More Than Matter by Keith Ward

Author:Keith Ward
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lion Hudson UK
Published: 2010-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Do zombies exist?

Some philosophers, who obviously have a liking for horror films, address this point by asking whether there could possibly be zombies. A zombie, for philosophical purposes, is a human body that acts and talks exactly like a human, but has no consciousness, no mental states, at all. It would obviously pass the Turing test – that is, after talking to it for as long as you like, you would still not be able to tell that it was a zombie. You would probably think that it had thoughts and feelings and sensations, just like you. But it might not have.

Is such a thing possible? I have to say that I think it is – and not just because I really suspect that some of the people I meet are zombies. I prefer to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Yet I can think of borderline cases. For instance, do ants possess consciousness? Do they feel anything or like and dislike things? I tend to think ants operate solely by reacting to chemical stimuli – by stigmergy or programmed behaviour caused by previous behaviour that has changed the immediate environment, and that looks as though it is intelligent (like termites building a rather complicated nest).

If someone built a robot that was more or less indistinguishable from a human being, but the creator knew that his robot consisted just of integrated circuits and programmed routines, she would have good reasons for thinking she had built a zombie. Descartes infamously thought that animals were all zombies. How do we know that they are not? Well, their physiology is very like ours, they have central nervous systems and brains, and their behaviour seems to suggest awareness of pleasure and pain.

A number of experiments by the physiologist Michel Cabanac claim to show that animals and humans both act, at least in laboratory conditions, not to maximize their biological fitness, but to maximize their sensory pleasure. The feeling of pleasure, he holds, is the cause of many behavioural and physiological changes. This suggests that animals are similar to us in being conscious – they feel pleasure. Of course you could still maintain that the feeling is a by-product of the release of chemicals in the brain, which is the real cause of behavioural changes, thereby preserving a materialist view.

There is no experimental way of resolving the issue. It is natural to think that the more like us something is, the more it will share the same sorts of property, including conscious properties. I conclude that zombies are possible, but it is a good thing to extend a personal set of interpretations of and reactions to the world as widely as possible. We take a particular moral stance toward something when we regard it as a conscious agent. Perhaps, as Kant suggested, this is a basic attitude we must adopt to the world if we are to be fully moral agents ourselves, even though it cannot be based on conclusive evidence.

Though we cannot refute

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