[1] For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object, it would not feel any pain, but it would react exactly the way any conscious human would.
Before that, Keith Campbell made a similar argument in his 1970 book Body and Mind, using the term "imitation man".
[7] Critics who primarily argue that zombies are not conceivable include Daniel Dennett, Nigel J. T. Thomas,[8] David Braddon-Mitchell,[9] and Robert Kirk.
[10] Critics who assert mostly that conceivability does not entail possibility include Katalin Balog,[11] Keith Frankish,[12] Christopher Hill,[6] and Stephen Yablo.
[14] In his 2019 update to the article on philosophical zombies in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Kirk summed up the current state of the debate: In spite of the fact that the arguments on both sides have become increasingly sophisticated—or perhaps because of it—they have not become more persuasive.
According to Kind, in her book Philosophy of Mind: The Basics, The Zombie Argument can be put in this standard form from a dualist point of view: Zombies, creatures that are microphysically identical to conscious beings but that lack consciousness entirely, are conceivable.
[26]Galen Strawson argues that it is not possible to establish the conceivability of zombies, so the argument, lacking its first premise, can never get going.
Chalmers writes, "From the conceivability of zombies, proponents of the argument infer their metaphysical possibility"[23] and argues that this inference, while not generally legitimate, is legitimate for phenomenal concepts such as consciousness since we must adhere to "Kripke's insight that for phenomenal concepts, there is no gap between reference-fixers and reference (or between primary and secondary intentions)."
[29] Another response is the denial of the idea that qualia and related phenomenal notions of the mind are in the first place coherent concepts.
Daniel Dennett and others argue that while consciousness and subjective experience exist in some sense, they are not as the zombie argument proponent claims.
The experience of pain, for example, is not something that can be stripped off a person's mental life without bringing about any behavioral or physiological differences.
We may believe we are experiencing conscious mental states when in fact we merely hold a false belief.
Thomas Metzinger dismisses the zombie argument as no longer relevant to the consciousness community, calling it a weak argument that covertly relies on the difficulty in defining "consciousness" and an "ill-defined folk psychological umbrella term".
To show this, he proposes "zoombies", which are creatures nonphysically identical to people in every way and lacking phenomenal consciousness.
[35] Stephen Yablo's (1998) response is to provide an error theory to account for the intuition that zombies are possible.
"[36] The zombie argument is difficult to assess because it brings to light fundamental disagreements about the method and scope of philosophy itself and the nature and abilities of conceptual analysis.
[37]: 448 Moreover, while Chalmers defuses criticisms of the view that conceivability can tell us about possibility, he provides no positive defense of the principle.
Indeed, according to Hill and McLaughlin, the fact that Chalmers concludes we have epiphenomenal mental states that do not cause our physical behavior seems to be a reason to reject his principle.
[37]: 449–51 Frank Jackson's knowledge argument is based around a hypothetical scientist, Mary, who is forced to view the world through a black-and-white television screen in a black and white room.
Jackson initially believed this supported epiphenomenalism (mental phenomena are the effects, but not the causes, of physical phenomena) but later changed his view to physicalism, suggesting that Mary is simply discovering a new way for her brain to represent qualities that exist in the world.
[38] John Searle's Chinese room argument deals with the nature of artificial intelligence: it imagines a room in which a conversation is held by means of written Chinese characters that the subject cannot actually read, but is able to manipulate meaningfully using a set of algorithms.
Searle holds that a program cannot give a computer a "mind" or "understanding", regardless of how intelligently it may make it behave.
Stevan Harnad argues that Searle's critique is really meant to target functionalism and computationalism, and to establish neuroscience as the only correct way to understand the mind.