my mind on books

There’s been a lot of discussion on zombies recently at Overcoming Bias, starting with “Zombies! Zombies?”, followed by “Zombie responses” and “The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle.”

A recent book on the topic is Zombies and Consciousness by Robert Kirk (Oxford University Press, 2008)

from the book description:

By definition zombies would be physically and behaviourally just like us, but not conscious. This currently very influential idea is a threat to all forms of physicalism, and has led some philosophers to give up physicalism and become dualists. It has also beguiled many physicalists, who feel forced to defend increasingly convoluted explanations of why the conceivability of zombies is compatible with their impossibility. Robert Kirk argues that the zombie idea depends on an incoherent view of the nature of phenomenal consciousness.

David Chalmers’s “Zombies on the web” and bibliography of online papers on “Zombies and the conceivability argument”

Journal of Consciousness Studies: Symposium on Conversations with Zombies (v2 n4, 1995), “Sniffing the Camembert: on the conceivability of zombies” by Allin Cottrell (v6, n1, 1999)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on zombies

Wikipedia entry for “philosophical zombies”