this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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philosophy
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Other philosophy communities have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. [ x ]
"I thunk it so I dunk it." - Descartes
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Yeah, it seems like semantics really get in the way of serious consideration of the example, and I don't really think it leads anywhere interesting.
I'm not sure what I can say here other than it isn't necessary to consider P zombies as an argument, but there should be a little bit of willingness to ask what if rather than resorting to intuition to dismiss them. The idea should be to approach this from a position of intellectual curiosity - if it were possible to have a creature that resembled a human in all respects except for the fact that it lacked subjectivity, would we be able to tell the difference? What would we need to know to tell? It doesn't seem sufficient to conclude that certain behaviors are inherent properties of "usness" simply on the basis of intuition, because neuroscience has found that a lot of behaviors that seem conscious and volitional may not, in fact, be so.
Talking strictly in terms of what p zombies can and cannot do feels a bit like asking whether unicorns would be able to fart rainbows if they existed. Do you want them to?
To me, entertaining the thought of a P Zombie is like asking me whether a unicorn can fart: sure why not but does that actually provide any utility to the conversation?
My belief is that consciousness is a result of your physical state, so asking me to make something with my physical state that isn't conscious is like asking me to imagine a computer that doesn't have a processor. That can't be. A computer is defined by its relationship to the processor!
How do we dissect a P Zombie that is fake conscious? How do we even suspect it's a P Zombie? Is the P Zombie dead after I take it's brain out?
I think the idea is designed to get you to move beyond belief and consider your personal epistemology. Sure, consciousness seems central to your behavior, but recent neuroscience research suggests that even some of the behavior that seems conscious might not fully be - in some situations, the consciousness may be providing post-hoc rationalizations of actions that are decided elsewhere in the brain.
On that note, there's probably flaws to the analogy you're using to reject the idea of a p-zombie. If consciousness is a result (your word) of your physical brain-state, then the computer analogy does not hold because processors are not a result of the rest of the physical material that comprises a computer. I can also freely swap processors and still have a computer that functions more or less the same unless I remove a component completely, so while processors are necessary, they aren't sufficient.
That's basically the question of a thought experiment. If it were possible for a being to exist that exhibits human behavior but isn't conscious, how would we be able to tell? What would need to be different? It's pointing to gaps in our current understanding.
It looks like Mark Zuckerberg.
Presumably. The brain is more than just the consciousness, given that people are capable of survival (albeit not independently) while in comas. There's also other examples where consciousness appears to be lost or modified while the brain continues to do its thing - did Phineas Gage stop being Phineas Gage and start being someone else when he lost his frontal lobe? What's going on with sleepwalkers? What about Alien Hand Syndrome?
They aren't gaps to a physicalist though. We would end up dissecting the P Zombies brain and concluding it's literally exactly the same as ours, and he was probably actually conscious.
We could even envision a technology that is able to capture, in data, the entirety of your brain state. We could then take a copy of your brain, and the p Zombies brain, and see if any differences exist. Once we determine that A = A (as the thought experiment claims at least) we would conclude the P Zombie is conscious.
This has actually happened before. People went diving for vital essences and came up with a better understanding of biology instead.
Instead of a computer with no processor we can just boil it down to what I actually think we are: biological agents with a proclivity for homeostasis. You remove the "agency" and you cannot achieve homeostasis. You can't achieve homeostasis you will not be a biological creature very long. The biological creatures that lack agency lose to my lawn mower every spring.
Consciousness simply is agency, which p Zombies lack in the thought experiment, but cannot lack in reality without being BTFO by the weather.