One of the great battles in the Zombie Wars is over what, exactly, is meant by saying that zombies are “possible”. Early zombie-ist philosophers (the 1970s) just thought it was obvious that zombies were “possible”, and didn’t bother to define what sort of possibility was meant.
Because of my reading in mathematical logic, what instantly comes into my mind is logical possibility. If you have a collection of statements like (A->B),(B->C),(C->~A) then the compound belief is logically possible if it has a model—which, in the simple case above, reduces to finding a value assignment to A, B, C that makes all of the statements (A->B),(B->C), and (C->~A) true. In this case, A=B=C=0 works, as does A=0, B=C=1 or A=B=0, C=1.
Something will seem possible—will seem “conceptually possible” or “imaginable”—if you can consider the collection of statements without seeing a contradiction. But it is, in general, a very hard problem to see contradictions or to find a full specific model! If you limit yourself to simple Boolean propositions of the form ((A or B or C) and (B or ~C or D) and (D or ~A or ~C) …), conjunctions of disjunctions of three variables, then this is a very famous problem called 3-SAT, which is one of the first problems ever to be proven NP-complete.”
So just because you don’t see a contradiction in the Zombie World at first glance, it doesn’t mean that no contradiction is there. It’s like not seeing a contradiction in the Riemann Hypothesis at first glance. From conceptual possibility (“I don’t see a problem”) to logical possibility in the full technical sense, is a very great leap. It’s easy to make it an NP-complete leap, and with first-order theories you can make it arbitrarily hard to compute even for finite questions. And it’s logical possibility of the Zombie World, not conceptual possibility, that is needed to suppose that a logically omniscient mind could know the positions of all the atoms in the universe, and yet need to be told as an additional non-entailed fact that we have inner listeners.
jefftk comments on Zombies Redacted