Zombieophile counter arguments

1) In an ideal world dualists and physicalists can agree on what is physical and non physical.
And some physicalists do implicitly believe in dualism so it might convince someone.

2) Even if conception is just in a negitive sense this is somthing.

3) We can reject the causal theory of reference.
Maybe intuition and conception have some sort of cross world presence.

4) You don't need to fully concieve of something all you need to do is fail to find contradictions to get (weak) evidence somthing is true.

5) If the trees are fundiemntially identical then there is no issue.

6) science doesn't apply for two reasons, first because this is an a priori question and second because we have reason to believe first person experience is not reducable to third person experience. the only reason why science applies else where is bcause other things are not seperated in this way.
So yes qualia may be weird things indeed but we expect that.

7) any other argument would outweigh such considerations.

Zombie arguments (refined)

1) dualists and physicalists cant agree on the definitions. Simply - If a physicalist accept a definition of Qualia such that Qualia is non physical he is either debating nonsense (which doesn't threaten physicalism) or he has already surrendered the debate. Therefore The zombie argument never gets off the ground with a real physicalist.
The Zombie argument is simply question begging.

2) The zombie argument uses negitive concievibility but it requires positive concievibility.
For example - You can concieve of a HOLLOW ball in a negitive sense without thinking about the inside of the ball but your conception is not meaningfully different from one of a solid ball. Similarly you can imagine a zombie in the negitive sense but to imagine it in the positive sense would requireconcieving of a first person experience that is hollow but we have no logical acess to others expericence, and regardless it is a straightforward contradiction.
This is the complex form of the simple argument "but what is it like to be a zombie"?

3) Kriple approach - reference and knowledge require us to be causally affected by what is known or referred to (Kripke 1972) if zombies are conceivable, so are epiphenomenalistic worlds. But by the causal theory of reference, epiphenomenalistic worlds are not conceivable; therefore zombies are not conceivable.

Or in more detail - in epiphenominalism there is a wall between qualia and the physical world.
Intuition and the logical part of concieving are things that occur on the physical side and are a result of evolution and experience's refining. If we are to say there is no reason to believe qualia obey any laws (what we use to deflect the science arguments against qualia) then there is no reason to believe intuition and concieving will be any better than random noise in investigating qualia.

In the same way intuition is best for investigating familiar scenarios - of limited use in very unusual scenarios it is completely useless in scenarios where it has no logical acess to the data .

4) Even if it did get off the ground when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably underestimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition (Daniel Dennett).

5) Zombie Philosophers
- Imagine zombie chalmers (pro zombie) and zombie Dennet (anti zombie) arguing about the existence of zombies. what does zombie chalmers mean when he talks about a zombie?
- Well Dualists argue, since our zombie twins, in contrast, have no experiences, their quasi-phenomenal judgments are unjustified and even if qualia have no causal influence on our judgments, their mere presence in the appropriate physical context ensures that our thoughts are about those qualia.

This appears to be like saying that if there is a duplicate of you on mars talking about a tree, and you are talking about a tree, you are talking about the tree on mars.

6) science provides a number of tough questions for zombeophiles if they permit the discussion to begin.
- Most objects in the universe obey laws - why not qualia?
- If qualia dont obey laws why are qualia at all consistent with reality in the ways that they are.
- Are more valid questions raised and unanswered by this? What is the nature of qualia? If we state that it doesn’t obey natural laws what laws do they obey? Ideally can these be documented? What would such a documentation look like?
- why are qualia seem to be so poorly developed as a model.
there are lots of thought experiments seldom done to elaborate on the model - what would happen if you took a trip to zombie world - what if you came back again? what would it be like? what if you steeped halfway into zombie world? what does the answers to that say about the relationship between qualia and matter?
- if you dump causality as important for connecting qualia with eachother you raise issues regarding all sorts of things including your definition of yourself – if someone recreates some pattern that happens to trigger similar qualia somewhere else is that all of a sudden ‘you’?

7) Defensiveness - Most of the argument for ep zombies is extremely defensive, Ie it relies on the burden of proof of concepts like inconcievability lying with the physicalist. If the physicalist was to take that burden he deserves a quid pro quo in terms of credibility.