Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal

Volume 24, Number 1, 2003

Zombies Begone!
Against Chalmers' MindiBrain Dualism

Wallace Matson

Like Berkeley's Three Dialogues, David Chalmers' now celebrated

book' makes for a good read as it leads us down the garden path, It is
written with a like enthusiasm, and for the most part in a clear and
forthright style. The author is not afraid of candidly drawing the conse-
quences of his contentions ("biting the bullet"), He takes consciousness
seriously, according to his lights. And one must admire his insouciance
in printing the Calvin & Hobbes cartoon strip2 that (as we shall see)
pulls the rug out from under him.
Chalmers writes (CM 22) that "[c]onscious experience is always tied
to cognitive processing, and it is likely that in some sense it arises from
that processing." Here he is on the right track. If only he had stricken
out the words "always tied to," he would have been entirely right, and
could then have omitted as redundant the remainder of the sentence
after the comma; and, indeed, the rest of the book. Alas.

1. Revisionism

What Chalmers has produced-most surprisingly, for the end of the

20th century-is a revisionary metaphysics. Such systems are intrigu-
ing, exciting even, as they shake us up. Here, can't you see, you've been
looking at things all wrong! This is the way they really are!
Descriptive metaphysicians such as Aristotle, Locke, and Spinoza
aim at articulating world views that set out explicitly what they take to
be the presuppositions ofthe informed common sense oftheir time, par-
ticularly the best validated results of the natural sciences. The aim is
clarification and systematization. On the other hand, revisionists like
Plato and Berkeley conceive of themselves as having had insights into
the true nature of reality that have not been given to others, and their
task as that of correcting, in a fundamental way, the current outlook on
how things are. Typically they declare that science is all very well but

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must be kept in its place. The metaphysical revisionist's aims are to

turn the hitherto accepted conceptual world upside down and to pro-
duce something like a cataclysmic paradigm shift. Plato with the
Forms, Leibniz with the Monads, Berkeley with his Ideas-are all
great metaphysical revisionists. And now Chalmers presents us with
floating phenomena: "Consciousness," taken so seriously as to be
exalted far above the humdrum world of causation and explanation.
Revisionary metaphysical systems, instead of being based on broad
surveys of facts, typically rest, like inverted pyramids, on a single lumi-
nous (alleged) truth, the significance of which has been overlooked by
everybody else. For Plato it was that meaning is naming. For Leibniz it
was that whatever is complex must be composed of simples. For
Berkeley, that we perceive not things but ideas. From these simple
beginnings came Plato's two-tiered world, Leibniz's "tables as colonies
of souls" (as Russell described it), Berkeley's abolition of matter.
Chalmers' epiphany is: zombies are logically possible. 3
Sadly, the history of philosophy shows that all revisionary systems
are wrong. That does not mean they have no value. They stimulate
detection of ground-floor mistakes: in Chalmers' case, that logical possi-
bility is a kind of possibility, like physical possibility but at a higher (or
lower?) level; and that in some Clintonian sense of "are," there are pos-
sible worlds besides the real world.

2. The Argument

Chalmers's metaphysics entails a breathtaking rejection of intentional

causation and explanation. We are told over and over that conscious-
ness, which the author also over and over tells us he-almost alone--
"takes seriously," is "explanatorily superfluous"-everything in the
physical world would go on just as it does if there were no conscious-
ness. As long as the neurons fire properly, Joan of Arc will get burnt
and the Sistine Chapel will get painted, though Joan will feel nothing
and nobody will ever have either a religious or an aesthetic experience.
For this view there is no precedent in the history of philosophy, as far
as I know. 4
That a zombie is logically possible means that there is a possible
world containing a zombie (an animal just like us physically, and
behaving just like us, but devoid of consciousness). Chalmers knows
there is such a possible world because, following Kripke, it is just obvi-
ous that there is nothing self-contradictory in the concept of a zombie,
and every non-self-contradictory entity is, by definition, a denizen of
some possible world. He has challenged doubters who think there is
something self-contradictory about a zombie to specifY the flaw, and no

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one has done SO.5 That is the whole argument. Non-self-contradictory =

logically possible = actual in some possible world. Not actual in this
world, of course,6 for in this world there are "bridge laws" that tack con-
sciousness onto neuron firings and so forth. But these uniquely "psy-
chophysical" laws are empirical, so there are possible worlds where
they don't obtain, and that is enough to show that "the phenomenal" is
detachable from "the psychological," the goings-on in the brain. If so,
and given that the split leaves all the executive powers on the "psycho-
logical" side, then consciousness is not needed to explain behavior, and,
indeed, could not do so. Zombies (presumably) did not paint the Sistine
Chapel, organize Dachau, or raise the prime interest rate; but there is
a possible world just like this one except that Michelangelo, Hitler, and
Greenspan and the other ten billion humanoids (plus all the beasts as
well) were never conscious. And evolution, in that world, led to the neu-
ron firings that guided the brushes, cattle cars, and mortgage signings
exactly as here. 7
The notions underlying this world-view include three kinds of possi-
bility and necessity: logical, physical, and metaphysical; plus "law of
nature." In discussing them I shall begin with a bit of history, the rele-
vance of which I hope to make apparent later.

3. The Creation of Possible Worlds

Chalmers says "the notion of a logically possible world ... is something

of a primitive" (CM 66) which "is useful to think of ... as a world that it
would have been in God's power (hypothetically!) to create, had he so
chosen" (CM 35; he goes on to say that "a male vixen is logically impos-
sible ... a flying telephone is logically possible"). "[E]very conceivable
world is logically possible." (CM 66)
By claiming this, Chalmers makes contact with the history of philos-
ophy (and theology). The idea oflogical possibility was generated in the
medieval controversy about God's omnipotence. It was agreed that
omnipotence didn't mean God could make a contradiction true. 8 Yet
that was not really a limtation on His power, since contradictions are
nothing God either could or could not make so, since they assert some-
thing and then immediately take it back, in the result describing noth-
ing.
Medieval philosophy also incubated the notion of Law of Nature, in
the physical sense in which we speak of e = mc2 as a law of nature.
This locution, never used by the Greeks,9 started out as a full blown
theory. In Genesis 1, not only does God create the things that make up
the world, He tells them explicitly, in a few instances anyway, how to

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behave, e.g., "Be fruitful and multiply." It is basic to the Mosaic outlook
that the existence of the world is the result of God's command; and so is
how things are to behave (the Laws of Physics) and how they ought to
behave (the laws of morality). This is not how other peoples, including
the Greeks, looked at things. Their gods (or the ancestors of their gods)
produced the world, but by honest toil, not by issuing commands. 10 We
still speak of the planets as "obeying" Kepler's Laws. For us this is a
metaphor, on the model of the citizen obeying the prescriptions of the
traffic code. But is it a dead and harmless metaphor? The textbooks
point out that laws of nature are descriptive whereas human (or divine)
laws are prescriptive, and that is supposed to take care of it.
Nevertheless, major metaphors seldom die altogether; they may be all
the more misleading just because they are no longer recognized as
metaphorical. This is the case with "Law of Nature":. it is still at its
baneful work in the Chalmers version of Genesis, revised and speeded
up to three days instead of six: First day, the things; second day, the
laws they are to obey; third day, consciousness. While Chalmers brings
God into his metaphysics only heuristically, he takes literally and seri-
ously the distinctions implied in this sequence. There could be worlds
with the same sorts of things as in this one, but in which those things
behaved quite differently-flying telephones for example. This is what I
mean by saying that the metaphor of "Law of nature" as God's com-
mand lingers on. You and I, transported to Saudi Arabia, will behave
differently because we will be obeying different laws. It is in these
terms and in accordance with this model that Chalmers distinguishes
"structure" (things) and "dynamics" (laws), which he claims are the two
distinguishable and separable factors in physics, including brain physi-
ology or "psychology" as he confusingly calls the material side (portion?
aspect?) of the mind.
This is an untenable distinction. It makes no sense to suppose that
God might create the planets on Monday, warehouse them overnight,
and come back Tuesday morning to endow them with gravity. To create
planets is to create gravitating bodies. To be sure, maybe ''logically"
God could create big spherical gizmos that didn't gravitate, but they
wouldn't be planets. They would be shplanets (to adopt Gil Harman's
useful "sh" prefix)-and even so they would have to "obey" some laws or
other from the first moment, even if they just sat there-and whatever
"laws" they "obeyed" would be inextricable from their shplanetary, if
temporary, natures. To put the point more succinctly, there is no real
distinction between what a thing is and what it does (can do). Things
can't have the same structures (all the way down!) but different dynam-
ics. Or, to lapse into what I gather has lately become the preferred
idiom, dynamics are supervenient on structure.

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This difference between Greek and Hebrew-the order of the cosmos

as expression of the inherent nature of things vs. the order of the cre-
ation as obedience to God's Law-is a far more significant difference
than that between polytheism and monotheism. With the triumph of
Christianity the Hebrew conceptual scheme supplanted the Greek, this
being the origin of the expression and concept "Law of nature." This is
the reason why when, in the later middle ages science on the Greek
model began to stir again after a millennium of slumber, scientists and
philosophers, most of whom kept their day jobs as theologians, con-
ceived of their inquiries-into the rainbow, for instance-as attempts to
determine the laws that God had prescribed for His creation.
This way of looking at nature had consequences undreamt of in
Greek philosophy. One was the contingency of the world. God in no
sense had to create the world as He did, so there could have been a
world very different from this one, had He chosen. Indeed, there being
no limits on what an Omnipotent Being could create, there were "infi-
nite possible worlds." This was not a Greek idea. There were Greek
speculations about other worlds, but that is not the same thing: it is the
difference between present-day searches for other, possibly inhabited,
planets, on the one hand, and, on the other, "possible world semantics."
Before God's choice, all the possible worlds-including this one, the one
that eventually got the divine nod-were distinct objects of God's
thought, and so, all of them had a sort of shadowy Meinongian reality.
Thus one could speak intelligibly of the different characteristics ofvari-
ous possible worlds. According to the Mosaic way of looking at things,
they could differ from each other in containing different objects, or in
containing the same objects which, however, behaved in obedience to
different laws; or in both ways at once.
This is the source of the notion of logical possibility/impossibility,
another corollary of God's omnipotence, not found in Greek philosophy.
Greek notions of possibility and necessity presupposed the actual
world-to the Greeks a redundant phrase in any case. Necessity was
simply what "could not be otherwise."
In sum, the notions of a) the contingency of the world; b) infinite pos-
sible worlds; c) logical possibility (as distinguished from" physical"); d)
distinction between things and what they do; and e) laws of nature,
owe their origins and, at least at their inception, their justifications to
the Mosaic conception of the world as created and directed by an
omnipotent, intelligent, and willful God. They are part of this world-
view; they were not part of the Greek world-view. When Newton wrote
that "[tlhis most beautiful system ofthe sun, planets, and comets, could
only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and pow-
erful Being," he was buying into this scheme. So was it with Leibniz

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when he showed how God must have chosen to create the "best of all
possible worlds."

4. Consciousness Day

The crucial divide, however, in the Chalmersian Genesis is not between

the first and second day, between things and laws, but between the sec-
ond and third-before and after consciousness. The first and second
days get the physical system all set up. If God rested after the second
day, all the physical structures and dynamics would be in place. So all
the physical objects, and all the events they took part in, would be just
what they are, and would go on just as they do, in this world (the one
we live in). This describes all animals, including us, for they and we,
physically considered, are nothing but structure and dynamics, all
taken care of already. In other words, at the conclusion of the second
day God had finished creating a world of zombies.
If that is so, what then would God's point have been in going ahead
on the third day to create consciousness? Chalmers does not tell us. If
the Supreme Being-was He conscious?-had never got around to mak-
ing people conscious, they still would have screamed if bound to stakes
and set afire, but not in agony-they would not really have felt any
pain. Now, after the work ofthe third day, they would. That would be
offset to a certain extent by the circumstance that now they would not
merely "ooh" and "aah" when drinking a fine Bordeaux or having great
sex; they really would be experiencing pleasure. But on balance who
could gainsay Schopenhauer, who would have regarded this addition-
this kind of "taking consciousness seriously," namely, creating pain and
tacking it on to behavior-as profoundly Satanic?
Well, after all, it is consciousness that Chalmers takes seriously, not
God. And to take consciousness seriously seems for him to amount sim-
ply to the insistence that it is there-not to impute any point to it. This
is a quintessentially fin-de-XXe-siecle sensibility. Well, maybe Mother
Nature occasionally does some things in vain; But this? Why should we
not rather suppose that consciousness, instead of being something only
dangling from the executive transactions of the brain tissues like tin
cans behind a wedding limousine, is identical to (some of) those trans-
actions; and, being identical to what admittedly has causal powers, is
itself a causal power? That pain, for example--the conscious "phenome-
nal" feeling, not the (allegedly) merely physical and unconscious "psy-
chological" stimulation of C-fibers-is the warning system without
which no mobile organism can hope to survive and evolve? That con-
sciousness is the seat of intentionality, guiding human and other ani-

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mal affairs, and no metaphysically mysterious stuff but (relatively)

plain physiology?

5. Logical Possibility without God

We must reject such a view, we are told, because zombies are logically
possible. Chalmers and Kripke can imagine them, and anything they
can imagine is logically possible.
Now let's see. Ifwe subtract God, what is left ofthe notions oflogical
possibility and of possible worlds? Perhaps these definitions: That
which in its concept does not involve contradiction is logically possible;
and a possible world is any consistent set of propositions. l l OK. But
how can we tell whether a concept is free of contradiction? By trying
(we are told) to imagine an instance of it. If we succeed, affirmative; if
not, negative. And how do we tell whether a set of propositions is con-
sistent? That is very hard. Even in mathematics it can't, in general, be
done otherwise than by modeling the set with objects from the actual
world.
It is surprising (is it not?) that this blatantly psychological (in the
usual, not the Chalmersian, sense of the word) and subjective imagina-
tion test for conceptual consistency has persisted unchanged and unim-
proved since Hume. And it patently will not do. All sorts of logically
impossible things are imaginable, as we know from the fact that people
imagine them: time travel, commensurable diagonals, squared circles,
magnetic monopoles. Escher drew elegant pictures of some. Moreover,
such things are not only imagined but also believed: On December 31,
1999, virtually the entire population of the earth believed that at mid-
night of that day the 20th century would come to an end, despite the
fact, often pointed out, that this contention was equivalent to the con-
tradiction 99 = 100. Conversely, many things that are not only logically
possible but in some cases (we have good reason to believe) actual can't
be imagined, by lots of people or even everybody: 21-dimensional
strings, the Big Bang, the non-existence of God, locomotives moving
without horses inside. If some of these examples are controversial, that
only reinforces my point.

6. Identity and Logical Possibility

But one thing certainly is logically impossible: that any thing should
not be what it is. Concepts are our constructions. But not every word
signifies a concept. Proper names do not. "Hesperus," for example, is
only a label, a verbalized pointing: "that bright thing up there in the
pre-dawn sky." "Phosphorus" is another such label. The astronomer's

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planet, on the other hand, is a concept: it is something like "object mov-

ing in a determinate elliptical orbit around the Sun," and has all and
only the characteristics explicitly assigned to it by the theory in which
it is an element. The orbit is specified in mathematical terms. That of
Hesperus can be determined by making a series of observations and
reducing them to a curve. Likewise for Phosphorus. Now 10 and
behold-the orbit of Hesperus is identical to that of Phosphorus; more-
over, the extrapolation of the one, when it is not visible, gives a position
that is the same as that of the other which is visible. Conclusion:
Hesperus = Phosphorus. And this is necessarily so: there is no "possible
world" in which Hesperus is not Phosphorus.
This schema of identification is typical of mature science: water =
H20, sulfur = element No. 16, etc. They could not be otherwise-could
not, that is, if the stuffs of which these words (not concepts) are the
labels have been properly identified with the elements in the theories. 12
But once the identification has been made, the term (water, Hesperus,
etc.) that once was a mere label no longer is; it has been superseded, for
serious purposes, by the concept; and there is no longer any possibility
in any sense that water = XYZ or that Hesperus is not Phosphorus.
"Possible world" has an innocent and even salutary sense: as a
rather poetical term for a domain of hypotheses worth investigating.
But the aim of science is to rule out possibilities, and when it does, as
often happens, there is nothing left.
Applying this to the case under consideration, there is nothing inter-
nally contradictory in the concept of a thought as being a brain event,
or in the theory that all thoughts are brain events-not associated with
them by "bridge laws," but being the very same things, as water is
H20. And all the evidence we have points in this direction. If this iden-
tification is correct, if it is true that thoughts are brain events, then it is
necessarily true. It couldn't be otherwise. There is no need to multiply
necessities beyond necessity; this, as Aristotle knew, is the only kind
there is. 13
So, if thoughts are brain events of kind C, then, since "necessarily" is
symmetrical, brain events ("psychology") of kind C are thoughts; from
which it follows that zombies are impossible-"logically" if you like, but
this adverb is redundant.
Now that we have got clear about that, let us consider some less
abstract reasons for rejecting the very notion of the Chalmersian zom-
bie.

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7. Sizing Up

Although Chalmers refers merely to "a zombie" or sometimes "my zom-

bie twin" (which he says he has grown to love), I shall call this being
Superzombie because he is much superior to the zombies of horror
movies. Those creatures shuffle slowly around, never altering their
blank expressions, and ifthey speak at all, they do so in disjointed mut-
terings. That is, they behave "like sleepwalkers," and this is no acci-
dent: if we try to imagine what a being with no "soul" (no conscious-
ness) would be able to do, this is precisely what our experience sug-
gests she could do: all-and only-the things we can do "in our sleep."
Maybe drive a car from home to work, though that would be stretching
it.
Like everyone else, I can imagine a zombie. My zombie would be
unable to do countless things that conscious people (and other animals)
routinely do. For instance, she could not get a joke. I can even imagine
Superzombie. My zombie and Superzombie will differ in behavior when
told a joke. Superzombie will laugh and slap his knee (or wince and
tear his hair, or blush, or file a harassment charge, or yawn supercil-
iously, etc.). And yet-I think Chalmers would agree-Superzombie
does not "get" the joke. Getting a joke is, of necessity, a conscious pro-
cess.
Let's simplify, and suppose that there is only one kind of joke, the
apperception of incongruity, and only one response (for humans or
Superzombies) to jokes: the giggle. How then are we to explain giggling
behavior? In Hempel-Chalmers fashion: It is a law of nature that when
people perceive incongruities, they giggle. Input: incongruous remark
or situation; Output: giggle. Now I have no trouble with this, so far.
There is indeed a law of human behavior that (first approximation) peo-
ple laugh at incongruities, and qua law it is just as well established as
Boyle's Law. What, however, is an incongruity? There is not even in
principle any way to specify in physical terms what situations are
incongruous. There is, therefore, no way of specifYing what the input to
the ears or eyes must be to produce the output. Yet people, like Mr.
Justice Stewart, know it when they see it-when, that is, it comes to
their consciollsness. Incongruity is an evaluative notion, the applicabil-
ity of which is not specifiable in terms of any set of "objective" criteria
expressible as a computable algorithm. And yet it is a concept in terms
of which laws of nature can be formulated.
If jokes are too trivial to count, consider the elegant first sociological
law to be formulated, that of Gresham: Bad money drives out good. Of
course it is not a basic law of physics, but it is a law, for it describes the
behavior of physical objects (namely people) accurately, and it is used

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successfully in making verifiable predictions. So it must be among the

Laws that God decreed on the second day. And it would describe the
behavior of the zombies who would be the people if God had rested
after the second day.
How can that be? What is money? There can be no physical descrip-
tion of money as such, for anything from shells to magnetic fields can
count as money. Moreover, "good" and "bad" in the statement of the
law are value terms, which notoriously are not "in the world," as
Wittgenstein remarked. All the same, Gresham's Law is purely descrip-
tive.
Must there not have been, then, a fourth day of creation, in which
God enacted Gresham's Law (and Watterson's Law: Real zombies never
get the giggles)? Chalmers, I gather, would say no; Gresham's Law was
really already there on the second day, though in the form of some
immensely complicated story about neuron firings in connection with
stacking up bits of metal (or whatever) into different piles accordingly
as whether or not their edges had been filed (or whatever). In fact, how-
ever, there is not any physical regularity whatsoever that can be identi-
fied as objects "obeying" Gresham's Law, let alone a pattern that could
be extrapolated to make predictions. To turn Wittgenstein upside
down: An external process is in need of an internal criterion.
Evaluating (say) beads or pieces of metal or paper as money in the
first place, then as good or bad money, are examples of what I call "siz-
ing Up.,,14 Sizing up a situation involves:

1. Picking out certain features in the sensuous manifold as distinct,

delimited;

2. Recognizing some ofthem (the "foreground") as more important than

others and from those not distinguished (the "background");

3. Apperceiving the whole which the foreground features comprise;

4. Relating this whole to one's interests;

5. Finally, sometimes, going ahead to consider what to do about it.

The first four elements are found in every apprehension of meaning,

including the linguistic. The ability to size up has been built into ani-
mals primarily because it is absolutely necessary for successes at the
Churchlandian "Four Fs" that determine survival, that is, the first four
elements are for the sake of the fifth.

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Sizing up is the core conscious activity. It is what neither zombies

nor even Super zombie can do. It is the center of rational activity too,
which, pace Aristotle, is not peculiar to humans. Any animal that has
to get its dinner while avoiding being dinner, that is, any animal at all
(except perhaps a few parasites) must behave rationally, that is, must
behave in an interest-maximizing fashion tailored to the world out
there. The raw data of mere physical sense perception are not enough;
the data must be processed with regard to values, as sketched above,
and this processing is not computable (pace Hobbes). It is what we do
every moment of our conscious lives (but only then), and without
attending to it it is hopeless to attempt to explain our behavior or to
understand how evolution could have proceeded from amreba to
philosopher. 15
The pseudo-problem of how consciousness can break into the closed
physical system to cause behavior results from failure to recognize the
identity of consciousness and brain events. '6 The data for sizing up-
pains and locations, for example-and the process itself, issuing in
fears, tactics, and so on, are (part of) the activity of the brain-the neu-
ron firings etc. Consequently, explaining in detail these "psychological"
events is explaining consciousness, in the same sense that explaining
evaporation and condensation, the Coriolis force, the motions of heated
and cooled gases, etc., is explaining the weather. When the brain physi-
ology has all been wrapped up, there will be nothing left to do.
Before that can happen, however, it seems likely that some new con-
cepts will have to be developed, analogously to how a satisfactory the-
ory of electricity and magnetism had to wait for Faraday's break-
through in conceiving of the field. Maybe that will enable us to get
some grip on how it is possible for a material system to display inten-
tionality, which is the "hard" mind-body question-to which neither I
nor, as far as I have heard, anyone else has an answer, or even an idea
of what an answer might look like. Because at present we have no bet-
ter model of the mind than the digital computer, which, however, we
know cannot be adequate. '7 This problem, however, lies entirely within
the province of science. Philosophers who meddle with it will only mud-
dle it further, as they would have done had they presumed to lay down
principles to guide the men whose names now designate the units of
the electrical and magnetic phenomena they investigated. Thank good-
ness no early nineteenth century metaphysician had the chutzpah to
proclaim that magnetism can't be "supervenient" on electric current,
"since I can imagine the one without the other," and then, borrowing a
white coat, to announce, ta-da!, his discovery of a "bridge law": "Where
an electric current is flowing there's always some magnetism around
too"-which, being a universal and fundamental law of nature, can't

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--- --- - ------------- ----------

have any explanation and doesn't need any. But I digress. To repeat,
the hard question is how physical things can refer, not whether they
can-we already know they can. Here we are. That's what we're doing
right now.

NOTES

1. David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental

Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Hereafter cited as
"CM" with page references following.
2. Ibid., figure 3.1, p. 95.
3. Chalmers advances two further arguments for his thesis that phenomena
(i.e., bits of consciousness) are not supervenient on psychology (the term
he employs to refer to brain events): the possibility of subjective color
reversal, and the allegation that "Mary," who knows all the facts about
colors but then, for the first time in her life, experiences something red,
thereby learns an additional fact. I pass these by, as both are based on the
mistaken assumption that we observe our experiences and find them
vastly different from what is given in observations of brain events. See
Wallace Matson, Sentience (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1976), chapter 3. Additionally, concerning Mary: It's impossible (logically!)
for one subject of phenomena to have access to another subject's experi-
ence-that's all there is here. "You can't get there from here" follows nec-
essarily from the centering of subjectivity (or what amounts to the same
thing, the fact that my brain is distinct from your brain). As for Mary's
"knowing all the physical facts": Mary is, after all, only human. If she
knows the complete physiological theory, then she knows that some of
those facts are experiences. But knowing that doesn't insure that she has
them-knows them "by acquaintance." And she knows why she can't-
their centeredness is a feature they necessarily have. This is where the
curious fact that I am not you comes in.
4. Unless you count the fictitious Anaxagorean of Plato's Phaedo who would
explain Socrates' sitting in his prison by a disquisition on bones and
sinews.
5. A discussion of the Kripkean intuition that might have given Chalmers
pause is missing from his bibliography: Michael Della Rocca, "Kripke's
Essentialist Argument Against the Identity Theory," Philosophical
Studies 69:1 (1993), pp. 101-112.
6. Although Chalmers does not, in my opinion, give a convincing account of
how this can be known, since his zombies behave exactly like conscious
beings, including the giving of indignant negative answers to the question
"Are you a zombie?"; and since in his view consciousness enters into no
causal relations with the "psychological" part of us, no apparatus could
detect any difference.

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7. "[Hodgson] also makes an appeal to evolution, but ... evolution selects for
certain physical processes directly, and psychophysical laws do the rest,
ensuring that consciousness will evolve alongside those processes. Like all
fundamental laws, these psychophysical laws are universal, so we do not
need an evolutionary explanation of why these laws hold in the first
place." Chalmers, "Reply to David Hodgson," in "Moving Forward on the
Problem of Consciousness," at http://www.u.arizona.edu/-chalmers.
8. As, e.g., St. Peter Damian had asserted.
9. It would have been nomos physeos-intolerably oxymoronic, since nomos
and physis, "'convention" and "nature," marked precisely the opposition
that was a central topic of discussion at the same time the Greeks were
inventing science. What they said they were doing was simply studying
"nature"-phusis-and showing that it was not a chaos but a cosmos, an
orderly system. Philosophers of science make themselves philologically
ridiculous when they latch on to the Greek word for law and write of
"nomic" this and "nomological" that.
10. Nor did they produce morality by issuing commands, any more than the
multiplication table; it was already "there."
11. Chalmers has qualms about linguistic conceptions of possible worlds; see
CM 336, n. 30. But he offers no alternative.
12. This qualification is what keeps even the hardest natural science from
consisting of categorically necessary truths. We can't be certain that
Venus will stay in the theoretical orbit if we haven't ruled out the possibil-
ity, e.g., of a supervolcano on the planet capable of acting as a jet engine.
13. This is closest to what Chalmers calls "metaphysical" necessity, or "sec-
ondary intention." For reasons unclear to me, he fails to see that the "pri-
mary" and "secondary" can't coexist-the latter, if established, supersedes
the former, as Copernicanism supersedes sunsets.
14. Matson, Sentience, chapter 5.
15. Sizing up is something that we do. In a way, it is not wrong to say that it
is something that the brain does, for there is every reason to believe that
the process goes on chiefly there (as opposed to in the liver or heart or big
toe). But it would be misleading to put it that way, for it would encourage
the disastrous mistake of supposing that the brain sizes things up and
then reports its appreciation of th!'l situation to us. This would be to slip
back into homunculus thinking. There is a homunculus, all right, but we
are him, and what we read is the world, not an internal representation of
it. There is an internal representation, but it is the reading, not what is
read.
16. In part also due to uncritical acceptance of the billiard-ball view of causa-
tion as always involving the exertion of physical force. From C's being the
cause of E, it does not follow that C must do something to bring E about.
The cause of E is whatever explains E. Static entities can be causes as can
emotions, abstractions, even negativities. The Nibelung's ring caused the
destruction of Valhalla, 'twas love and love alone that caused King
Edward to lose the throne, barbarism and religion caused the fall of the

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Roman Empire, and lack of oxygen causes death. But rings, love, bar-
barism, and lacks don't do anything. They are not agents. Agents are often
causes, but the notion of cause is altogether distinct from that of agency.
Agents are not always causes. The axe and the executioner were the
agents of Charles 1's execution, but they were not the causes of it.
Consciousness can cause behavior without being the agent of behavior.
17. See Dreyfus, What Computers Can't Do (New York: Harper & Row, 1972);
and Matson, Sentience.

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