Zombies and microtubules

Zombies and Consciousness

By definition, zombies would be behaviourally and physically just like us, but not conscious. If a zombie world is possible, then physicalism is false. Just as importantly, the seductive conception of phenomenal consciousness embodied by the zombie idea is fundamentally misconceived. One of this book’s two main aims is to bring out the incoherence of the zombie idea with the help of an intuitiv...

Resonance Mixing , “ Dipoles ” , and ‘ Zombies ”

If the lively discussion of the p-w system and the A2 splitting at this conference is any guide, the problems of resonance mixtures will continue to be an active one for some time, Therefore I would like to review here a simple formalism for treating the problem and in particular to emphasize certain points: 1. The parameter which gives the nonorthogonality of the underlying states caused by th...

Transactional Semantics with Zombies∗

Different formal models of transactional memory are required at different levels of the system stack. This paper focuses on the run-time level, where the semantics of individual operations (start, read, write, try-commit) govern the interactions between the compiler and the TM system. For sandboxing TM systems, which allow a doomed transaction (a “zombie”) to continue for some time beyond an in...

Why Zombies Are Inconceivable

I argue that zombies are inconceivable. More precisely, I argue that the conceivability-intuition that is used to demonstrate their possibility has been misconstrued. Thought experiments alleged to feature zombies founder on the fact that, on the one hand, they must involve ®rst-person imagining, and yet, on the other hand, cannot. Philosophers who take themselves to have imagined zombies have ...

Alien-nation: zombies, immigrants, and millennial capitalism.