Zombies are Preposterous
David Chalmers in his book on consciousness, as well as a long tradition of philosophers, makes copious use of an intuitive argument about zombies. Remember that philosophical zombies are not like the Haitian ones you know about from Hollywood. Philosophical zombies are just like us. They look like us, act like us, and are different from us in only one way: they don’t actually experience anything. Zombies don’t experience the phenomenological feeling that is associated with experience. They have eyes, and they see things, but they don’t experience the quale that we know as “red.” They might eat, but they don’t experience any pleasure at a particular taste or texture. Or they might sense these, but they don’t know that they sense them. It is consciousness that they lack.
He argues that there could be a zombie exactly like him, molecule-by-molecule the same as him, except for one thing: the zombie does not have a conscious experience of what goes on around him. The human is a conscious agent, the zombie unconscious. He goes on to argue that this make sense in at least that we can’t find a logical argument to invalidate the concept. Because we can’t rule it out with logic, we have to consider it a possibility. As such, there is something extra that consciousness adds to the mix.
My Zombie Car
We don’t know how consciousness works, but we do understand automobiles. So let me replay this in an analogy.
Imagine if you will that next to my car, is a car that is molecule for molecule exactly the same as my car, except for one difference: my car can drive around, while the other car can not. That is, my car works as you expect a car to work, but the identical zombie car does not work. It can not start. It can not be driven. That is the only difference.
We then define the difference between the two as “runningness.” That is, my car will run, but the zombie car does not run. When it runs, my car will vibrate or “hum” in a way distinctive to a well designed internal combustion engine. From this we can deduce that “runningness” involves the additional property of vibrating which the zombie car does not have.
How do we explain the vibration of runningness? Obviously the zombie car does not have that. The vibration of runningness seems to be an extra property that my car has, that the zombie car does not have. Thus, you can’t explain runningness simply from the physical material of the car, or else the molecule-by-molecule identical zombie car would have the same. If runningness was a property of the material, then both cars would have it.
Therefor, runningness must be something non-material.
Chalmers uses this to argue that consciousness must be beyond the mere material, or at the very least a property of material that we don’t know about yet. That is, in my estimation, the wrong way to look at it. Instead, consciousness is an active interplay between parts of the body (mostly the brain) and is not itself anything extra unaccounted for by the material.
The zombie car argument is reasonable similar to the philosophical zombie argument, because the function of the brain is to produce consciousness. In a normal human, that is what you get, but in the zombie, this function of the brain simply does not work. But we are asked to ignore why it does not work. It is just so by assumption.
Life
Well, ok, in a certain sense runningness is non-material. It is instead a process. It is an active interplay going on between the parts. The pistons go up, but then they go right back down again. This is different than when the car is not running. There certainly is something that it is like for a car to be running which different from one not running.
The vitalists from 100 years ago argued that life itself had to have an extra something — called elan vitale — which made the difference between a living animal and a dead animal. When a living thing expires, it “gives up the ghost” which is symbolic of the way that a dead animal seems intuitively to be so much less than a live one.
Years have uncovered the truth that life is merely a biological process. Sugar is converted to ATP and ATP is converted to energy. Cells are building blocks provided with nutrients and purged of waste and account for everything we know of in a living body. The entire body functions as a unit. When it stops functioning, it seems to have lost something. But all that really happened is that the process has stopped. All the same material is there (for a while).
It is nonsense to talk about two cars that are identical in all ways except for runningness. If the cars were identical, then they both would run. If one car does not run, then maybe the battery is dead, or the tank is empty, or a wire is broken, but there is surely something that is different between the cars that accounts for the behavior.
The same argument applies to the philosophical zombies: if there is one human who is fully conscious, and another identical which is not, then there surely must actually be some difference between them. Maybe (from Descartes) only the pineal gland is not working properly, but there is certainly a difference between the two.
It is simply nonsense to argue that we can logically conceive of a person and their identical zombie, just as it is nonsense to argue that there are two molecule-by-molecule identical cars one of which has “runningness” and the other that does not. The intuition that you can have an identical zombie begs the question by incorporating into the premise of the thought experience the assumption that consciousness is separate from material world.
Zombie Lifestyles
The more you examine the zombie argument, the more absurd it appears. Zombies are supposed to be like humans in every way: the get up, get dressed, and appear to enjoy cocktail parties. The problem is, that people drink because they enjoy the experience of drinking. If you could not experience the qualia of beer, why would you drink it? If you can’t experience the taste and texture of a french fry, it might be a lot more convenience to just eat cardboard.
Human behavior is driven by these conscious experiences. Why would a zombie ever sit to watch a sunset? There is no reason to believe that a zombie that was molecule-by-molecule identical to a person except for consciousness would act or be anything like a human. At least in this regard Hollywood has a better handle on zombies than philosophers.
Consciousness is not an epiphenomenon that sits on top of the activity, but it is deeply integrated into human behavior. Without the conscious experience of enjoyment of a show like Star Trek, or Seinfeld, these shows would simply not exist. Consciousness is not separate from life, it is not separate from the body, it is not separate from behavior, but it is an active participant in the cycle of producing and consuming entertainment. And so it is with almost all aspects of life as we know it.
Consciousness is part of human behavior at every level.
We may not today be able to find the logical flaw in the idea of identical unconscious zombies. We can find that logical flaw in a car without “runningness.” We also historically have found that life works fine without the magical elan vitale. Once we understand consciousness, there is equally likely to be a perfectly logical argument for why zombies are nonsense.
Summary
Nothing can be learned from the preposterous proposition that we can imagine a philosophical zombie. That imagination is simply flawed. We don’t understand how consciousness works. Through this ignorance, we “guess” that it might be possible for there to be a human without any experience. We find it intuitive to fantasize about the possibility because we assume from the beginning that consciousness is separate from the rest of the function of the body. But there is no evidence for that. We learn nothing about “runningness” by considering the zombie car. And we learn nothing about consciousness, by considering the philosophical zombie.