Zombies See Red

I don’t mean the undead that want to eat your brain! This zombie is properly alive – at least, sort of! There are lots of zombie analogies in philosophy, supposedly about the nature of consciousness. One such is the seeing red example. How do I know what a zombie is seeing when it looks at a red object? Perhaps it just pretends to see red, because it knows this is what it should be reporting. But what does it REALLY see? Does it see anything at all? What, after all, is seeing? Observation though is not the best of examples when it comes to zombies. What about pain? Prick a zombie with a pin and it goes OUCH, but what does it REALLY feel? This is more to the point, as it were. Because pain is a lot less straight-forward than observation. We have to ask, what, exactly is pain? Nerves reacting to a stimulus? Neurones firing? If it can be ‘reduced’ to a flow of information this seems to help things along. Now it’s become just another observation – like seeing red. But what about an emotion? What about grief, or anger, or humiliation, or shame? What are those, exactly? A zombie might feel it appropriate to be continually in a state of grief at the condition of the world. But a human has learnt that emotions often have to be suppressed, simply in order to function. (Indeed, grief, fear and despair have to be suppressed even in order to address the causes of grief, fear and despair!) So the zombie has to learn to suppress emotions where appropriate. But what exactly happens when an emotion is suppressed? Humans also fake emotions in order to navigate social interactions. So our zombie must learn to fake a fake! And then humans have personalities. Part of having a personality is to get emotional responses wrong in characteristic ways. So, in order to pass as a human, our zombie must pretend to sometimes get their fake emotions wrong. And finally, humans are fickle, so will sometimes randomly contradict their habitual emotional reactions. So the zombie must somehow fake this too. Here we have to ask, what is it exactly that a philosopher has in mind when they give zombie illustrations? Is it, perhaps, to show that consciousness is a very complex thing that’s very difficult to understand? Is it to show that complexity is actually just built from very simple foundations? Or something else? I think the answer is ambiguous. There’s a subtle reductionism going on – and we see it already in the examples above. If everything can be reduced to information then the zombie ceases to be a problem. Not only that, the zombie becomes a model for how consciousness is built. Or even – how we might build consciousness! So are the zombie examples trying to tell us that – because everything can be reduced to flows of information – then zombies are actually alive? If this is the intention then surely it is misguided. If everything is just a flow of information then are the examples not actually telling is that WE are dead?! There is a subtle split going on as we move from direct observations (seeing red) through to emotional responses. Observation – seeing – is regarded as a kind of automatic process. ‘What you see is what you get’. A matter-of-fact kind of thing. (Even here though, humans and animals often defy this explanation – being very selective and often deliberately distorted in the way we see the world.) But the trouble with humans – at least for the would-be reductionist – is that we’re all about sensation, feeling, emotion, pleasure and pain. Observation, rational thought and objective truth are wall down the list of what makes a conscious creature of any kind – let alone a human. Zombie examples – the reductionist ones – are leading us towards the question of whether computers could ever be conscious. The question is asked as if consciousness means giving rational answers to empirical questions – an accountant’s truth! The zombie examples are given by philosophers on the basis that WE THINK WE ARE NOT ZOMBIES. But actually, they are trying to turn us into zombies rather than try to turn zombie computers into humans. At some point the two processes will coincide and they’ll tell us they’ve cracked it! But all that would have happened is that we would have reduced humanity to the level of dumb, blind, stupid machinery. Alongside these trends is an increasing interest in what’s known as determinism. Determinism is the idea that there is no such thing as free choice or ‘agency’ in the world. Free choice is an illusion. Everything that we do is determined by past causes. This could be our genetic inheritance and the conditions of our upbringing. But these things – in turn – relate back to a purely physical determinism. So it’s matter, and the flows of information moving around physical arrangements, that determine everything that happens. This is despite Einstein, and the idea that causes and effects may not follow in the same order for different observers. And this is despite quantum theory, showing us that so much of what we see in the world is a matter of probabilities and not fixed relations between things. Despite all this, determinism seems to attract increasing credibility as a theory about free will – or rather, the lack of it. Why do people seem to like this idea of determinism? I think it’s because it plays into the mindset that consciousness can be reduced to process – and that this process can find a suitable substrate in a purely mechanical arrangement of matter just as well as in biology. I think instead that we should look somewhere else when searching for that elusive something that makes conscious beings conscious. We should start with the thing that is most apparent to us – we have agency – we have choice. There is something different about a living, conscious being that sets us apart from other things in the world. To start with, this is not to be forced into saying that we have a ‘soul’. It is just to notice the distinctions we make in the world. We ‘have a body’, rather than just being a body or a thing, like a rock or a table. We would find it impossible to navigate the world if we had to continually deny the fact of our own agency. But things like rocks and tables we recognise as things that are not agents. There is a sliding scale of the things and creatures that are considered as agents on the world. Agency is an emergent quality of life. So, will computers ever be conscious? Without flesh and blood bodies it is difficult to see this as being possible – although, like our hypothetical zombies, they may get very good at faking it. To create consciousness from scratch then becomes a question of creating artificial life. And will this ever be possible? I think perhaps yes – this seems like a more likely scenario. We have to ask though whether this is really desirable. What exactly would be the point, when nature herself has created such a variety of life-forms? So agency is the thing that modern science seems to want to deny, even although everyone’s life – in fact, all conscious life – seems to demonstrate its truth. Why this insistence that it’s all a delusion? Perhaps it is simply that agency cannot be explained. But, perhaps something more than this. Perhaps it is because the ways in which it might need to be explained run exactly counter to the prevailing mindset of the last 500 years of science. We’ve not yet truly embraced quantum theory – which seems to offer a pointer towards rethinking things from the ground up. Science still hankers after a mechanical universe. Science wants us to believe that there is no difference between real people and the philosophical zombie. The zombie of course has no agency – it has to fake this as well. But, dear reader, you could reasonably ask, why is it that some people insist on the reality of agency, even although agency is as difficult to prove as determinism? It’s a fair question. For one thing, agency allows for accountability. Some of us believe in a moral universe, but without agency, and hence accountability, a moral universe makes no sense. Quality and choice define the universe, they are not just delusions created from the subjective feelings of conscious beings. Some of us think that determinism is simply stupid! Whatever your opinion, I get the feeling that these matters will never be settled. We will always wonder if computers are REALLY conscious – even when they become indistinguishable from real people. We will always ask questions involving zombies. We will always puzzle over where consciousness comes from. Until, one day, we will finally give up and re-start science from the reality of a conscious universe, whose grounding is in value and quality, not matter and truth.