You can't argue with a zombie

A redated post.
A paper by Jaron Lanier.

The zombie-world

Imagine a possible world physically identical to this one in which no one is having any thoughts. Particles just move the way they move, but none of the first-person mental states that go with those physical states exist. There are no inner states, just behavior of various kinds that someone might interpret from the outside as being “mental.”


If they are just like us physically, what do we have that zombies don’t have? A soul???