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Articles

The Mark of Zombie

These days philosophers of mind talk a lot about zombies, to illustrate ideas about the nature of consciousness. Edward Ingram thinks they are all crazy.

As every intelligent person knows, things which exist are of two sorts. The first sort is conscious things – things like you and me, cats and dogs, and chimpanzees and tigers. These things, the conscious things, have experiences: they experience the redness of red, the paininess of pain, the yumminess of yum, and so on. Philosophers call these experiences qualia. Qualia, by definition, are the sole preserve of conscious things.

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