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Thought Experiment 93: Zombies

5/15/2017

6 Comments

 
Picture
Self-portrait of author gritting his teeth over this question.
Brains! Sometimes I wonder if zombies eat them because they're philosophers on the hunt for usable parts.

--------------------------------------------------
     Lucia lived in a town where the lights were on, but nobody was ever home. She lived among zombies.
     This was not as scary as it might sound. These zombies were not the flesh-eating ghouls of horror films. They looked and behaved just like you and I. They even had exactly the same physiology as you and I. But there was one key difference: they had no minds. If you pricked them they would say "ouch" and wince, but they felt no pain. If you "upset" them they would cry or get angry, but there would be no inner turmoil. If you played them soothing music they would appear to enjoy it, but in their minds they would hear nothing. On the outside, they were ordinary humans, but on the inside, nothing was going on.
     This made them easy to get along with. It was easy to forget that they didn't have inner lives as she did, since they spoke and behaved just like ordinary people and that included references to how they felt or what they thought. Visitors to the town would also fail to notice anything strange. Even when Lucia let them in on the secret, they refused to believe her.
​     "How do you know that they have no minds?" they would ask. "How do you know that other people do?" would be Lucia's reply. That usually shut them up.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 277.
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So what do you think — are so-called philosophical-zombies a legitimate possibility? I'll do my best to turn on the lights and think about this over the week ahead and get back to you on Friday with my ideas.
6 Comments
Predrag
5/15/2017 11:35:07 am

" They even had exactly the same physiology as you and I."

If they did then they would "have a mind" since a mind is organic and organic only.

Reply
John A. Johnson
5/15/2017 09:08:32 pm

My first impulse was to say that zombies of this sort are impossible and that it is reasonable to assert that others have minds like mine, given assumption that minds are wholly a consequence of brain physiology, and the statement, "They even had exactly the same physiology as you and I." If minds are caused by brain physiology and we all have the same brain physiology, then we all have minds.

But then I began to think of some of the fact that "same brain physiology can allow for dramatic differences in mental functioning. We may all have brains constructed of neurons that charge and discharge the same way and stimulate each other with the same neurotransmitters, but there are differences between people in the way these neurons are networked, availability of and sensitivity to neurotransmitters, and a host of other factors that lead to differences in mental functioning. There are people like you and I, and there are also geniuses and people with intellectual disabilities. Savants can be geniuses in some areas and intellectually disabled in others. Some individuals on the autism spectrum do not experience the kind of empathy that most people experience. People with Cotard Delusion have a brain that operates according to the same physiology as ours, yet they believe that they are dead. So, who knows--in theory there could be people with a brain "just like ours" but it is wired in such a way that they exhibit behaviors like ours but without mental experiences.

Reply
Predrag
5/16/2017 06:20:00 am

Well, yes, one can imagine a brain that functions similar to ours without generating qualia. But that brain will be somewhat different from what we have, wouldn't it? I mean, its not like you only need to switch places between two neurons to switch consciousness on/off?

Reply
Ed Gibney link
5/16/2017 08:49:31 am

Dr J! Good to hear from you. This is probably the best argument I've heard for the possibility of philosophical zombies but I still have to wonder if delusions or wide variations in phi (from Integrated Information Theory) are categorically different things than zombies with *no* subjective experience. I'll have to think about that, but thanks for making the strong case.

Reply
John A. Johnson
5/16/2017 01:14:35 pm

Truth be told, I strongly suspect that zombies with no subjective experience would be categorically different from the multitude of strange variations in mental functioning. But since we do not fully understand the way in which conscious experience is generated by neural activity, this raises for me at least the theoretical possibility of zombies.

Reply
Ed Gibney link
5/16/2017 01:49:24 pm

Yeah, I have to agree with that. The theoretical *obsession* with zombies though? That's something I just don't get...

Reply

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