> you can just stamp your foot down and insist on physicalism (and thereby dismiss whole swathes of the philosophical literature on consciousness), but from Cha

> you can just stamp your foot down and insist on physicalism (and thereby dismiss whole swathes of the philosophical literature on consciousness), but from Chalmers' point of view you'd just be begging the important questions And to Dennett (and me), as a physicalist, Chalmers's claim that zombies are a coherent concept is begging the important questions. So if we're going to take that approach, we're just at an unresolvable impasse. However, physicalism is not just a doctrinaire assumption. It's everybody's default assumption when dealing with anything that matters in practical terms. If Chalmers has a problem with his car, he's going to assume there is some physical reason for it and take it to a mechanic. He's not going to wonder if his car has lost some non-physical essence of carhood and become a zombie car. And cognitive science is taking a similar approach to consciousness, finding physical processes that underlie various conscious activities of people's minds (as well as unconscious ones). Dennett simply said that he expects that that process is sufficient to explain consciousness. Chalmers disagrees (as do many others), saying that no matter how many discoveries cognitive science makes, it will never fully explain consciousness. In the end, though, neither Chalmers nor Dennett nor any other philosopher is going to resolve that issue just by making arguments. Ultimately it's going to come down to whether, once we have enough cognitive science under our belts, our intuitions about what that science is telling us will change or not. Particularly if, once we have enough cognitive science under our belt, we are able to build robots that are behaviorally indistinguishable from human beings, that tell us they are conscious and describe their conscious experiences the same way humans do. Some like Chalmers (or Searle) might still remain holdouts even then, saying that those robots are actually zombies, unlike us humans (because, in Searle's terms, our human brains have biological "causal powers" that the robots' brains don't), but those claims will seem a lot less plausible in the face of the actual existence of such robots. Or perhaps it will turn out that we are never able to build such robots, and cognitive science ends up hitting blank walls where it is simply unable to account for some aspects of human consciousness, in which case our intuitions will go the other way, making Chalmers and Searle seem a lot more plausible and Dennett seem a lot less so. We'll see. I know which way I'm betting (and which way Dennett did), but we'll see.