based on a misuse of language. If Martian consciousness consisted of immaterial processes, we would be misdescribing them if we attributed phenomenal experience to them. The term 'phenomenal experience' corresponds to the term 'watery stuff' as it is used in the water-H2O analogy, and Chalmers has already admitted that 'watery stuff' is not necessarily water in all counterfactual worlds according to the secondary intension of 'watery stuff'. Chalmers must either find some mistake in the Kripkean theory, or apply it consistently to all examples. There is no reason we should consider consciousness to be some special sort of phenomenon which should be picked out by its primary intension rather than its secondary intensions in all possible worlds. Chalmers makes one last effort to rule out the materialist response. He writes: We can simply forget the semantics of these terms, and note that the relevant possible world [the zombie world] clearly lacks something, whether or not we call it "consciousness." The Kripkean considerations might tell us at best how this world and the relevant features should be appropriately described, but they have no effect on its possibility; and the mere possibility of such a world, no matter how it is described, is all the argument for dualism needs to succeed. (Chalmers 134)The materialist response to this argument is to say that Chalmers is wrong in asserting that this zombie world actually lacks something. What the Kripkean considerations show is that it is an exact duplicate of our world which is misdescribed as lacking consciousness when really it does not. The only thing lacking is a correct description of the phenomenon responsible for all of the zombie's behaviorhis consciousness. This is a semantic issue, but the metaphysics of this case cannot be such that anything is lacking in the zombie world as long as it is physically identical to our own. Given that materialism remains as a plausible view of cons...
