A Tale of Two Mary's

• Autores: Heimir Geirsson
• Localización: VII Conference of the Spanish Society for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science: Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 18-20 July 2012 / Sociedad de Lógica, Metodología y Filosofía de la Ciencia en España (aut.), Concepción Martínez Vidal (dir. congr.), José L. Falguera López (dir. congr.), José Miguel Sagüillo Fernández-Vega (dir. congr.), Víctor Martín Verdejo Aparicio (dir. congr.), Martín Pereira Fariña (dir. congr.), 2012, ISBN 978-84-9887-939-1, págs. 205-211
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Anti-physicalists have in recent years presented interesting thought experiments when advocating the view that conscious states are something over and above the physical, or the view that the mental cannot be fully explained in purely physical terms. This paper will look at a tension between the two thought experiments. One way to remove the tension is to focus on the role of conceivability in the zombie thought experiment, suggesting that we are not justified in believing that zombies are conceivable. To support their view they have largely relied on two thought experiments, one of zombies, which are human replicas that lack consciousness or phenomenal feel, and another of a color deprived scientist, Mary, who after a lifetime in a black and white environment is exposed to colors and sees a red tomato. The anti-physicalists have argued that the two thought experiments work best in tandem. The thought experiment about Mary and the argument based on that thought experiment, they argue, is best understood as easing the way for the zombie thought experiment and the argument based on it. However, upon closer inspection the two thought experiments seem to undermine and not support each other.