I think we are talking past each other. There are various issues in regard to human consciousness. And there is lots of work being done on them. The zombie matter has to do with a very general question: Is human consciousness a particular kind of activity in the brain? Chalmers has offered an argument purporting to prove that it is not.

One of your claims seems to be that this is premature. We need to have a clearer picture of what consciousness is before we can meaningfully ask whether it is something physical or not. Is this what you are saying?

Another of you claims may be that Chalmers’ argument just doesn’t work. There is something basically wrong with it. Is this your view? I will assume that it is.


There are (at least) two broad lines of attack (objections) to Chalmers’ argument. Yours may be one of them. To put it a bit more boldly, the claim is that the alleged notion of a ‘zombie’ is a non-starter - just plain gibberish disguised as a description of a possible creature. Strictly speaking the claim should probably not be that there is no such possible creature but, rather that no coherent description has been offered. (It like saying, “It is possible that there should be ugnuglee glompy dorfs.” No real claim advanced.)  So far as I know, Dennett is the foremost exponent of this sort of line. See:
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness/papers/DD-zombie.html

The other principal line of attack is the one advanced by Scott Soames.  Chalmers really needs his ‘two dimentionalism.’ It is this that (presumably) allows him to go from ‘p cannot be known a priori to be false’ to ‘p is possible’ i.e. ‘p is logically possible’ to (as Soames would say) ‘p is metaphysically possible’. (Well, that’s a crude hint of the issue, I hope.)
Soames has written a lot about two dimentionalism.