The Assumption Of Zombie And The Conceivability Argument

The proposal of the assumption of zombie is closely related to the prevalence of physicalism. A zombie is a system exactly resembles us in all physical respects but has no mind or conscious experience or qualia. It is obvious that such a system cannot exist actually, but the problem is whether or not the zombies conceived by the philosophers can possess some kind of possibility. It is argued that if zombies are so much as a bare possibility, then physicalism is false and some kind of dualism must be accepted. For many philosophers that is the chief significance of the zombie idea. Opposing the physicalism with the use of zombie also leads to a more universal questions about relations between conceivability and possibility. And zombies also leads to epistemological difficulties: it reinstates the 'other minds' problem.Chalmers renews the concept of zombie when he take it as a refined conceivability argument. The kind of physicalism which opposed by Chalmers entails the impossibility of zombies, while intuitively we feel that zombies are conceivable and thus possible. In the contemporary philosophy of mind, a number of popular arguments against physicalism, such as the knowledge argument, the explanatory-gap argument, and the modal argument, conclude that there is an ontological gap between physical process and consciousness as the epistemic gap between physical truths and phenomenal truths. However, physicalists hold that the epistemic premises do not entail ontological conclusion. Chalmers revises the traditional conceivability argument and argues that the inference from epistemic premises to ontological conclusion is reasonable. His process is to reason first from epistemic premises to modal conclusions (about necessity and possibility), and from there to ontological conclusions. The point of the process is the link between the epistemic domain and modal domain. Chalmers assumes that two-dimensional semantics can rebuild the bridge between conceivability and possibility. This is a real challenge for phycalism if Chalmers is right. Two-dimensional approach directly originates from Kripke's interpretation of the necessity aposteriori which causes the controversy between direct referentialism and descriptivism. Two-dimensionalism distinguishes two kinds of intension so that the terms such as apiori, aposteriori, possibility and necessity can be defined as the different evaluation in possible worlds. To support the conceivability argument, Chalmers developes a version of epistemic two-dimensionalism and defined the modal concept in epistemic terms. In recent years, new debates begin with the rise of two-dimensionalism and the use of new semantic methods and modal concepts. Soames detailedly attacks the descriptive tendency of two-dimensionalism. While Chalmers argues that his epistemic two-dimensionalism can maintain both referentialism and descriptivism.The paper focuses on the analysis of Chalmers's conceicability argument against physicalism and concludes that the refined conceivability argument cannot confute physicalism virtually because of some deficiencies.