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RichardChappell comments on Causal Reference - Less Wrong
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It sounds like "thinking" and "qualia" are getting the special privilege of being irreducible, even though there have been plenty of attempts to reduce them, and these attempts have had at least some success. Why can't I pick any concept and declare it a bedrock case? Is my cat fuzzy? Well, you could talk about how she is covered with soft fur, but it's possible to imagine something fuzzy and not covered with fur, or something covered with fur but not fuzzy. Because it's possible to imagine these things, clearly fuzziness must be non-physical. It's maybe harder to imagine a non-fuzzy cat than to imagine a non-thinking person, but that's just because fuzziness doesn't have the same aura of the mysterious that thinking and experiencing do.
Erm, this is just poor reasoning. The conclusion that follows from your premises is that the properties of fuzziness and being-covered-in-fur are distinct, but that doesn't yet make fuzziness non-physical, since there are obviously other physical properties besides being-covered-in-fur that it might reduce to. The simple proof: you can't hold ALL the other physical facts fixed and yet change the fuzziness facts. Any world physically identical to ours is a world in which your cat is still fuzzy. (There are no fuzz-zombies.) This is an obvious conceptual truth.
So, in short, the reason why you can't just "pick any concept and declare it a bedrock case" is that competent conceptual analysis would soon expose it to be a mistake.
No, I'm saying that you could hold all of the physical facts fixed and my cat might still not be fuzzy. This is somewhat absurd, but I have a tremendously good imagination; if I can imagine zombies, I can imagine fuzz-zombies.
More than that, it's obviously incoherent. I assume your point is that the same should be said of zombies? Probably reaching diminishing returns in this discussion, so I'll just note that the general consensus of the experts in conceptual analysis (namely, philosophers) disagrees with you here. Even those who want to deny that zombies are metaphysically possible generally concede that the concept is logically coherent.
On reflection, I think that's right. I'm capable of imagining incoherent things.
I guess I'm somewhat skeptical that anyone can be an expert in which non-existent things are more or less possible. How could you tell if someone was ever correct -- let alone an expert? Wouldn't there be a relentless treadmill of acceptance of increasingly absurd claims, because nobody want to admit that their powers of conception are weak and they can't imagine something?