The Mystery of Capital and the Construction of Social Reality by Barry Smith

Author:Barry Smith [Smith, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Court
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

1. Why Zombies?

Zombies have not been merely the subjects of Hollywood films. The most celebrated use of zombies in philosophical inquiry is found in David Chalmers’s investigation of consciousness. A zombie provides an interesting case for our purposes, since he is a living dead person. He is living insofar as he is, following Chalmers’s discussion, physically identical to a human being except that he lacks conscious experience. An important characteristic of the Chalmers zombie is that he is not a corpse: a corpse is merely the body of a dead person. A corpse has no life.

The Chalmers-type zombie is also psychologically identical to a conscious being by virtue of his being able to process psychological phenomena. He will thus be able to report the character of his perceptions, tastes, and other stimuli, and he will be able to control his attention and behavior. The crucial difference between the Chalmers zombie and a conscious being is that the zombie lacks any conscious experiences. In other words, he is not able to experience perceptions, tastes, or mental states even if he is able to make assertions which seem to report their character. The Chalmers zombie functions and responds like a living person, but he does not feel anything because he lacks consciousness.

We must keep in mind that zombies, for Chalmers, are a matter of logical possibility and not of physical probability.7 Their conceivability, he holds, entails their logical possibility. Chalmers’s zombie is unlike the zombie of Hollywood films in that the latter typically suffers from functional impairments such as, for example, he is typically depicted as ambulating with arms stretched out in front of him since he may not otherwise be able to avoid obstacles in his path. The Hollywood zombie also reveals in his behavior a capacity for enjoyment, albeit one that is limited to, for example, enjoyment in eating or killing people (see Block 1995). In large part for this reason, the Hollywood zombie is not useful for our examination. Consequently, our attempt to investigate the matter of dead human capital will consider only the Chalmers-type zombie but for aims altogether different than his. But this will come later on. First, we must consider in detail the theoretical framework in economics from which our assumptions begin.

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