11 hrs ago·edited 11 hrs agoLiked by Tommy Blanchard
I've always found the zombie argument intuitively strange because to me it seems clear zombies are not conceivable. Saying "I can imagine zombies" is saying "I can imagine the universe being literally identical except somehow something about it is inexplicably different". That doesn't make sense, and someone's confused. To me that indicates the question itself is misframed and is taking consciousness to be something it isn't.
But even if we indulge the question, I'd challenge the conceivability part. One reason zombies seem conceivable is that we don't have a full causal understanding of consciousness, so the conceivability sneaks in through the question-marks in the theory. Another reason is because people are bad at imagining things and determining what it means to "be able to conceive something" fully. For example, if I said "imagine a zombie jet plane built identical to a normal jet plane, with all its parts in working order down the smallest gear, screw, and atom. The only difference is that in this universe the plane somehow flies sideways instead of straight ahead. Try to imagine this." Can you? The answer is no. If you're truly imagining all the physics accurately and the causes and effects at every level, then the plane must fly forward. If you're imagining it flying sideways, you're ignoring something in the causal chain and imagining something that isn't true to reality. Saying you can imagine zombies is sort of analogous--it just means you're imagining in a sufficiently vague way that it seems plausible.
I agree, when I first encountered philosophical zombies I didn't initially interpret them as an argument against physicalism, I thought it was just a funny "imagine this to try to elucidate what we mean by consciousness". I don't find the intuitions they pump plausible--and that's the point, if we all have different intuitions, clearly the arguments don't have the force proponents think they do, in which case let's look for better evidence!
Beyond the issue of appealing to our intuitions, which you noted, I immediately noticed another problem with the "zombie argument".
The assumption that an universe can be physically identical to ours and yet have "zombies" for conscious humans is logically equivalent to the assumption that physicalism is false. This is a problem because it is invoked in the argument. If physicalism is false in a metaphysically possible universe, then that universe can exhibit entities appearing to have consciousness outwardly whilst being zombies, and there can be another universe only physically identical to it but with consciousness (explained by other factors) - conversely, if there is such a "zombie universe" which is physically identical to a "non-zombie universe", then physicalism is false (since consciousness is present in one and absent in another in spite of the physical identity). This effectively renders the argument as "Physicalism is false. Therefore, physicalism is false".
I really don’t know about some of this. If everyone starts from an inevitable belief structure of some kind, and you start from a materialist reductionist view of the universe, then surely your own “armchair intuitions” are at the basis of your views about others having incorrect intuitions? I fully agree it’s worth “exercising some humility”. How about the arrogant claim by many that we have virtually the highest level of sophisticated understanding about physics? Really? Is that not reminiscent of the claim made in the late 19th century that all that was left to do in physics was dot the i’s and cross the t’s – just before Einstein overturned everything? Look at the pitiful state of physics! String theory has got nowhere, nowhere, in fifty years! Otherwise brilliant men believe in multiple parallel universes where there are other versions of David Deutsch. And they think that's more rational than Scientology! The whole edifice of current cosmology rests on a pseudo-religious belief in “dark matter” and “dark energy”, both of which seem to exist purely conceptually as a hole in the equations because we don’t really understand gravity at large scales, and neither of which is any more detectable than zombies. A new “Einstein” is perhaps eventually going to reveal this as the emperor’s new clothes. (Listen to Lee Smolin and Eric Weinstein if you think all the physicists have got it all right and can sit in their armchairs with smug grins.)
“The laws underlying the physics of everyday life are completely understood” – really? How about “except for consciousness”? (Or even except for the origin of life itself, or except for the work of Michael Levin which defies what “genetics” was believed to be responsible for?)
Dr Iain McGilchrist knows all about hemispatial neglect and the effects of brain damage on many aspects of consciousness, but a lifetime of medical and scientific and philosophical work has led him to the position that consciousness could be an ontological primitive, built into the structure of the universe just as matter and energy are.
I agree we shouldn’t be old-school religious about this, and believe in Cartesian dualism or the “soul”, but to believe that consciousness – the subjective experience, it “being like” something to be this – can arise as an emergent property from non-conscious matter is not necessarily a coherent position. It is worth thinking about what Brett Andersen said about this. Emergent properties are not wholly disconnected from the nature of underlying physical structures. For example, the behavioural properties of water such as flow (and wetness) and surface tension can be logically derived from the structure of H2O molecules. For conscious experience to emerge from a wholly non-conscious underlying physical substrate surely requires some kind of “miracle”.
So that does not seem to be a reasonable position unless you’re fond of miracles as explanations for anything, which I’m not.
[I am of course quoting Mr Andersen from when he was involved in important scientific work, and this has no relationship to anything he may have said while suffering from an unfortunate psychotic breakdown. If a great physicist said something brilliant, its content is not invalidated by him years later suffering from, say, dementia, and would not imply it should be treated with any less respect. I thought I’d better say that in view of the vicious and spiteful nature of many commentators on social media.]
I think the jury is seriously still out on consciousness, life, the “mechanisms” (necessary but unfortunate word, as McGilchrist fans will appreciate) of biology, and the level of understanding of physicists. Fortunately for the next generation – gives them some important stuff to investigate.
"surely your own “armchair intuitions” are at the basis of your views about others having incorrect intuitions?"
Sure -- my whole point is, let's put aside our intuitions. Sorry if it isn't clear, but the argument is:
1. Philosophical arguments around consciousness rely on our intuitions about consciousness
2. Empirical evidence from brain damage cases gives us reason to be skeptical of our intuitions about consciousness
3. Therefore our philosophical arguments about consciousness are on shakey ground
4. We shouldn't be willing to upend something we're very certain of (the laws of physics) based on something we are not very certain of (philosophical arguments about consciousness).
Thanks for the link, excellent article. I see it agrees that physics doesn’t “know everything” about consciousness, dark matter, dark energy and so on, as these are not just “everyday life”. My points and my perspective were rather bigger than that, though. Perhaps I was not patiently reading the phrase “everyday life”, and perhaps I was going, possibly unfairly, beyond what you were really saying, trying to use the same “launching pad” for thinking but going deeper and further ahead. I just didn’t think it fair to leave the readers with a potential impression of “oh, this guy is smart”, which clearly you are, “and therefore this consciousness stuff is basically sorted out and not really philosophically or scientifically or even spiritually interesting” – which we are nowhere near, whatever our armchair intuitions.
Let me just chime in on some of the claims on physics. It is understandable that you get the impression of physics that you present if you read certain corners of the internet hostile to current theoretical physics - especially Eric Weinstein and his ilk. But as a professional theoretical physicist working on classical and quantum gravity myself, I don't think he gives an accurate view of neither physics nor physicists. Listening to Weinstein will unfortunately give you a very distorted, sometimes conspiratorial, view of the field. I know he can seem alluring, but relatively speaking he is not a person with deep knowledge of physics, and he consistently ignores serious physicists who are kindly willing to spend their precious time to give technical criticisms of his so-called theory of everything - a theory which suffer from inconsistencies that theoretical physics grad students learn to be on the lookout for.
Now, let me address some of your specific claims. I genuinely do not understand why you are calling "dark energy" pseudo-religious. We have a theory, general relativity, that fits experiment extremely well. That theory has a very natural free parameter, the cosmological constant, which a humble physicist have no a priori reason to set to one value or another the other. However, going out and measuring the expansion of the universe, we find that this constant is non-zero and positive, although extremely small. This shocked and disturbed many of us, but we begrudgingly accepted it. Many have tried to explain the smallness of it - but no one has succeeded. People have tried, people are trying, but mostly everyone concedes that it is a great mystery why it has the value it has. But it is not a mystery that such a term is present. Dark energy is a measured phenomenon, represented by a particular term in Einstein's gravitational equations. What exactly is religious about this behavior? What is a "hole" in an equation supposed to mean?
Second, what do you mean "the arrogant claim by many that we have virtually the highest level of sophisticated understanding about physics? Really?". It is just an objective fact that we can explain more phenomena than in the past. Yet physicists are woefully aware of how much we don't know about physics outside regimes where we currently have the power to measure. That's what makes it an exciting endeavor. As for criticisms of string theory, its not the Peter Woit doesn't have any points, but it doesn't get to the core of the issue, which is this: humanity currently does not have the capacity to measure physics at the length and energy scales where the quantum effects of gravity are expected to show up. We are left to theorizing based on consistency, rigidness, elegance and similar principles that have worked it the past. This is a pretty thankless job, but do you have a better idea than preserving some of the broad principles for guiding theorizing that worked in the 20th century? The glory days of physics in the 20th century had the massive luxury of constant new experimental data. That era is over. We picked the low hanging fruit in terms of measurements. While string theory has not produced predictions, it has produced more interesting insights into theoretical aspects quantum field theory, ways gravity can behave quantum mechanically, and mathematics than any other rival programs (by a factor somewhere between 10 and 100 in my personal biased estimation). Trust me, nothing would get me and my colleagues more excited than an alternative theory with greater promise. The sad fact is that no one has such a theory.
And yet most people in the world continue to believe in souls, gods and other immaterial things. (I notice you don’t touch that issue with a ten foot pole here). I think it’s because, until you are proven wrong, being wrong feels exactly like being right. If you then already sit with a foundational belief that feels right (probably due to being indoctrinated as a child), along with your strong wish to remain part of your in-group, all you have to do is refrain from full intellectual humility to continue believing things with zero evidence. There’s usually no harm, and often large social gains involved, and our brains are lazy and biased because it’s evolutionarily advantageous to be so.
‘The Big Picture’ by Sean Carroll is the most rational book I’ve ever read.
There is some irony here, because the problem with your entire argument is that you haven’t overcome your own physicalist intuitions. It happens too often that alternatives to physicalism are presented as a homunculus watching videos inside your head.
But this creates something worse than a straw man, I’ll call it a Frankenstein, an idea created when someone keeps all their physicalist assumptions and then plonks some kind of immaterial ghost into the brain. I mean in a physicalist universe, that's the only way it could happen.
But the non-physicalist doesn’t share these assumptions about a self-sufficient physical system, so all that's happened is we’ve failed to drop our own assumptions enough to even understand the view we’re criticizing.
I assume the core of your argument is that we can’t rely on intuitions to create theories of consciousness, I’d agree. But who is doing that? Conceivability isn’t an exercise in intuition. And worse yet for the argument, if we agree to ignore intuition, physicalism is incapable of even discovering that consciousness exists. That's one hell of an epistemic gap.
1. Philosophical arguments around consciousness rely on our intuitions about consciousness
2. Empirical evidence from brain damage cases gives us reason to be skeptical of our intuitions about consciousness
3. Therefore our philosophical arguments about consciousness are on shakey ground
4. We shouldn't be willing to upend something we're very certain of (the laws of physics) based on something we are not very certain of (philosophical arguments about consciousness).
"Conceivability isn’t an exercise in intuition."
It is when we're ignorant about something, which is the case with consciousness.
"if we agree to ignore intuition, physicalism is incapable of even discovering that consciousness exists."
I'm not suggesting we ignore intuition, just suggesting we shouldn't privilege it above empirical evidence in domains we know we don't have good intuitions in. I'm not sure what you mean when you say that physicalism would be incapable of discovering consciousness exists
I understand your argument, I’m saying it’s full of physicalist assumptions.
We’re not ignorant about consciousness, no one has any doubt about the existence of their qualia. What you mean is, we’re ignorant of the brain mechanism that produces it. But the non-physicalist rejects that there is any such mechanism, that’s only true if physicalism is true. And telling them that's only because we're at present ignorant of what it is, isn't an argument likely to convince them.
Consider “how” we know qualia exists. It’s not a scientific discovery. To make this point clearer, we could reword the conceivability of zombies so it’s a conclusion rather than a premise:-
P1 - If there is a conceptual difference between phenomenal mental states (ie qualia) and [whatever physical state is being identified with them eg neural states, behavioural states, functional states] then zombies are conceivable.
P2 - There is a conceptual difference etc.
C - Therefore, zombies are conceivable.
The conclusion of that argument has nothing to do with intuitions. And if you want to defend against it, you have to justify your identity claim. The response of "So What?" isn’t going to cut it.
All I want to say is "exactly!"
You may be familiar, but if not, you should check out this recent article by Suzi Travis! Looks like a lot of overlap here you might be interested in.
https://open.substack.com/pub/suzitravis/p/the-p-zombie-argument?r=3kyzup&utm_medium=ios
I saw it! It's great!
I've always found the zombie argument intuitively strange because to me it seems clear zombies are not conceivable. Saying "I can imagine zombies" is saying "I can imagine the universe being literally identical except somehow something about it is inexplicably different". That doesn't make sense, and someone's confused. To me that indicates the question itself is misframed and is taking consciousness to be something it isn't.
But even if we indulge the question, I'd challenge the conceivability part. One reason zombies seem conceivable is that we don't have a full causal understanding of consciousness, so the conceivability sneaks in through the question-marks in the theory. Another reason is because people are bad at imagining things and determining what it means to "be able to conceive something" fully. For example, if I said "imagine a zombie jet plane built identical to a normal jet plane, with all its parts in working order down the smallest gear, screw, and atom. The only difference is that in this universe the plane somehow flies sideways instead of straight ahead. Try to imagine this." Can you? The answer is no. If you're truly imagining all the physics accurately and the causes and effects at every level, then the plane must fly forward. If you're imagining it flying sideways, you're ignoring something in the causal chain and imagining something that isn't true to reality. Saying you can imagine zombies is sort of analogous--it just means you're imagining in a sufficiently vague way that it seems plausible.
I agree, when I first encountered philosophical zombies I didn't initially interpret them as an argument against physicalism, I thought it was just a funny "imagine this to try to elucidate what we mean by consciousness". I don't find the intuitions they pump plausible--and that's the point, if we all have different intuitions, clearly the arguments don't have the force proponents think they do, in which case let's look for better evidence!
Enjoyed the read. A stimulating one.
Beyond the issue of appealing to our intuitions, which you noted, I immediately noticed another problem with the "zombie argument".
The assumption that an universe can be physically identical to ours and yet have "zombies" for conscious humans is logically equivalent to the assumption that physicalism is false. This is a problem because it is invoked in the argument. If physicalism is false in a metaphysically possible universe, then that universe can exhibit entities appearing to have consciousness outwardly whilst being zombies, and there can be another universe only physically identical to it but with consciousness (explained by other factors) - conversely, if there is such a "zombie universe" which is physically identical to a "non-zombie universe", then physicalism is false (since consciousness is present in one and absent in another in spite of the physical identity). This effectively renders the argument as "Physicalism is false. Therefore, physicalism is false".
Yeah I think Suzi's article does a better job than me going deep on the problems with the zombie argument: https://open.substack.com/pub/suzitravis/p/the-p-zombie-argument
I really don’t know about some of this. If everyone starts from an inevitable belief structure of some kind, and you start from a materialist reductionist view of the universe, then surely your own “armchair intuitions” are at the basis of your views about others having incorrect intuitions? I fully agree it’s worth “exercising some humility”. How about the arrogant claim by many that we have virtually the highest level of sophisticated understanding about physics? Really? Is that not reminiscent of the claim made in the late 19th century that all that was left to do in physics was dot the i’s and cross the t’s – just before Einstein overturned everything? Look at the pitiful state of physics! String theory has got nowhere, nowhere, in fifty years! Otherwise brilliant men believe in multiple parallel universes where there are other versions of David Deutsch. And they think that's more rational than Scientology! The whole edifice of current cosmology rests on a pseudo-religious belief in “dark matter” and “dark energy”, both of which seem to exist purely conceptually as a hole in the equations because we don’t really understand gravity at large scales, and neither of which is any more detectable than zombies. A new “Einstein” is perhaps eventually going to reveal this as the emperor’s new clothes. (Listen to Lee Smolin and Eric Weinstein if you think all the physicists have got it all right and can sit in their armchairs with smug grins.)
“The laws underlying the physics of everyday life are completely understood” – really? How about “except for consciousness”? (Or even except for the origin of life itself, or except for the work of Michael Levin which defies what “genetics” was believed to be responsible for?)
Dr Iain McGilchrist knows all about hemispatial neglect and the effects of brain damage on many aspects of consciousness, but a lifetime of medical and scientific and philosophical work has led him to the position that consciousness could be an ontological primitive, built into the structure of the universe just as matter and energy are.
I agree we shouldn’t be old-school religious about this, and believe in Cartesian dualism or the “soul”, but to believe that consciousness – the subjective experience, it “being like” something to be this – can arise as an emergent property from non-conscious matter is not necessarily a coherent position. It is worth thinking about what Brett Andersen said about this. Emergent properties are not wholly disconnected from the nature of underlying physical structures. For example, the behavioural properties of water such as flow (and wetness) and surface tension can be logically derived from the structure of H2O molecules. For conscious experience to emerge from a wholly non-conscious underlying physical substrate surely requires some kind of “miracle”.
So that does not seem to be a reasonable position unless you’re fond of miracles as explanations for anything, which I’m not.
[I am of course quoting Mr Andersen from when he was involved in important scientific work, and this has no relationship to anything he may have said while suffering from an unfortunate psychotic breakdown. If a great physicist said something brilliant, its content is not invalidated by him years later suffering from, say, dementia, and would not imply it should be treated with any less respect. I thought I’d better say that in view of the vicious and spiteful nature of many commentators on social media.]
I think the jury is seriously still out on consciousness, life, the “mechanisms” (necessary but unfortunate word, as McGilchrist fans will appreciate) of biology, and the level of understanding of physicists. Fortunately for the next generation – gives them some important stuff to investigate.
"surely your own “armchair intuitions” are at the basis of your views about others having incorrect intuitions?"
Sure -- my whole point is, let's put aside our intuitions. Sorry if it isn't clear, but the argument is:
1. Philosophical arguments around consciousness rely on our intuitions about consciousness
2. Empirical evidence from brain damage cases gives us reason to be skeptical of our intuitions about consciousness
3. Therefore our philosophical arguments about consciousness are on shakey ground
4. We shouldn't be willing to upend something we're very certain of (the laws of physics) based on something we are not very certain of (philosophical arguments about consciousness).
As far as concerns that physics isn't on firm ground because there are certain things we don't understand, Sean Carroll responds to those objections here: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/09/29/seriously-the-laws-underlying-the-physics-of-everyday-life-really-are-completely-understood/
Thanks for the link, excellent article. I see it agrees that physics doesn’t “know everything” about consciousness, dark matter, dark energy and so on, as these are not just “everyday life”. My points and my perspective were rather bigger than that, though. Perhaps I was not patiently reading the phrase “everyday life”, and perhaps I was going, possibly unfairly, beyond what you were really saying, trying to use the same “launching pad” for thinking but going deeper and further ahead. I just didn’t think it fair to leave the readers with a potential impression of “oh, this guy is smart”, which clearly you are, “and therefore this consciousness stuff is basically sorted out and not really philosophically or scientifically or even spiritually interesting” – which we are nowhere near, whatever our armchair intuitions.
Let me just chime in on some of the claims on physics. It is understandable that you get the impression of physics that you present if you read certain corners of the internet hostile to current theoretical physics - especially Eric Weinstein and his ilk. But as a professional theoretical physicist working on classical and quantum gravity myself, I don't think he gives an accurate view of neither physics nor physicists. Listening to Weinstein will unfortunately give you a very distorted, sometimes conspiratorial, view of the field. I know he can seem alluring, but relatively speaking he is not a person with deep knowledge of physics, and he consistently ignores serious physicists who are kindly willing to spend their precious time to give technical criticisms of his so-called theory of everything - a theory which suffer from inconsistencies that theoretical physics grad students learn to be on the lookout for.
Now, let me address some of your specific claims. I genuinely do not understand why you are calling "dark energy" pseudo-religious. We have a theory, general relativity, that fits experiment extremely well. That theory has a very natural free parameter, the cosmological constant, which a humble physicist have no a priori reason to set to one value or another the other. However, going out and measuring the expansion of the universe, we find that this constant is non-zero and positive, although extremely small. This shocked and disturbed many of us, but we begrudgingly accepted it. Many have tried to explain the smallness of it - but no one has succeeded. People have tried, people are trying, but mostly everyone concedes that it is a great mystery why it has the value it has. But it is not a mystery that such a term is present. Dark energy is a measured phenomenon, represented by a particular term in Einstein's gravitational equations. What exactly is religious about this behavior? What is a "hole" in an equation supposed to mean?
Second, what do you mean "the arrogant claim by many that we have virtually the highest level of sophisticated understanding about physics? Really?". It is just an objective fact that we can explain more phenomena than in the past. Yet physicists are woefully aware of how much we don't know about physics outside regimes where we currently have the power to measure. That's what makes it an exciting endeavor. As for criticisms of string theory, its not the Peter Woit doesn't have any points, but it doesn't get to the core of the issue, which is this: humanity currently does not have the capacity to measure physics at the length and energy scales where the quantum effects of gravity are expected to show up. We are left to theorizing based on consistency, rigidness, elegance and similar principles that have worked it the past. This is a pretty thankless job, but do you have a better idea than preserving some of the broad principles for guiding theorizing that worked in the 20th century? The glory days of physics in the 20th century had the massive luxury of constant new experimental data. That era is over. We picked the low hanging fruit in terms of measurements. While string theory has not produced predictions, it has produced more interesting insights into theoretical aspects quantum field theory, ways gravity can behave quantum mechanically, and mathematics than any other rival programs (by a factor somewhere between 10 and 100 in my personal biased estimation). Trust me, nothing would get me and my colleagues more excited than an alternative theory with greater promise. The sad fact is that no one has such a theory.
I'm curious for your view as a theoretical physicist--is Sean Carroll saying anything that would raise any eyebrows among physicists when he states that the core theory means the laws understating the physics of everyday life are completely understood (e.g. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/09/23/the-laws-underlying-the-physics-of-everyday-life-are-completely-understood/)?
Any commentary or alternative perspective you would add to Carroll's view, or how I've used it in this article?
Pretty much completely agree with Carroll here. As long as we don’t stretch “everyday life” far beyond what common sense dictates :)
And yet most people in the world continue to believe in souls, gods and other immaterial things. (I notice you don’t touch that issue with a ten foot pole here). I think it’s because, until you are proven wrong, being wrong feels exactly like being right. If you then already sit with a foundational belief that feels right (probably due to being indoctrinated as a child), along with your strong wish to remain part of your in-group, all you have to do is refrain from full intellectual humility to continue believing things with zero evidence. There’s usually no harm, and often large social gains involved, and our brains are lazy and biased because it’s evolutionarily advantageous to be so.
‘The Big Picture’ by Sean Carroll is the most rational book I’ve ever read.
There is some irony here, because the problem with your entire argument is that you haven’t overcome your own physicalist intuitions. It happens too often that alternatives to physicalism are presented as a homunculus watching videos inside your head.
But this creates something worse than a straw man, I’ll call it a Frankenstein, an idea created when someone keeps all their physicalist assumptions and then plonks some kind of immaterial ghost into the brain. I mean in a physicalist universe, that's the only way it could happen.
But the non-physicalist doesn’t share these assumptions about a self-sufficient physical system, so all that's happened is we’ve failed to drop our own assumptions enough to even understand the view we’re criticizing.
I assume the core of your argument is that we can’t rely on intuitions to create theories of consciousness, I’d agree. But who is doing that? Conceivability isn’t an exercise in intuition. And worse yet for the argument, if we agree to ignore intuition, physicalism is incapable of even discovering that consciousness exists. That's one hell of an epistemic gap.
To be clear, the argument is:
1. Philosophical arguments around consciousness rely on our intuitions about consciousness
2. Empirical evidence from brain damage cases gives us reason to be skeptical of our intuitions about consciousness
3. Therefore our philosophical arguments about consciousness are on shakey ground
4. We shouldn't be willing to upend something we're very certain of (the laws of physics) based on something we are not very certain of (philosophical arguments about consciousness).
"Conceivability isn’t an exercise in intuition."
It is when we're ignorant about something, which is the case with consciousness.
"if we agree to ignore intuition, physicalism is incapable of even discovering that consciousness exists."
I'm not suggesting we ignore intuition, just suggesting we shouldn't privilege it above empirical evidence in domains we know we don't have good intuitions in. I'm not sure what you mean when you say that physicalism would be incapable of discovering consciousness exists
I understand your argument, I’m saying it’s full of physicalist assumptions.
We’re not ignorant about consciousness, no one has any doubt about the existence of their qualia. What you mean is, we’re ignorant of the brain mechanism that produces it. But the non-physicalist rejects that there is any such mechanism, that’s only true if physicalism is true. And telling them that's only because we're at present ignorant of what it is, isn't an argument likely to convince them.
Consider “how” we know qualia exists. It’s not a scientific discovery. To make this point clearer, we could reword the conceivability of zombies so it’s a conclusion rather than a premise:-
P1 - If there is a conceptual difference between phenomenal mental states (ie qualia) and [whatever physical state is being identified with them eg neural states, behavioural states, functional states] then zombies are conceivable.
P2 - There is a conceptual difference etc.
C - Therefore, zombies are conceivable.
The conclusion of that argument has nothing to do with intuitions. And if you want to defend against it, you have to justify your identity claim. The response of "So What?" isn’t going to cut it.