... states of consciousness to other human beings, so that to deny consciousness to the hypothetical pile of pebbles in the circumstances envisagedwould be to succumb to narrow-minded prejudice, of the ... whiff of woodsmoke, the colour of ripe tomatoes, or the sting of anettle. And the issue raised here by the absent qualia argu-ment is whether the existence of such zombies is really pos-sible, as ... strings of meaningless marks or sounds. If that is so, then to abandon the category of belief is implicitly to abandon also the verynotions of truth and falsehood and therewith, it seems, the very...