Ghosts v. Zombies

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21459620

Conscious Cogn. 2012 Jun;21(2):742-6. Epub 2011 Apr 2.

A priori physicalism, lonely ghosts and cartesian doubt.

Goff P.

Source

University of Hertfordshire, Department of Philosophy, de Havilland Campus, Hatfield AL 10 9AB, United Kingdom.

Abstract

A zombie is a physical duplicates of a human being which lacks consciousness. A ghost is a phenomenal duplicate of a human being whose nature is exhausted by consciousness. Discussion of zombie arguments, that is anti-physicalist arguments which appeal to the conceivability of zombies, is familiar in the philosophy of mind literature, whilst ghostly arguments, that is, anti-physicalist arguments which appeal to the conceivability of ghosts, are somewhat neglected. In this paper I argue that ghostly arguments have a number of dialectical advantages over zombie arguments. I go onto explain how the conceivability of ghosts is inconsistent with two kinds of a priori physicalism: analytic functionalism and the Australian physicalism of Armstrong and Lewis.