Talk:Philosophical zombie

Does not require dualism
It's possible to conceive of a machine built to pass an arbitrarily extended Turing test, to the point that one could interact with it for an extended period of time without realizing that it is simply playing back canned behaviors and responses. This doesn't require there be a soul or spirit separate from the body, consciousness could still be created by some computational process that is merely excluded from this machine.

I personally don't find this argument convincing, but it is a viable one that doesn't require dualism. Examples of such p-zombies in literature include the members of Julian Jaynes' bicameral civilizations, Peter Watt's vampires, and Karl Schroeder's various explorations of non-human-like minds in Ventus, Permanence, and the Candesce trilogy. -- Resuna (talk) 14:09, 5 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Somehow I feel like evoking 'vampires' gets us further away from reality, not closer. Let's forget about the fiction. I have read Jaynes' non-fiction book and it does not postulate any non-material consciousness. It theorizes that schizophrenia is an artifact of evolution of the two brain halves, which Jaynes thought might have communicated with each other via auditory and visual hallucination in primitive humans. As interesting as it is, there are all sorts of problems with that theory, but in no way does it evoke a non-materialist explanation for consciousness, it's just a theory that consciousness was at one time less integrated than it is now. FairDinkum (talk) 09:50, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

An odd point
In the article, it says "A p-zombie may be in every way equivalent to a human being, but only be simulating the exact way a human would react instead of actually feeling emotion". But, isn't that a known mental issue? Not sociopathy, which is different, but I have read about people that have little-to-no emotion, and have some personal experience with one as well. My ex, a paranoid schizophrenic, hated taking her meds for numerous reasons, but one she cited was the fact that her already dullened emotions (flat affect, a thing with schizophrenia) pretty much became non-existent. Just Googling, I find people that describe themselves as having no emotions or barely any and having to fake it to fit in, and it seems more common than just a few people. So, is it just me, or does point seem both ableist (or, if you hate the word, just oppressive towards those with certain mental illnesses, literally saying they're not human) and, because saying people aren't human because of their mental illness is just wrong on so many levels, outright wrong? I'm not sure if there should be a section there explaining all these issues with that idea, but from how I see it, there's a lot of issues with it. --PosthumanHeresy (talk) 03:20, 25 July 2015 (UTC)
 * The original sentence was badly phrased. Only lacking in emotions isn't enough to count as a p-zombie; the lack has to be more categorical; e.g. a complete lack of conscious experience. 141.134.75.236 (talk) 04:16, 25 July 2015 (UTC)

Turing test
Could the Turing test be adapted to p-zombies? Anna Livia (talk) 16:52, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

The quacking zombie
How do the PZ and the Duck Test ('If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.') interact or differ? Anna Livia (talk) 15:00, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

A Different Viewpoint
See a different viewpoint here: Essay:The Death Knell of Dualism? More Than Magnetic Ink (talk) 05:21, 17 October 2022 (UTC)


 * I read (most of) your essay. Since there is not yet a talk page for it, and I don't feel like starting one just to trash it, I'll say my piece here. As soon as you said your defense of dualism is based on Occam's Razor I knew it would go nowhere. Occam's Razor is not even a rule, it's a suggestion for where to look first for explanations of phenomena, and materialist hypothesis is always going to be preferable to non-materialist hypothesis under Occam's Razor, and the same goes for free-will; a lack of a property is always a simpler explanation than conjuring the property is. Your claim that materialists have a burden of proof (under Occam's Razor, no less) to prove the consciousness allows for free-will is false, because it presumes that free will exists, while any dualist hypothesis for the existence of free-will requires an invented force with no known properties except the ones you casually apply to it (eg that it can make free-will happen). Consciousness being an emergent property makes no such claim about free-will. If free will exists, how it can exist is beyond our ability to ascertain without inventing it. It is much more likely that free-will is an illusion that emerges from a whole lot of deterministic variables that we lack the infrastructure to track, than it is an unknown (magical) non-deterministic property that emerges from consciousness. To build modelling infrastructure capable of tracking every deterministic variable in the universe would likely require the use of more energy, material, and probably time than that available in the universe. We may be able to talk ourselves into believing in free-will because we really want to, but we cannot reason our way there. And instead of trying to, a much more interesting essay that you could write would examine why you have a need for this belief. Kudos for resisting the urge to evoke 'quantum woo', though. FairDinkum (talk) 09:36, 14 November 2022 (UTC)


 * I took the liberty of copying your critique to The Death Knell of Dualism? talk page. I plan to respond there, but might not be able to until early December. More Than Magnetic Ink (talk) 03:25, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
 * I have posted my response to your critique on the The Death Knell of Dualism? talk page. More Than Magnetic Ink (talk) 08:19, 17 December 2022 (UTC)