A philosophy of zombies

Could there be a zombie version of you, one that is identical to you in every respect physically, but which lacks any form of mental life? Is it possible that some creature could be structured from the same physical timber, share in a mathematical replication of your genome, “enjoy” your favourite rock band, and yet lack any manner of consciousness?

The philosopher David Chalmers has argued that this is, importantly, logically possible. From this he draws conclusions about what he calls the “hard problem” of consciousness. First of all: what is that problem and what’s difficult about it?

The post-Enlightenment view of science is that it can explain everything, including (it being everything) the rich kaleidoscope of the mind. The agenda is this: that what we used to call the soul is in fact no more than the mind and what we think of as the mind is, science reveals, no more than the deterministic fluctuations of the brain. That deeply mysterious cognitive firework display which is initiated by the feeling of jealousy, or of pain or of a resentment that Trump gets away with it (or which discloses a satisfaction that he has), all of that is no more than a system of chemical activity, which we don’t yet quite get, but which cannot (can it?) be outside the reach of science.

What’s hard about this is that it offers a version of our interior mental lives that leaves out the most important bit: what it feels like to have a pain; or what it really means to say that my thought about Paris is in fact a thought about Paris. There is no physical theory of the mind, it seems, that can contain the “feelingness”, or what philosophers call the “phenomenal properties” of a pain; or the “aboutness” of our conscious mental states: the grammars do not match. If you give me a brain scan, what is it in that description that captures the “intentionality” of my thoughts about Paris in the springtime?

Consciousness is a “hard problem” because it seems that when you move from a science of the brain, to offer a solution of what it means to be a thinking soul, you cross a luminal space. It’s intellectually legitimate to assert that science has established correlations between mental events and neural architecture – it’s a move too far to conclude that the correlations amount to a relation of identity. To make the latter claim is to move from the direction of cold science into the comforting warmth of worldview.

This is where the zombies come in.

If it is conceivable that there could be a version of you, which is physically identical to you, but which lacks the peculiar and scientifically rebarbative thing that we call consciousness, then it follows that it is at least logically possible that your mind just isn’t the same thing as your brain. And if it’s logically possible, then on what basis is that identification a warranted one? If it’s possible that your conscious self is of a different kind from your zombie self, then why conclude that consciousness has anything to do with your biological instantiation as a purely physical thing?

Chalmers’ solution is a humble one. He invokes a discrimination between what is logically possible, versus what can actually happen in the world we share. He acknowledges that our rich interiority is not something which can be subject to a sophisticated MRI scan. Your consciousness, in his view, is not just the same thing as your brain, but might instead be something which emerges from a system of metaphysical laws which only kick in when your brain has acquired a certain complexity.

Zombies are possible from the point of view of logic, but unlikely from the perspective of metaphysics, he argues.

His “solution” to the hard problem is, if you like, quite accommodating. It’s the version in which you encounter an obstacle to your world view and consign it to the concentration camp, happily out of mind. There are other philosophers who, having encountered a hard problem, decide to do away with the problem in the first place. They prefer the purge.

If “consciousness” is recalcitrant with respect to the brain sciences then, rather than attempt any recalibration of the scope of the brain sciences, why not just do away with “consciousness”?

That sounds ridiculous, but philosophers have a habit of being ridiculous in very clever ways. What could be more obvious than we have a rich phenomenological life, the one thing which, when you think about it, accompanies us from cradle to grave? Nothing. But in their own ways, philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland, have proposed (seriously) that consciousness is an illusion.

If you can’t explain something, on this view, then assert that it doesn’t exist. You might believe you are conscious, but the belief that you are conscious is a false belief, since there are no beliefs in the first place.

This is how clever philosophers get when they follow an argument to its natural end, and a premise of the argument is a false one: like zombies.

And incidentally, for those who criticise us on the basis that philosophers deal mainly in the esoteric and the impractical, Professor Chalmers has brought his own world view into his personal life as the lead singer of a rock group called Zombie Blues.

I saw them once. They were awful… almost worth being a zombie just to sit through the set.