I've lost count of the number of times Zombies came up in our Philosophy of Mind classes. The classic question was always "if consciousness can be entirely reduced to physical phenomena, then isn't the only difference between a zombie and a person that they have different brain states (or a lack of certain ones)?"
That made people very uncomfortable about a lot of things, and really demonstrated the group feeling that consciousness has to be some other substance. A lot of great conversations about verifiability, positivism, philosophy of mind, and naturalism/materialism were started with Zombies.
I always like these kinds of debates, but they always strike me of being fundamentally futile.
The arguments always assume that we have qualia as a prerequisite and that a zombie doesn't. However, the very people who believe in qualia will themselves say that animals don't possess qualia as they're not conscious. Yet we as conscious thinking humans do. So how did we acquire this from a logical standpoint? Because surely a biologically identical zombie, built atom for atom the same way as a human would itself possess qualia. If the zombie doesn't posses qualia, how did we acquire it? I'm genetically related to a rat and at one point in history we were the same species, so how did I acquire qualia and it not?
It eventually just strikes me that it's an asinine argument, and only unthinking zombies would waste their time with it, thus we have proof of p-zombies in the form of the qualophiles and qualophobes, because no one else gave a big enough shit for long enough to think past an initial idea and the two camps have been left arguing as futilely as if they were arguing over the existence of god.
That made people very uncomfortable about a lot of things, and really demonstrated the group feeling that consciousness has to be some other substance. A lot of great conversations about verifiability, positivism, philosophy of mind, and naturalism/materialism were started with Zombies.