Hi Jason

Thanks for your words of support. Good to know I'm not quite the proverbial voice crying in the wilderness!  I must look up the reference you provide as well.

Yes, I think there are basically two problems with the zombie idea. The first - which I've been harping on for some time now - is that one can hardly talk of a being "minus consciousness" unless one has a sound and persuasive idea of what exactly one is 'minus-ing'. And I have yet to come across one of those...

But the second - perhaps less obvious, but equally damaging, I think, - is that once one tries to imagine what this being would be like in real life (and we can't presumably leave it floating in some half-realised, merely notional state) it just seems unimaginable. The idea seems incoherent. Because to say that a being is "physically identical to a normal human being" can't surely just mean that when we see it from afar, so to speak, it looks like a human being - a store mannequin would do for that.  This being presumably has to walk, talk, express opinions, have what seem to be emotions, appear to feel pain, be susceptible to insults, seem to enjoy praise, etc etc  - exactly like a human being.  But if that's the case, it would not just be indistinguishable from a human being; we could in fact never tell if it wasn't a human being. So we seem to end up in the position that if there were zombies we could never know it (unless perhaps some divine voice from the clouds told us so). It would, ex hypothesi, be something whose existence we could never establish or demonstrate.  (This is presumably why Hollywood move makers used to give their zombies a slightly glazed look: there had to be something to tell you that this wasn't really a human being. But the philosophical definition doesn't allow for that handy little device.)

Things are looking up in the cricket. Seen from an antipodean angle anyway.

DA