Zombies: why they matter in the philosophy of mind – TheArticle

Who (perhaps I should say what) is your favourite zombie? Which dextrously eccentric eater of flesh (there are no vegan zombies), catches your fancy?

I guess if you are old school you would have to go with Frankenstein s creation. Is the Monster really a zombie, though? Or is he better described as a work in progress? A composite zombie? I Googled a request for a Top Ten list and up there was something called the Worm-Eyed zombie , who made his appearance in some Italian film in 1979. A celebrity zombie? The average Stepford Wife , desirable though she is, doesn t count as a genuine zombie because in my view she is more of a manufactured creation. A zombie is different from an android. To be a bona fide zombie you must have once been a human person. There are rites of passage issues in play. Replicants are not part of this club.

Strange to relate, but the philosopher David Chalmers has made the zombie possibility central to certain arguments in the philosophy of mind, specifically those which concern the nature of consciousness. There are two seriously complex issues in philosophy: the nature of the mind and the nature of time. They are interconnected, but only God gets the connection.

What does it mean to be conscious, to have this interior kaleidoscope of colour, emotion, love and anticipation of the future? What is it to have a certain awareness of your own subjectivity? Philosophers sometimes mention qualia , the felt properties of experience. What it is to experience something, regardless of what the science announces?

Chalmers preferred zombies are not of the Shaun of the Dead stripe. A philosophical zombie can be defined as follows: a being that is behaviourally, physically, and apparently a human person but one which lacks consciousness.

What follows from this is metaphysically significant, he argues. If it s possible to imagine such a being, then an assumed connection particularly one of identity between consciousness and the brain is subverted. If a zombie is a purely physical entity, but one from which consciousness has departed, then how can consciousness be something purely physical?

There is a view that because the brain and consciousness are reliant on each other, then it follows that they must be one and the same. This ignores a basic principle of metaphysics: that for A to cause B it must follow that A and B are logically and metaphysically distinct. (There is the problematic counterexample of God Himself, but I will park that for now.) To confuse deep causal connectedness with identity is a form of intellectual confusion.

There are persuasive arguments that materialism (the hypothesis that the mind and the brain are the same thing) cannot account for the phenomenological richness of the human mind. The computer scientist and polymath David Gelernter makes the following argument in his Tides of the Mind: that to understand what the mind is, it s impossible to take cognitive slides and analyse them. The human mind flows and is never static, and assumptions about its position at any given time will always be misplaced. There will always be observer error.

Gelernter makes a good point, one which was also articulated by C.S. Lewis in his beautiful collection of essays, The Weight of Glory: that to isolate a slice of the mind s life and attempt a diagnosis involves all sorts of assumptions about your ability to diagnose. Why would the human brain trust itself to give honest answers about the nature of the character of the human brain, if it is no more than a collection of cells, a product of evolutionary adaptation ordered in the direction not of truth but of survival advantage? As Lewis himself puts it: you might as well listen to the leaves on the trees. (I ve written on this elsewhere).

There is an objection to Chalmers argument, which is also an objection to thought experiments more generally: that they conflate what is imaginable with what is conceivable, and what is conceivable with what is possible. They are especially contagious when it comes to issues concerning personal identity (the late Derek Parfit, brilliant though he was, was a serial offender when it came to this). The meretricious trolley problem (the dilemma of whether to sacrifice one person to save a greater number) is a particularly egregious example.

But I am sympathetic to Chalmers worldview, and if zombies have inserted themselves into the battle against the spiritually impoverished materialist orthodoxy, then they have my gratitude.

Not that it would mean anything to them.

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Zombies: why they matter in the philosophy of mind - TheArticle