Access granted to Zombies

Poly(ADP-ribosyl)ated chromatin domains: access granted.

The seemingly static architecture of interphase and mitotic chromatin betrays an otherwise elegantly dynamic entity capable of remodelling itself to facilitate DNA replication, transcription, repair and recombination. Remodelling of local chromatin domains in response to physiological cues proceeds, at least in part, through transient cycles of relaxation and condensation that require use of hi...

Transactional Semantics with Zombies∗

Different formal models of transactional memory are required at different levels of the system stack. This paper focuses on the run-time level, where the semantics of individual operations (start, read, write, try-commit) govern the interactions between the compiler and the TM system. For sandboxing TM systems, which allow a doomed transaction (a “zombie”) to continue for some time beyond an in...

List of Granted Patents

Why Zombies Are Inconceivable

I argue that zombies are inconceivable. More precisely, I argue that the conceivability-intuition that is used to demonstrate their possibility has been misconstrued. Thought experiments alleged to feature zombies founder on the fact that, on the one hand, they must involve ®rst-person imagining, and yet, on the other hand, cannot. Philosophers who take themselves to have imagined zombies have ...

Zombies and Consciousness

By definition, zombies would be behaviourally and physically just like us, but not conscious. If a zombie world is possible, then physicalism is false. Just as importantly, the seductive conception of phenomenal consciousness embodied by the zombie idea is fundamentally misconceived. One of this book’s two main aims is to bring out the incoherence of the zombie idea with the help of an intuitiv...