2018-08-17-philosophical-zombies.md 2.5 KB
layout: post title: "Philosophical zombies among us" date: 2018-08-17 02:43:02
categories: philosophy
The (in)famous concept of philosophical zombies does not make a valid argument for refuting functionalist (physicalist, materialist) view of consciousness. As an argument, it is nothing more but an interestingly worded tautology: those who accept argument as valid have to accept its consequences, but they also already believe them. Those whom this argument is supposed to convince will simply refuse its premise validity. Yet the concept of philosophical zombies seems to be useful beyond its metaphorical value.
The reason for that is that whether we want it or not, entities very similar to philosophical zombies do exist among us. Of course, there is still a way to deny them and perhaps that question warrants separate post, but for the sake of this one i'll assume the intuitive point of view that groups of people do not form consciousnesses.
Given that assumption, we can finally name the philosophical zombies in question: society, nation, religion, humanity.. institution. Yes, institutions, those entities humans tend to create, striving to work around their imperfectness, inconsistency, mortality.
Once properly established, they are no longer in control of a single human or even group that creates them; they behave as if they have some separate will of their own, to the point that thousands and millions of people are willing to sacrifice their lives for them; to the point that even smartest people consider it normal; to the point that even in our mind language we tend to anthropomorphize them.
Perhaps, they are not as sophisticated in entity-level behaviour as human mind; they are unbelievably slow, but then they also exist (in our understanding or imagination; but that's the only place save for platonic realm of ideas where they have place to exist) for quite a long time.
From functionalist point of view, there's zero sensible arguments to deny them at least capability for consciousness, if not the thing itself. If we do deny it however, for one reason or another, they become philosophical zombies; or perhaps, given their nature of compound entities, it would be better to say "philosophical frankensteins".
And although the purely consciousness philosophy consequences of that proposition are interesting in themselves, i would like to point out more "human" problems which inevitably arise and can be summarized by the question:
Why do we allow zombies to take away our time, efforts, happiness, identity, freedom and life itself?