Comment on Zombies Redacted

Mon, 11 Jul 2016 15:55:17 GMT

The usual point of p-zombies is to support non-physicalism. I hope it's clear that these purely-imagined possible-yous don't do that.

(Just as the fact that I can imagine disconnecting all my computer equipment from its electricity supply but having it continue to work doesn't offer any evidence that it doesn't work by electricity; it just means that my imagination is sufficiently coarse-grained that I'm often happy to imagine things that aren't actually possible.)

If you are not a modal realist, I don't think it's at all true that "the main difference for me of possible me from real is that possible me doesn't have any experiences"; a more important difference, surely, is that possible-you exists only inside your head whereas real-you exists in the actual world. And therefore, in particular, despite the "possible" in his name, possible-you is not constrained to actually be possible, unlike real-you.

It also seems to me that saying that possible-you differs from real-you mostly in not having experiences involves a sort of level-confusion. Within your imagination, possible-you has experiences (which is why it will be complaining about the pain as it takes the horrible way home, right?). In reality, possible-you has no experiences -- but also doesn't exist at all.

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