Zombies And Consciousness

ZOMBIES AND CONSCIOUSNESS This page intentionally left blank Zombies and Consciousness ROBERT KIRK CLARENDON PRESS ● OXFORD 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Robert Kirk 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Kirk, Robert, 1933– Zombies and consciousness / Robert Kirk. p. cm. 1. Consciousness. 2. Zombies—Miscellanea. 3. Other minds (Theory of knowledge) 4. Mind and body. 5. Materialism. I. Title. B808.9.K58 2005 126—dc22 2005020194 Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–928548–9 978–0–19–928548–8 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 To Fay This page intentionally left blank Preface Zombies (the philosophical sort: this is not about voodoo) would be exactly like us in all physical and behavioural respects, but completely without consciousness. This seductive idea threatens the physicalist view of the world dominant in philosophy and science today. It has led a number of philosophers to reject physicalism and take up dualism. More surprisingly, it has beguiled many physicalists, who now feel forced to defend increasingly convoluted explanations of why the conceivability of zombies is compatible with their impossibility. But the zombie idea is a major source of confusion and distorted thinking. I have two aims in this book. One is to dispose of the zombie idea once and for all. There are plenty of objections to it in the literature, but they lack intuitive appeal. I have an argument which I think demolishes it in a way that is intuitively appealing as well as cogent. The other aim is to set out an explanation of what it is to be phenomenally conscious. Both aims need to be pursued in the same work, since the anti-zombie argument on its own would have left us still wondering how on earth there could be such a thing as phenomenal consciousness; while my account of consciousness is in the end dependent on the anti-zombie argument. Three things about my approach are distinctive, I