And Say the Zombie Responded?
23
this is what they are saying. Similar to the hand that plays the piano, it is the
tongue that speaks the words. The illusion of the controllable self—the Cartesian
mind—-just be abandoned. And like the zombies of Pontypool, most of what we
say is repetitive and all of what we say is mimicry. You say hello; I say hello.
You say you love me; I say I love you, too. Language is the magician’s trick: he
is able to pull a rabbit out of a hat only because he stuffed the rabbit in there in
the first place before the trick ever started. And we respond to a question in a
way that is recognizable and understandable because the possible responses to
the question preexisted within that question before the conversation ever started.
The zombie has merely accepted this and moved on.
Zombies, it might thus be argued, are animated and perhaps even
conscious, but they do not seem self-aware. They do not seem aware of the fact
that they are aware. They are not thinking in the same way that humans are.
Perhaps. But I would, if pressed, even go so far as to champion zombie-like
consciousness. Not merely a consciousness of the flesh, but a consciousness
where it is the body that is consciously acting without the need for anything like
second-order awareness.
I
am well aware that I act like this on a regular basis. Frequently, for
instance, I will be driving and come to realize that I have no memory of the last
several minutes of steering the car. I obviously have kept the car centered,
stopped at stop-lights, and attended to my surroundings and the laws that govern
them, but I did not do so consciously. Usually this is when I am caught up in
some deep thought about something that ultimately has me worried or sad. In the
shower, I sometimes find myself ready to get out, reaching to turn off the water,
and then pausing to ask myself if I washed my hair or even soaped up my body.
I have no memory of having done any of it, but it is usually the case that the
shampoo has been applied and rinsed, and the scrubbing clean has taken place,
all without any conscious attention—again, all of this happening most often
when I find myself preoccupied with something troubling. If you ask me, I think
that I would sometimes gladly give up the worry and the sadness and all the rest,
and happily just be a washing, driving, living zombie.
I
don’t conclude this lightly. I am, for better or worse, an academic,
someone who has to some degree or another decided to live a life of the mind.
But when I stop to consider it seriously, I often think that self-reflexive
consciousness is just the sort of quality that will end up killing off our species in
the end—even if species is a specious concept.
Consider: natural selection chooses the qualities for any sort of
organism that will allow that organism to survive. It must be noted, in fact, that
natural selection does this “choosing” mindlessly, without a plan or a design,
without any real “choice” in the usual sense of the word. It creates random
mutations, stumbles around, and sees if the mutations create more viable beings.
If the mutations allow the organism to survive, they are passed on. If the
mutations harm survival, they begin to disappear from the population. A short
period ago—something on the order of 8 million years—natural selection