THE ZOMBIE QUESTION: DO PEOPLE WHO SEEM CONSCIOUS, BUT WHO ARE NOT, EXIST?

It has been argued by some that the term Artificial Intelligence AI has to go. They say there is no intelligence except human intelligence and all we are doing is setting up devices to mimic our smart minds. So the intelligence remains ours. You look at a beautifully written lucid essay but it is not the masterpiece. The mind that created it is.  Yet we will pay lip service to that mind, that person.  We want the beautiful object.  We value what the person accomplished, not the person.  Generally the person lets us do this by taking our awards and our thanks and our praise. In short, we feign value for the person.  In fact it is more more than what they produce than them. 

Intelligence is not just human. Many creatures show some degree of it.

Our brains are not amazing machines but Frankenstein creations that contain elements from the animals we came from. We have some brain parts in common with reptiles and fish. If they are amazing because of how a mess made them and in many ways they are still a mess then amazing they are.  If we are made in the image of God, then is God a fish as well?

We think we are like ethereal ghosts, spirits, gods, whatever in a body.  We feel that all the information our bodies get goes to something unbodily.  We know from psychology many of us have dissociative disorders.  Occult techniques can be used to make you feel you have got out of your body.  Our bodies are less impressive when we know the eye is upside down, when they are poor for reproduction - babies' heads are too big, and so on.  We look like the result of a lot of luck.  So it stands to reason that some dissociation, which would be considered an error in nature, has been turned by us into something useful.  As nature is not a good thing and is lucky for some, it is a matter of opinion if a dissociative disorder is really a disorder.

Could it be that there are people who have less of the arcane perception than we do, who have less of the dissociation?  When we talk about being conscious beings is that what we mean?  That we feel like a mind-not-body in a body?  If so, a person who does not show it but who has less than me would be considered some kind of zombie, some kind of inferior.

You might say that intelligence is human and if they are intelligent they are human.

Intelligence implies a standard. A human being who reasons in an anti-social way is considered stupid. But are they? If nature, or God, does not have intentions and is just a force or power then if it has set no standard then stupid is not real. It is just a social construct. What happens is some people in power decide what you should do and call you stupid if you disagree with them.

Are the stupid really so bad when say if most people were above average clever, we might have blown the world to bits decades ago?  You have to deny how big and cosmic the picture is and pretend you know enough about the consequences and ignore far-reaching consequences in order to call somebody or their idea stupid.

Smart people are too good at rationalising. They find clever ways to justify insane ideas. If you are clever, you find ways to make the incoherent look sensible. It is not true at all that only stupid people fall for cults and religions. A stupid person could walk away faster from a religious charlatan than a smart one might.

So the standard is a matter of opinion. Nothing else.

That will not do for most of us. We want a standard.

Now nature or God won’t directly tell us what the standard is. It is left to people to do that. This raises red flags. Faith in God is really trusting in those who claim to have revelations from God or to think accurately about him. Devotion to somebody’s vision of God is not devotion to God. Atheism is a noble thing when it actively avoids such dishonesty.

Nothing amazing is just the product of intelligence. A lot of it is luck. An above-average intelligent person can be wrong.

So we have shown that intelligence need not be human or a feature of something conscious. In theory it is possible for chaos to accidentally become something that acts as if it knows what it is doing. It is an as if. It can improve itself. A big enough universe of sand will eventually have an amazing sand castle by pure coincidence.

So that makes us wonder if there are people who are pure machines though it does not seem so.

Philosophers who believe in the soul wonder if human zombies actually exist. What they are referring to is a person who has little or no consciousness but who seems normal. You would need to see inside them to know that they are not an experience-r like you are.

A soul is so much like something untestable or unimaginable that you cannot say you know much about it.  You cannot say that John's is the same is Alan's.  What if one simulates consciousness and the other really is conscious?  What if Alan has less right to live than John for Alan has a different form of selfhood?  What if it is not as much?

Science would say that if their brains in scans look like yours then they are not zombies. This is an example of how science avoids these kinds of religious or superstitious beliefs arising:

- I have a psychic or spiritual sense that John is a zombie and thus has no right to respect or a right to life.

[Note:  I am acting as if I have a psychic or spiritual sense that John is NOT a zombie anyway so it is remarkable that I don't decide that he is.  I am still endorsing the above principle even if I do not regard anybody as a zombie.  I am still prepared to underneath it all. It is a safe assumption that everybody in fact objectifies those they do not like and those who they consider doormats as effectively machines.  It is a safe assumption that toxic males regard beautiful women as objects.  They treat them as zombies or things.]

- If I kill a person for their organs, God abetted me for this is not a person. If I succeed in my endeavour that is a sign that God approves.

- I sense that Jane may seem exactly the same but she is now a zombie.

- People can be zombies temporarily and not realise it.  It is not a sin to torture or kill them when they are in that condition.

- No matter how much the person I torture says they are suffering I should harden my heart and not believe them for they are zombies and actually feel nothing

There are many examples. It is true that some people do follow those faith ideas or incline to.

Religion says that it is revealed by God that all persons have souls and that the Holy Spirit in you reveals that to you. When it claims this clairvoyance itself, it cannot object to somebody using it to get to the opposite conclusion.

Catholicism says that lifeless bread and wine are in fact alive when they become Jesus Christ during Mass.  This separates life from biology and separates consciousness from biology. So a thing can be a person, Jesus.  If that can happen then a person might be a thing.  If that can happen we can argue that nobody should be in jail for murder for nobody can prove what was murdered was a person.

Religion does say that you have to test things for good results and that is a sign God approves. In principle, that is not different from saying that if you get somebody’s organs that person is not human and that is why God let it happen.

Though science can protect people from being classed as zombies, a difficulty arises from how consciousness may be experienced by me but I cannot experience it for the next person and I cannot know if they are as conscious as me.  If it is 5% less than mine then what?  What if being a zombie is on a spectrum?

Such a suggestion wrecks equality.  A slave owner will rationalise what he or she does.  It grants a right to consider another to be your property at least to an extent.

Some creatures with a level of intelligence may be considered zombies.  We tend to treat smart animals that we feed on that way, as if they were things that did not matter.

What if the dog has more consciousness than I do?  Just because it does not have the equipment I have, the ability to write or talk, does not mean I have more than it.  Perhaps it is a better mind than it is trapped in the wrong body?  Perhaps it just adjusts.  Dogs don't get depressed anyway so who knows?

If a person lost the thinking part of their brain and we replaced that with a computer are we going to call that person a non-person?  A half-person?  Are we going to call their intelligence artificial?  What if they are able to perform at their accounting work just the same way as they did before the loss of part of their brain?  What if a brain had the power to rebuild parts of itself with metal and plastic?

Nobody likes thinking about zombies and the implications for it shows our morality is nonsense and is based on the very lies that it calls sins and wrongs.  One core aspect of morality is that justice is impossible without truth.  Now we have have learned that nobody in this world can prove or reasonably verify that anybody is not a zombie.  Morality then is based on pretending to have sufficient certainty.  The problems are kept away from us by political and religious and social structures so we are cheated.

Oddly most of us consider a baby in the womb to be a sort of zombie when we support the woman aborting it.

Even if our morality is true and right, everybody has to admit we apply it in such a way as if we know more than we do.  So either way our moralistic posturing is ridiculous.  To say that God gives us our morality is blasphemous as it were.  To say that God is needed and is a helpful concept is eviscerated of any worth.

Religion says God is an intelligence.  So if he is an impersonal force-like intelligence, he is not an artificial intelligence.  AI would resemble him in being an intelligence that functions without having any personal characteristics.

I suggest that we should regard human-made intelligence as intelligence and stop referring to it as artificial.  Intelligence is intelligence.  If we make an animal with intelligence we will not be calling it artificial intelligence then. What puts intelligence together is irrelevant.  Custard is custard and you don't need to start talking about Custard x4233 and Custard x9344 to make some needless difference.

No Copyright