“Hello, are you a zombie?” I asked.
The young woman next to me in the ferry terminal shook her dreadlocks — yes. She and 40 other zombies were going to a concert in Bremerton.
The zombies were a little scary, and I wished that Dr. David Chalmers, a philosopher specializing in the study of consciousness, had been with me.
This was the second time in two weeks that zombies came into my life. I met Chalmers at a conference, “Toward the Science of Consciousness,” in Tucson, Ariz. He used zombies to discuss human consciousness. And here they were again.
In fact, they’re everywhere.
Originally from voodoo cultures, they abound on the Internet. The National Rifle Association named a bullet after them. Hollywood adores them. Overseas, English Bobbies blocked them from TV cameras during William and Kate’s matrimonials.
Our Seattle zombies have shambled from Fremont to Wallingford. They’ve growled at Gas Works, shuffled onto Sounder trains and battled on the University of Washington campus.
Eric Pope, the self-proclaimed head of Seattle zombies, told me that he and his girlfriend started the Seattle craze as a pub-crawl six years ago.
The Bremerton-bound zombies were tattered and bloody. They had blue, black and liver-red hair. One zombie peered through black contact lenses with white crosses.
“This is theater of the streets. We make up costumes, devise fake wounds and lose our consciousness,” one female zombie explained.
Another said, “We enjoy the fact that we are different, creative and acceptable, even though we are not pretty, rich or intelligent. ”
“Our common purpose is to find and eat human brains,” said a zombie in black.
Why brains, I asked. Apparently, zombies want our consciousness.
One young zombie, Arthur, clarified, “Zombies aren’t conscious; people are — that’s what it means to be alive. I almost died in a hospital once, and it made me think, What is consciousness? Do we make up reality in our brains? This is far-out, yet I think about it. But like most people, I don’t talk about it. Of course, we all know zombies are not real, right?”
Based on experience
At that point, I really wanted Chalmers by my side. Chalmers is a professor of philosophy at the Australian National University and co-chair of the University of Arizona conference I attended. The presenters represented the fields of medicine, anesthesiology, biology, physics, chemistry, zoology, physical therapy, musicology, spirituality and psychology. Some were famous (Deepak Chopra). Many attendees were interested laypersons. Chalmers led the philosophers.
I attended because I was confused about consciousness. When my father died from a massive brain aneurism, my family intensely debated his consciousness: Could he hear us? Without his brain functions, could consciousness reside in another organ? What about his heart, which beat strongly for two weeks after his stroke? Some family members felt that consciousness was independent of his body.
Chalmers’s approach to consciousness, using zombies to make his point, resounded with me.
In the mid-1990s, Chalmers took on the major school of consciousness study, called materialism. The proponents believe that human consciousness is a result of a person’s experience in the material world. Consciousness resides in the body and can be scientifically measured like other bodily functions, i.e., heartbeat. It is subject to physical laws and can be studied logically. In fact, classical physics would support a world independent of human consciousness.
Chalmers dissented in his 1996 “The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory”: “It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question is how…? Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information processing, we have visual or auditory experience [such as] the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C…? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how…. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems…unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.”
Chalmers asked his readers to imagine an exact duplicate of a human, except without qualitative experience and, therefore, consciousness — a zombie.
An ongoing debate
In the physical world, there are no zombies. How then can humans conceptualize such a thought, without experiencing them? If we can conceptualize, then zombies must be logically possible, even if apparently physically impossible.
Chalmers does not argue that zombies are real. Rather, his important insight is that the physical world does not entail consciousness, as he understands it. Clearly, consciousness is something different than the world of textbook physics. This presents a conundrum for materialism.
Chalmers proposes an alternative argument: Consciousness might exist as a function of both the mind and the body, the mind being outside the measurable physical world. Perhaps consciousness is independent of either of them, or maybe it is part of a higher order of the universe, a panprotophysical approach (all matter has mental properties and can’t be reduced to a purely physical description). Consciousness might be a primary universal force, such as magnetism or gravity.
This set off a firestorm. Philosophers wanted to deep-six the argument, calling it meaningless, deeply flawed.
The argument has not gone away.
Such heated debate may be slightly removed from most of our daily lives, but it certainly hovers nearby. Consider the Terry Shiavo case in Florida. And what do anesthesiologists actually do to us? Is sleep conscious or unconscious?
I personally like Chalmers’ panprotophysicalism: There is something more going on than can be measured and weighed.
Thanks to the Seattle zombies for helping me think about it.
MARY LYNNE EVANS is a retired urban planner-turned-freelance writer who lives in Wedgwood and is curious about all sorts of things.