For Halloween this year, I will
be dressed as a philosophical zombie (p-zombie). By any measure it is
the easiest costume, seeing as p-zombies are by definition
behaviourally and hence sartorially indistinguishable from your
garden variety Homo sapiens. But they are arguably the
scariest of monsters as well. The parochialism of conscious beings
leads them to consider only other conscious beings as suitable for
entering into moral relations with, if that (although Shaun of the
Dead provides a counterexample, with Shaun playing PlayStation
games with zombie Ed). And given that our basis for believing in
other minds is merely pragmatic, inductive faith, even the simple act
of contemplating the possibility of p-zombies is sufficient to throw
doubt on the rest of humanity. Other people would seem uncanny. It
would be as if a genocide had been conducted stealthily in the heads
of everyone else. All whom we love would be no more. (Of course some,
like horror writer Thomas Ligotti, would consider the existence of
consciousness to be the horrifying fact, but I venture it would be
way more horrifying for those consciousnesses if other humans weren't
conscious.)
But come to think of it, is there
any way of proving that other people are not already p-zombies? What
proof of consciousness could be strong enough to satisfy the skeptic?
Not neurological correlates, which depend on statistical correlation.
Possibly not even some physical proof of panprotopsychism or the
emergence of consciousness. For, unless accompanied by direct
sensation, all proofs of consciousness will have to be taken on
faith. The closest to a proof I can think of would be by joining
consciousnesses with another human. There seems almost a corollary of
Gödel's first
incompleteness theorem, that in any suitably complex physical system
there are physical bodies which are conscious, but cannot be proven
to be conscious in that system. Which intuition might also be the
impetus for Hofstadter's theory that conscious selves are strange
loops.
The same reasoning can also be
used to claim that we can never prove that someone is a p-zombie
either. This would be the stronger line of reasoning if we had reason
to accept other people as conscious by default. Apart from
deeply-held intuitions and inferences from homology to ourselves,
there are also neurobiological reasons for thinking so. There have
been no reported cases of patients losing consciousness but retaining
function. Perhaps there are cases where they lose consciousness but
still think they have it due to concomitant loss of insight. Or
perhaps cases where people were born as p-zombies in the first place
and so there was nothing to lose. Yet we know that focal lesions in
the sensory cortices can abolish the capacity for specific types of
conscious experience, even via oblique routes such as blind patients
having visual dreams or (likely) colour-blind patients having
synaesthetic qualia. Furthermore, evolutionary reasoning implies that
consciousness is somehow inextricable from how our brains function,
or it would not have been selected for/been drifted away from. All
these suggest that various parts of the brain all contribute to
consciousness, so all those with anatomically normal brains and are
exhibiting human behaviour are likely to be conscious. This should be
our default belief, so the fact that we can't prove that anyone is
unconscious should lead us to accept that everyone is conscious.
Many more arguments against the
possibility (physical and metaphysical) of p-zombies exist, which I
shall not list here. Suffice it to say that p-zombies are essentially
a zombie idea, one which has been discredited but still shambles on.
And perhaps it is the zombie idea apocalypse which is the scariest
for any intellectual. It is the eternal return of the wrong, with
wrong ideas semantically linked to other wrong ideas (and also some
right ideas), forming shadow networks of wrong. After all, the
survivability of zombie ideas already attests to their fitness in
non-epistemic criteria, so they quickly outcompete right ideas.
And why stop at zombie ideas?
There will also be werewolf ideas, which appear to be correct but
reveal themselves to be wrong in certain circumstances. Vampire ideas
suck the belief (belife?) out of right ideas. Poltergeist ideas are
empty but make a lot of noise. Bodysnatcher ideas take over the forms
of right ideas but are totally wrong. And so on.
What's worse, wrong ideas
undermine our understanding of right and wrong, like how HIV disrupts
our immune capacity to fight it and other infections. And there are
infinitely more wrong ideas than right ideas. Thus confused and
overwhelmed, any ideas we reach for to fight the zombies are likely
to themselves be wrong. And why should there not be a coherent regime
of wrong ideas (especially when our idea of coherence would have been
corrupted)? Our tragedy will be like I am Legend - the zombie ideas
will be triumphant, establishing new worlds of untruth.
Our only hope lies in the fact
that mutation will eventually lead to nuclei of right ideas which can
reclaim our epistemology. But since it is Halloween, let me point out
that there is no guarantee that a wrong episteme will tolerate
mutation rates - these may be static and forbid truthseeking, such as
in Plato's Republic. And what is to guarantee the survival of human
intelligence through these dark ages where wrongness is hegemonic? In
a world like this, we would be better off as p-zombies, so that the
night within our heads may blot out the eternal night of truth.
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