Dear Nathan,You seem to be digging yourself a hole that looks very much like the sort of hole philosophers tend to dig in the sand when building sand castles on their (regular) language holidays. As I indicated before, I think there is an interesting grain of truth in your proposal but it does not have much to do with the rules of conceiving, because we do not know what they are, if there indeed are any.

You start the thread with: 
'Let's say you want to conceive of a zombie world. How do you do this? You have to think of physical stuff like people, who are, of course, zombies. Whatever you are conceiving of, like all the colors on the zombie people, I bet it has phenomenal character.'


So my assumption was that we are talking about us conceiving in this world. So that is the world we are conceiving in. My key point was that what we conceive of does not 'have phenomenal character'; phenomenality is an aspect of our experience in this world that may be determined by the dynamics of the outside world together with our preconscious processing or maybe just the preconscious processing of 'imagining' but at least in a physical approach there is no 'phenomenal character' to the determining dynamic (i.e. physical) world itself.


But then you go on with


'So someone (you) must not be a zombie. Only a partial zombie world is conceivable, where everyone except yourself are zombies.'


If this is still 'you' in this world, fine, but then it seems suddenly to be 'you' in the zombie world. But this is not literally 'you', merely a conception of some sort of pattern of dynamics that corresponds in some unspecified way to those you think underlie your own thinking. One way in which it is clearly not actual you is that it is not the same instance of the dynamics - so in a strong sense I think I would say that no I cannot conceive of myself in a world that is not this one, even if it really does not matter to the argument. You say that you are not getting a mind to leap into another world but it does seem a bit like that. Moreover, is there not an infinite regress here? If I am conceiving of an, other, partial(?) zombie world with me in it similarly conceiving of an, other, partial? zombie world with me... We don't seem to get the conceived me conceiving of the world it is in, at all. The conceiving of the conceived me clearly has to be a quite different conceiving from that of the real me. 


I think there is a more interesting approach than this sand castle stuff. Get to understand how physics works and then start wondering where it may be incomplete, as most physicists will acknowledge it is. (Note that it may be causally complete in an important sense without it being complete in other senses.) As I see it the whole zombie story is designed to refute a 'physicalism' that bears no relation to a 'metaphysics of physics'. Chalmers, if I remember rightly, suggests that the alternatives are dualism or a form of Russellian monism. My understanding of physics is it works best in a metaphysic that is structurally very similar to Russellian monism but in a sense has things the other way around - in terms of the relational and phenomenal. It is pretty much the idea of complementarity and has changed rather little since the seventeenth century and hardly at all from late Leibniz.


Jo