuitions in this regard.

I agree that the philosophical argument is circular, but it is still somewhat worthwhile in that it manages to restate the case against physicalism in a way which is intuitively appealing to many people. Many people will share Chalmers' intuition that it is implausible that there could be any sort of logical contradiction in the idea of a philosophical zombie, and those people will find his argument persuasive even if they might not otherwise have been inclined to doubt physicalism.

Of course, if Chalmers is wrong (and I believe he is), it's a matter of personal preference whether we ought to congratulate him or criticise him for eloquently advancing an argument which successfully pumps intuitions in the wrong direction.

Ed Gibney link

5/23/2017 01:19:40 pm

Ha! After that great comment, I'm inclined to be even *less* charitable to Chalmers for playing with our intuitions that way. : )

I agree he has hidden his tracks much better than the Philosophy Now article that I quoted would suggest, to the point where Chalmers may actually believe what he says. But truthfully, I'm not always so sure with him.

Thank you for stopping by and leaving a comment! I've seen your work on Massimo's blogs for years and consider it an honour to join him on the receiving end...

Leonard Schulte

7/21/2026 11:56:25 am

It seems to me that being able to feel pain is very essential to animals, including humans, being able to survive. If I step on a nail, cut a finger off, touch a hot cooking utensils, I react fairly quickly. David Chalmers assures us, apparently, that he can imagine zombies who would act the same as we do even though they do not feel pain. It seems to me that he should have to prove this in order to claim that his zombies would react just like humans who do and can feel pain. Indeed, there are actually humans who cannot feel pain and they have to act much differently than the rest of us in order to survive. Their condition is congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP). Of course, physically they are different than 'normal' human beings but their existence makes the idea that somehow feeling pain is not part of our physical make-up very suspicious. I suspect that the ability to feel pain has been an essential product of evolution and that any species that could not feel pain simply could not have survived or physically they would have to be much different than most animals on earth.

Chalmers also needs to explain to us how these zombies could even come up with the concepts and words for mental states if they do not have these mental states.

I think that the whole discussion about zombies is fueled by the desire to escape a physicalistic understanding of human beings. And I do think that as science finds out more and more about the world, philosophers are finding that they are running out of any 'real' topics. So they will seize anything that seems to make their discipline seem relevant.

Another strange consequence of Chalmers' ideas is that if he is corrent then consciousness makes not the slightest difference to the world we live in. We would be behaving exactly the same even if we were not conscious. We are all just zombies who just happen to be conscious. Our observations are just floating above the physical world. They make no difference in the physical world apparently since we would be doing exactly the same as we are now if we lacked consciousness. But this just seems false, if not absolutely absurd. If I imagine that the lights suddenly go off in me, it seems preposterous that my physical body would continue behaving just as it had been. All of our experience suggests otherwise.

Chalmers owes us an explanation for the existence of consciousness. It it is not necessary for our physical evolution then why do we have it? Seems like an excuse to include a deity in the picture.

Furthermore, I do not believe in free will but lots of philosophers do, including many who are very attracted to Chalmers' zombie argument but it is difficult to see how we could possibly have freeve free will in a world in which consciousness plays no role in how our bodies function.

Anyway, I agree whole-heartedly with your claim that the attractiveness of Chalmers' ideas to philosophers does not speak well of philosophers.

Ed Gibney link

7/21/2026 06:28:42 pm

Thanks for the comments Leonard. I wrote this post quite a while ago and since then I have done a huge series on consciousness. I really dove into David Chalmers' views in the FAQ post at the end of my series. You can see that here in questions 27-41:

https://www.evphil.com/blog/consciousness-24-the-faqs-of-consciousness

I would also really recommend Dan Dennett's paper "The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies." He actually made many of the same points that you do here.

https://dl.tufts.edu/concern/pdfs/6m312182x

Leonard Schulte

7/23/2026 12:29:13 pm

Thanks Ed for the links to your material and to Daniel Dennett's. I have always been a bit suspicious of Dennett after I read his defense of free will. It seemed to me that he was using arguments that he would condemn if theists used the same arguments for God's existence.lol But I know he is a physicalist when it comes to the mind.

Ed Gibney link

7/23/2026 06:34:12 pm

I tend to side with Dennett about us having the "free will worth wanting." I've read lots of his arguments about this and find it very different than religious arguments for gods. I have written quite a lot about free will too, including a review of Dennett's book with the free will skeptic Greg Caruso. I know Greg a little and he helped me get that published in a good magazine even though I ended up siding with Dennett in the review. I've also covered the debates on free will between Sam Harris and Scott Barry Kaufman (which Scott has told me in private he liked). You can find all of that and more in the last thing I've written about free will (so far).

https://www.evphil.com/blog/not-my-final-thoughts-on-free-will

Leonard Schulte

7/25/2026 02:10:38 pm

I kind of skimmed over your article on free will so I am definitely not claiming to have refuted your ideas on free will. But I have always thought that compatibilism is like trying to have one's cake and eat it at the same time. I said that Dennett sounded like a theist when arguing for free will because his article that appeared in the journal Free Inquiry because one of the reasons he gave for believing in free will was that it was simply too important not to believe in. I noticed that you also pointed out the dangers of not believing in free will. But I could easily imagine someone giving the same reasons for believing in God. Dennett gave one other argument in that paper which I considered fallacious but can't recall it now.

Anyway, I am not here right now to argue against free will but rather to recommend reading Robert M. Salposky's book, Determined. He is a neroscientist who lays out what happens a second before a human makes a choice, two seconds before, a year before, decades before, millions of years ago, etc. All of it leaves very little (he and I would say no room) room for free will. It has always seem to me that in order to have free will, one must inexplicably and non-causally bring something to the choice that one is making that simply is not there. One would be doing magic.

Anyway, I certainly understand why people believe in free will and why they want to believe in free will. And it is certainly made easy by the fact that one can look at a person who is making a decision about whether to take a twenty dollar bill that another person unknowlingly drops in a parking lot or to let them know they dropped it. There certainly isn't any outside force forcing a decision. But we are not seeing what is going on inside the person and I am pretty certain that whatever 'choice' the person makes that the only way they could have done something different is if there were some difference in what was going on in their brain and body.

I appreciate your responses and I will try to look at your defense of free will in more detail sometime. But of course, I am not hopeful that I will be convinced. lol

Ed Gibney link

7/25/2026 03:08:20 pm

That's all great, Leonard. I will say that I have read and listened to a lot of what Sapolsky has said about this topic. (As well as lots more from other determinists.) And I basically accept everything that has been said about determinism. And yet, there is more to the argument than Sapolsky (who is not a philosopher) has realized. We compatibilists do NOT believe in the free will that he and others (and you?) are arguing against. That kind of "libertarian free will" is what Dennett has called "panicky metaphysics". So, you are not wrong that we "want to have our cake and eat it too." I just think you maybe have't heard all the arguments for how we actually define cake! : )

All of those things about the universe leading up to our decisions are true. And yet....we exist as the locations of choices that are made and no one else can predict or exert control on these choices. So, I describe this by saying that we are a kind of will that is embedded in a (likely) deterministic universe. We certainly don't stand apart from all of that in any kind of free and completely independent manner. But there is something worth holding on to for this "free will worth wanting" that explains how we are the locations of the choices that are made, and are also therefore the locations for moral responsibility as well as the education that can influence our future actions to improve them. I think that's a better way to approach this issue than to overthrow all the history of moral responsibility and just say "the universe since the Big Bang made me do it."

Now, I know Greg Caruso is about to release a book about "how to live well without free will" and I will read that with interest to see if that provides a better way to think about this issue. But for now, I am happy to redefine free will in a way that makes it compatible with determinism and also with the moral responsibility that I think it makes sense to say we have. When Dennett says this type of free will is too important not to believe in, this is what he means. By itself, that would indeed be a lame argument along the lines of what people say about gods. But it's just a part of his larger argument for what "free will" really, really means and why it's important to hold onto that notion. If you want to get rid of it, you really need to provide a better way to run a society and a justice system. Caruso is working on that, but I personally think it's unnecessary. I like the compatibilist project better. But I'm happy to see Caruso (and others) working on this to help all of us get rid of silly notions about free will and retributive views on souls and sins and who "deserves" punishments and why. I think we compatibilists and determinists can work together to get rid of those kinds of free will arguments. You don't have to be convinced of my arguments to agree with me that those types of free will believers are wrong. : )

Leonard Schulte

7/25/2026 09:32:06 pm

I may be misunderstanding what you mean by location but it seems to me you are talking about being a self. And indeed it seems to me that anyone who believes that we have free will (of any kind) has to believe that we are selves that plays some role in the decisions that we make. But I believe that believing in a self is similar to believing in God or immaterial consciousness. One simply has no evidence for the existence of this self.

I used to teach intro to philosophy classes and would ask them to consider this: Suppose that I had been born to Hitler's parents, had exactly Hitler's genes, had exactly everything that happened to Hitler happen to me, lived in exactly the same historical setting Hitler grew up in, what possible reason could I have for thinking I would have become anything other than Hitler. You talking about learning but learning is always done under certain circumstances and with certain conditons taking place in the person determining what is learned. Learning is always circumscribed by circumstances and conditions over which one had absolutely no control.

Ultimately I think you will find a way to believe in any kind of free will that makes it possible to hold people morally responsible for their actions. First, i do not see how compatiblist free will gives us moral responsibility, second, I think people are looking at whether people are free just from the lack of external restraints and not paying attention to internal restraints; and third, I think that the idea of moral responsiblity allows us to make judgments about other people that we are not in a position to make. We are essentially saying that if we had been in the same situation as the person we are judging that we would have behaved differently. But what if we had been that person, had that person's background, etc? We are making a claim that is unwarranted. It would be better, I think, to see human behavior as just as determined as the weather and to try to understand human beings rather than morally judge them. 'Moral fact' are, as David Hume would say, just projections of our sentiments onto the world. Philosophers have unsurprisingly tried to determine moral truth by invoking God, reason, pleasure, happiness, etc. and no moral truth has yet been found. I am pretty sure moralities are fictions and so inventing another fiction, free will, to hold us humans responsible for fictions is a serious mistake. Again, we need to understand human beings rather than judge people.

It is ironical and revealing that the more details that we know about why a person did something, the less likely we are to say that they acted freely. The fact that the less we know about another person, the easier it is to say that the person acted freely does not speak well of free will.

Sorry, this is not very well organized but hope you get the basic idea; that idea being mainly that morally judging people morally may be one of the biggest mistakes we humans are making. We certainly need to defend ourselves against certain actions by other humans beings but we need to do it with pretty much the same attitude as we would protect ourselves against other natural forces.

Ed Gibney link

7/26/2026 08:21:05 am

We're getting further and further off track from the zombies in this post, but let me make a few brief comments.

1. It's really not helpful to accuse me and Dennett of arguing like theists. Our positions couldn't be further from theirs so I will immediately turn off and reject what you say about something if it includes that accusation.

2. This reflex to see our arguments like theistic ones actually seems to betray a black-and-white, all-or-nothing kind of essentialism in your thinking. Everything is either hard determinism or magical gods to you. But Darwin showed us that species are continual shades of grey everywhere, and I argue that that is the same for metaphysics, epistemology, morality, politics, and the rest of philosophy. See Dennett's article "Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism" for more on this.

https://www.evphil.com/overdue.html

3. So, yes, there are selves, but they are not carved out individual magic souls. They are better described as permeable communities with just enough structure and temporality to deserve the label of a self. The world is not an undifferentiated mass, which is what would be required to actually say "there are no selves". Like cake and free will, the definition of the self matters. It is not a black and white thing to me. It is a grey evolutionary kind of thing that requires an understanding of all 4 of Tinbergen's 4 questions — function, mechanism, ontogeny, and phylogeny. But once you grasp all of those issues, you can see what I mean by a self.

4. So, "you" would not be "you" if you went through all of Hitler's formative experiences. You would be Hitler. And all of the same condemnations would apply. To treat Hitler the same as a hurricane is to trivialize what life and humans are. We are not unthinking, unresponsive physical phenomena all the way down. If you truly believed this, you wouldn't argue with me. I have honestly never met a determinist who takes their views to the logical conclusion that they think they do. Sapolsky admits he struggles with this. And so does Harris.

5. Accepting all of this gives me more compassion and understanding for Hitler and other transgressors of societal norms and the definitions of morality that I have put together. By believing in the evolutionary development of selves, I believe in the possibility of reform and improvement of humans. I do not believe in that for hurricanes and floods. There is a difference here and that is what I mean when I say a self has moral responsibility. Please do not take it further than that and say I believe in gods. I don't.

Leonard Schulte

7/26/2026 02:09:51 pm

Good reply. A bit stern when you made your point about me accusing you and Dennett of believing in gods but I will accept that.

You make a good point about Darwin's theory allowing for degrees of differences and that this certainly seems in humans to allow for a greater sense of being a self. But David Hume would say that this self is a fiction created by our brains and there are scientific studies that would seem to support this. And this fictionalizing of the self is certainly enabled by language and our ability to use the word 'self'. But while Darwin's theory allows for degrees of differences, it does not allow for the breaking of physical laws and it seems to me that what you and Dennett are asking us to believe is that though the external and internal events going on in a person led them to do x they can be held morally responsible for doing x because it certainly seems like they could have refused to do x. But it just seems to me that the only way they would been able to not do x is to have broken laws of nature in order to do so. It seems to me that you and Dennett are asking us to believe is that while we humans are determined we are just not as determined as the rest of nature. But it seems to me that this is to give up determinism (which then means that the theory is not really compatibilism) and I just don't see how the increasing complexity of human brains ends up giving us any more freedom than any of the other life forms have, expecially since it is brain that is increasingly complex.

I certainly admit that it is not easy to believe that we do not have free will. I still judge myself and others but I do think I do it less frequently. But just because it is to give up the belief in free will doesn't mean that we do have free will.

I think those who believe in free will should reflect on the fact that they really do not want to relinguish their belief in free will and that this sends them out looking for whatever reasons they can find to believe in free will. I don't think that the evidence leads to the belief in free will; I think that the belief in free will leads to the reasons to believe in free will. But humans are notoriously good at finding reasons to believe things they find themselves believing in. Studies with people who have had split brain operations find that one side of the brain will invent a story to explain something that the other side of the brain has seen even though that story is completely false.

I would love to believe in a god, in an afterlife, in souls, in free will, in moral truth but so far the evidence for these entities is seriously lacking, these entities do not ultimately make sense, and the evidence for a completely physical world seems overwhelming.

Thanks again for making me think more about these subjects. I am thinking about writing an essay entitled: "Why no moral judgment is warranted."

Ed Gibney link

7/26/2026 02:44:08 pm

Well, good luck with that essay. I think you should write it and continue the discussions about this subject. I don't think you've fully grasped my position yet but I'll just say that selves and moral desert also come in gradations of grays so it's worth thinking about the differences in these concepts that make meaningful distinctions between individuals in the vast and diverse world we live in. I have thought a lot about these and have never once thought about breaking laws of physics to hold my positions. I would recommend Dennett's paper "Some observations on the psychology of thinking about free will" for more reflection.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2008-01933-012

I'm glad to hear you admit that you do judge people while also relinquishing hope in gods, souls, and afterlives in this (as far as we can tell) physical universe. On that we can agree fully and therefore align ourselves on very important actions. Cheers.

Leonard Schulte

7/26/2026 07:48:15 pm

Sorry Ed. I was going to just thank you for the conversation and sign off but then I read Dennett's Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism. Towards the end of that article he present an argument by Galen Strawson against free will and he attacks the third premise of that argument. He thinks that even if we have no control over what happened to us when we were fetuses, small children, we still at some point begin to have some control over how we respond to the world. But he doesn't show us how or when that takes place. Instead he presents a case where someone creates a robot and decides to release it into the public even though he hads not ensured that the robot will not do harm. Dennett thinks that in the case where harm is done he cannot plead that he is not morally responsible for releasing the robot. Certainly, that is how most, if not all, of society will view the matter. But the question is: Is the person morally responsible? Dennett needs to look at the possible reasons why the person released the robot. One of these might be that he would make a lot of money releasing him and given his background, that consideration drowned out everything else. But suppose that this 'greed' is fully determined by things that happened in his childhood and there is simply no way, given his history, that he could have changed this? Dennett needs to look at what is going on in each and every one of us and shown that even though such and such things have a history of causes that go back to events over which we certainly had no conrtol that we could have made changes. He just had not done that so I do not see how he has shown that premise three is false. Two people are addicted to alcohol. One overcomes the addiction; one does not. The best explanation is that they are two different people and had different causal forces going on within them. It is not that they were in identical places but that one was able to begin slowly making changes out of exactly the same physical forces. Anyway, I was not impressed by Dennett's arguments. He simply appeals to what most humans would say about moral responsibility but that is not good evidence for the existence of free will. Again, most humans would say that there is a god but that doesn't prove it.

Ed Gibney link

7/27/2026 07:49:55 am

I asked you politely not to liken these arguments to theist ones but you've done it again. So, I have to conclude that you are hurling insults now and are close to deserving the same in return.

There has never been evidence for the existence or actions of gods. There is infinite evidence for individual beings walking around and telling one another that they are making decisions. There is an enormous difference here that you would do well to recognize.

Your arguments are way too simplistic to accept. They could just as easily be applied to the emergence of life. E.g.: the universe started with just physics. At no point was anything magical put in; it's just been physics all the time. So....there is no such thing as biology and life.

This is nothing but the dumb end of the Sorites Paradox. One grain of sand is not a heap. Adding one grain of sand does not make a heap. Repeat, repeat, repeat..... 10 billion grains of sand do not make a heap. Do you see how stupid that final claim would be?

So when you say Dennett "doesn't show us how or when that takes place", you are simply repeating this mistake and asking for the exact location of a bright line that doesn't exist. Phenomena emerge gradually in nature and it helps enormously to recognize this.

What I have found in the history of discussing this subject is that hard determinists often have something awful in their background that they are ashamed about. They find comfort in giving away their responsibility for this. But it doesn't really make it so. The responsibility is built together out of the influences of their past and the actions that they have taken. All of that "deserves" blame. Not the individual alone, nor their environment and genes alone. But all of it. That is the compatibilist position. I hope I have made that clearer now.

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.

Response to Thought Experiment 93: Zombies

Leave a Reply.

Subscribe to Help Shape This Evolution

Blog Philosophy

Archives