The Scrutiny That Does Not Land: Strong Causality as Infinite Regressive Audit and the Wuji-Dissolution of Chalmers's Ideal Conceivability
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: For three decades David Chalmers's zombie argument has survived because every critic fought on the ground he chose: disputing whether the scenario is really conceivable, or whether conceivability entails possibility. This paper declines that ground entirely. By reconceiving Strong Causality not as a metaphysical theory but as an infinite regressive audit—a scrutiny that never lands, a gaze that never finishes stabilizing itself—we demonstrate that the closure condition Chalmers requires for ideal conceivability is structurally unrealizable. Causal arrows are local, stage-dependent, and self-dissolving at their boundaries; every framework that attempts to fix physics while floating experience is already operating inside the very coupling it purports to suspend. Consequently, the zombie scenario is not refuted in the ordinary sense—it evaporates before the assessment procedure can achieve the undefeated closure that ideal conceivability demands. The argument does not defeat the zombie; it dissolves the epistemic gate through which alone the zombie could be licensed. In the Eastern philosophical tradition this boundless, groundless ground—where polarity has not yet arisen and no arrow cuts—is called Wuji (无极). The zombie, it turns out, was a ripple mistaking itself for the ocean, unaware that the ocean has no edge. That, Professor Chalmers, is what we call Wuji.
Author: Niu, Gangbei
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222479563
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: