A priori physicalism, lonely ghosts and cartesian doubt

Consciousness and Cognition
Volume 21, Issue 2, June 2012, Pages 742–746
doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2011.02.007

Philip Goff

University of Hertfordshire, Department of Philosophy, de Havilland Campus, Hatfield AL 10 9AB, United Kingdom

Abstract

A zombie is a physical duplicates of a human being which lacks consciousness. A ghost is a phenomenal duplicate of a human being whose nature is exhausted by consciousness. Discussion of zombie arguments, that is anti-physicalist arguments which appeal to the conceivability of zombies, is familiar in the philosophy of mind literature, whilst ghostly arguments, that is, anti-physicalist arguments which appeal to the conceivability of ghosts, are somewhat neglected. In this paper I argue that ghostly arguments have a number of dialectical advantages over zombie arguments. I go onto explain how the conceivability of ghosts is inconsistent with two kinds of a priori physicalism: analytic functionalism and the Australian physicalism of Armstrong and Lewis.

Keywords

Consciousness; Zombies; Ghosts; Hard problem; Physicalism; Conceivability arguments

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381001100033X