Dean Zimmerman is a Professor at Rutgers University.
Abstract: Many philosophers have been attracted to a view one might call “property dualism” about certain aspects of conscious mental states: the view that there is a family of perfectly natural properties (“the qualia”) in virtue of which experiences are phenomenally similar or different, and that these are determinates falling under the same determinables as the properties we imagine to be permuted in inverted spectrum cases, to be absent in philosophical zombies, etc. Fewer philosophers, at least these days, are attracted to a dualism of mental and physical substances. But, because of the vagueness of all the ordinary material objects that are good candidates for being the subjects of conscious experience, the combination of property dualism and substance materialism is harder to maintain than one might have thought.
