Why Zombie Conceivability Is Weak Evidence: Semantic Closure, Interface Parity, and De Se Gettierization

Zombie conceivability is often treated as evidence for anti-physicalism: if a physical/functional duplicate could lack experience, then physical facts do not fix phenomenal facts. We target that evidential step by arguing that zombie conceivability is weak evidence for anti-physicalism. The diagnosis is structural. Under behavioral parity at a fixed observational interface, a system can token de se self-ascriptions while lacking same-layer resources to certify their truth-and-anchor status across an open-ended target class. Such avowals may be policy-justified yet fail anti-luck conditions in a systematic, Gettier-style way. This epistemic fragility accounts for the intuitive pull of zombie cases without licensing the intended metaphysical inference. Finally, we argue that natural “upgrades”—enhanced zombie variants and acquaintance-style routes—are not continuations of the original zombie argument but strengthened hypotheses requiring independent support. The dialectical upshot is premise-level: zombie conceivability is an unstable intuition pump, not a reliable guide from conceivability to metaphysical possibility.