Zombies

[Hundreds of zombies invade Folkestone for the annual Folkestone Zombie Walk - Matt Leclere, Kent Online - 2015]

Reference 1 is about people who think that they are dead, a paper which started a hare which resulted in my taking another look at Seth’s newish book (reference 2) which has been sitting on my in-shelf for 18 months or so now.

Then it so happens, on pages 20-22 of this book, Seth is a bit dismissive of thought experiments about zombies, beings which are indistinguishable from humans but which are not conscious, which are just fancy machines. His argument seems to be that such zombies are nonsense, they could not possibly exist, and so it makes no sense draw conclusions from hypothesising their existence.

He also puts up a strawman from the zombie camp: if you can imagine a world of zombies, without consciousness but otherwise identical to ourselves, then consciousness does not have a physical basis. Contradiction. QED.

While I find a weaker sort of zombie interesting. And presumably Seth does too, despite his opening remarks, as he devotes his last short chapter to intelligent machines.

In 1950, Alan Turing invented what came to be known as the Turing test: was the machine under consideration indistinguishable from a human being? With the test being conducted by a real human being talking to the machine unseen, through a keyboard. A test which has spawned an industry if the length of the Wikipedia article at reference 6 is anything to go by.

For practical purposes, I think we have already passed this test. There are plenty of machines out there, accessible through text links over the Internet, which seem pretty human, certainly if you stick to the stuff that they are supposed to know about, say the minutiae of the life insurance policies they are trying to sell you.

And I don’t suppose it will be long before such machines will be able to chat about the weather, what they had for dinner the day before and their lives in general. OK, so you may be able to trip them up, but they will manage most of the time.

And no-one will be claiming that any of these machines are conscious in any way at all.

On a different tack, machines are steadily colonising all kinds of occupations previously thought to be the preserve of humans. Say driving railway engines or power stations. Or checking my income tax return. Or responding to an inbound ballistic missile. And no-one will be claiming that any of these machines are conscious either.

While some enthusiasts are building machines which look like and talk like people – or pets. See, for example, references 7 and 8.

So we have built a lot of clever machines, perhaps something about which we should have more care, but we have still not found out what consciousness is for. What is consciousness bringing to our party? 

One can argue that consciousness is likely an expensive business in physiological terms and that it seems unlikely that nature would have bothered to make it or retain it if consciousness was not giving its possessors some adaptive advantage, an adaptive advantage which we ought to be able to run down. Just saying that consciousness is just a more or less accidental by-product of the real stuff that brains are doing, that our subjective experience is just an accident of physiology without any meaning or value – other than the value that we all put on our own consciousness, at least most of the time – does not seem terribly satisfactory. So for me the hunt is very much on: what is it that these zombies are not going to be able to do? Perhaps are never going to be able to do?

I then wonder whether an unconscious being, be it ever so clever and successful, would muster as much energy as we do for cultural matters – for example, the conceptual & performance arts, the decorative arts, the fine arts and the high arts – which, it might be argued, do not have practical values commensurate with the effort put into them, whose value goes no further than the eye of the beholder? Would it bother?

All of which is starting to get a bit deep, so perhaps it is time for a spot of lunch.

PS 1: unconscious would imply absence of felt emotion. But emotion could still be there, in which case it could be acted on unconsciously, the signally function would be sustained. The same would need to be true of sensation or the zombie would not last very long.

PS 2: Seth makes a nice distinction: ghosts are souls without bodies, while zombies are bodies without souls.

References

Reference 1: A vessel without a pilot:  Bodily and affective experience in the Cotard delusion of inexistence – Phillip Gerrans – 2022.

Reference 2: Being You: A New Science of Consciousness – Anil Seth – 2021.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/some-curiosities.html. The last, trivial outing for Seth.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/04/its-chips-life.html. Zombie 1.

Reference 5: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/descartes-baby.html. Zombie 2.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test. 

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BINA48.

Reference 8: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/01/virtually-human-1.html.