INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH JOURNAL OF COMMERCE, ARTS AND SCIENCE ISSN 2319 – 9202

An Internationally Indexed Peer Reviewed & Refereed Journal

Shri Param Hans Education & Research Foundation Trust

WWW.CASIRJ.COM www.SPHERT.org

Published by iSaRa Solutions

CASIRJ Volume 9 Issue 1 [Year - 2018] ISSN 2319 – 9202

Philosophical Zombie: The Philosophy of Mind Ms. Tamanna Research Scholar BA HONS, MA, M.PHIL., NET. Assistant Professor (Contract basis)

I remember calling the customer care regarding some issue with the payment. After waiting for few minutes, I heard a woman’s voice on the other side of the phone. Her voice hadmusical quality to it. The conversation went as follows:

The woman: welcome dear customer

Me: hello mam

The woman: yes tell me

Me: I wanted to confirm the status of my payment which is really vague on the site.

The woman: yes tell me

Me: I just told you mam

The woman: your query has been received

Me: thankyou mam, but can you please clear the air around the payment issue

The woman: yes tell me

Me: it’s really worrisome

The woman: yes tell me

Me: am I not audible?

The woman: yes tell me

It was after this that I realized may be I wasn’t even talking to a person,as she could not decipher my query and it seemedas if a computer was fabricating human dialogue in human voice. Although her voice carried that touch of life and she was able to form syntactic phrases and knew the rules of the language,but couldnot “think” like usor comprehend meanings. There is a huge difference in the conversation I have with persons who form syntactic as well as semantic relations in language which the mechanized intelligence cannot do.But is it logically possible for

International Research Journal of Commerce Arts and Science http://www.casirj.com Page 400

CASIRJ Volume 9 Issue 1 [Year - 2018] ISSN 2319 – 9202 a machine to imitate human conversations and hold discussions? Well yes, if a human programmes into a machine representation of concrete human experience it can happen. But does this programming also install consciousness and understandinginto the machine which only the humans are capable of?

This paper’smain concern is to direct some light on the concept of“philosophical zombies” keeping the above context in mind and show how this concept has gained prominence in contemporary popular culture.

How difficult can it be to imagine a fellow being who looks physically exactly like humans without any slight difference and exhibits same physical interactions, movements, structure, and dynamics? And what accounts for the radical difference between this fellow and a human being? Here comes the crucial role of subjectivity which is intrinsic to human beings. This acquaintance with subjective experiences, thinking, and phenomenal mental states makes a human being coherent. The conception of philosophical zombie as a logical entity leaves out this subjective impulse, phenomenal mind, and qualia (how I experience things) and accounts for only the physical identicalness. This concept gained impetus after publication of David Chalmers’s The Conscious Mind (1996), in which he described Philosophical zombie as “an exact physical duplicate of an actual conscious human, that lacks conscious experiences altogether” (p. 215).

This vividly makes the phenomenal mind a nonphysical component which deconstructs the premises of materialism that believes that nothing prevails except matter and all phenomena are result of material interactions.

The historical tangent around the logical possibility of philosophical zombie brings into the picture Rene Descartes. His conceivability thesis revolves around his theory of mind-body dualism where he celebrates the conceivability of mind without the body and draws upon a trajectory from conceivability (which is the result of the coherence factor) to the possibility of logical existence via possibility of unembodied mind to the distinctness of the mind from the physical body.Physical phenomenon in the brain encapsulates non-physical mental causes that the philosophical zombies lack which adhere to the interactionist dualism of Descartes’ but has been turned topsy-turvy here.Descartes’ original valuing of mind over body and existence of pain without brain state finds an inversion here where the physical exists without the mental. This reinstates the point that physical properties can do without mental properties and hence, it can be deciphered that brain states can also do without the phenomenal mind which is the consciousness. Descartes proceeded from the conceivability of the mind without the body to the conclusion that materialism is false, and the concept of philosophical zombie starts with the conceivability of the body without the mind and arrives at the same conclusion.

So what stands between materialism and dualism as a thick wall is the concept of logic that supports dualism against materialism. Here the distinction between the mental selves of mental states from physical bodies can make a logical existence of a thing possible. This logical International Research Journal of Commerce Arts and Science http://www.casirj.com Page 401

CASIRJ Volume 9 Issue 1 [Year - 2018] ISSN 2319 – 9202 possibility contrary to natural possibility of its existence gives rise to this dualism, under which mental states should not affect physical processes in the body. Materialism denies this logical existence and therefore the idea of philosophical zombies is generally used as a thought experiment against Physicalism, the notion that there is nothing more to the world than physical properties. The reason physicalism cannot carry out subjective experience is because the interaction of physical entities governed by physical laws cannot produce awareness or understanding which is a mental aspect. In this context David Chalmers says that,“physical processes have nothing in them but structure and dynamics and are therefore non subjective” (The Conscious Mind, 24).

In addition to this the argument from absence of analysis states that, as the concept of conscious experience and related concepts cannot be analysed in terms of physical properties, physical truths cannot entail truths about conscious experience, “which means that conscious experience does not supervene logically on physical facts” (The Conscious Mind,104-6). Here the challenge before materialists is to show with substantial explanation that how subjective experiences can be constituted by subjectivity-devoid movements and physical interactions of physical particles, and fields which themselves do not experience anything because without such an explanation, the identity theory is hardly even intelligible.And if the identity theory showcases the dimension that mental events can be correlated with physical events it deconstructs the logical possibility for the existence of philosophical zombies in favour of physicalism. The logical possibility of Zombie existence contradicts the identity theory, thus, they cannot both be true, and thus at least one of them is false.

The logical possibility of philosophical zombies and stance against physicalism gain prominence in contemporary debates concerning philosophy of mind.In contemporary times what happens with the fusion of philosophy and films? The movie “Matrix” directed by Wachowskis portrays this Cartesian scepticism. It shows that humans are able to perceive due to their mental states, but what they perceive is a fake reality called the Matrix, and their physical bodies are used by the sentient machines for energy source. The machines as philosophical zombies have been provided with programmed power to sense but have to use human physical self to sustain and fuel themselves because they do not resemble humans physically. Here the body mind dichotomy sees a reversal. The movie symbolises a human physical rebellion against sentient machines and this philosophy affects and engages the viewer in the game of participation. The machines act human but are internally dead making the whole debate a lot more interesting. The director issues statements regarding philosophy of human mind and reality through the movie as the intuitive machine the oracle is symbolic of the incessant aspects of humanity. On the one hand, the twentieth century has witnessed a logical commentary on the structure of mind, where the mind is no less than a computer, but is under the influence of desires, experiential aspects and unconscious state, and encapsulates certain determinate relations. While on other, the concept of mind as a creative agent perpetrates a theory of “liberated will” with no dependence on mental

International Research Journal of Commerce Arts and Science http://www.casirj.com Page 402

CASIRJ Volume 9 Issue 1 [Year - 2018] ISSN 2319 – 9202 states. Both the views conflate in the aforementioned movie with the end result retiring in an uneasy peace treaty between the two worlds the limited and the unlimited.

Gilbert Ryle calls it and the presence of mysterious human consciousness nothing else but “Ghost in the Machine” (The Concept of Mind,9) phenomenon. The zombies that are physically and behaviourally similar to conscious humans raise very interesting philosophical issues. One of the issues can be whether physical processes give rise to conscious experiences? The answer must be a big no, as it would make us zombies too. Functionalism endows organisms with certain physical patterns of behaviour like movements of arms and lips,and realization of such functions physically do not constitute anything subjective aspect either. Materialistseven if they ignore the existence of subjective properties or completely eliminate the mental states for the picture still cannot deny the fact that something like consciousness exits.

So what’s it about the notion of pain that makes it subjective experience?

The entire process of burning the hand involves a chain of automatic physical events and interactions among tiny physical bodies, facial muscles, along with the nervous cells that inhabit the brain, this to and fro motion which leads to withdrawal of hand from the hot object has nothing subjective about it and hence,is physically coherent. But the experience of pain is a subjective experience for the mental subject who feels it and hence, is someone who exists besides the physical processes in the brain connected with the pain. Concept of philosophical zombie acknowledges the totalityof all mental properties with the underlying physical totality and does not include singular aspects.

The physiological aspects in the philosophical zombie such as seeing lush green trees or the colour of the sky cannot make it conceive in the way humans do or experience qualia. In the movie “Robot” when the humanoid robot saves a naked girl from the burning building it is not conscious of the embarrassing feeling which the girl experienced that made her kill herself.Even if the humanoid robot knew every aspect about love in the physical processes in the brain, it would never be able to conceive or understand how it feels to be in love and the power of sacrifice in love. No knowledge of love would ever allow it to differentiate between the experience of being in love and the programming of this love as a mere representation because consciousness is not reducible and Chalmers finds such laws of consciousness to be “natural” but different from the physics we know. The movie brings into light the detrimental effects of installing a debased program into a machine which can harm humanity as it deliberately fails the evaluation conducted by the Indian army. In the end when asked as to why the humanoid dismantled itself,the answer was becauseit “started thinking”, a thinking which must have been a mere imitation of human behaviour.

So“What about an artificial, man-made machine”? Is possible to produce one with a nervous system identical to ours? Does the machine carry the mechanized intelligence which is

International Research Journal of Commerce Arts and Science http://www.casirj.com Page 403

CASIRJ Volume 9 Issue 1 [Year - 2018] ISSN 2319 – 9202 indistinguishable from humans? Alan Turing’s1turing test which is a sort of behaviourist test, in this context places the central concern of this paper which is,“can machines think” in motion. The test focusses on the credibility of the written answers and interactions around gender specific contextwhere one of the human candidates is replaced by a machine who has no obligation to spill the truth and if succeeds in eluding the invigilator’s attention it becomes the basis for assessing the intelligence.

John Searle2 argues that only special kinds of machines, namely human beings, have the capability to produce what we call consciousness by introducing the element of “intentionality” that distinguishes “thought” from mechanical action. For this he uses his Chinese room argument3, where a person who doesnot know Chinese has to decipher the questions written in Chinese, given the set of rules of that very language to pass the turing test. The question is how the turing test,here test the thought process of a human when he is not capable of understanding Chinese or get engaged in “intentional behaviour” or even think. He maintains that the brain is a “biological phenomenon”, with the “causal powers” to have intentionality. And if we can, as Searle says, “duplicate the causes” we can thereby “duplicate the effects”. However, philosopher David Chalmers provides evidence against this assertion, demonstrating that conscious experience is not logically supervenient on the physical.

These experiences become conspicuous in Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner”, which bring to the fore the contentious issues associated with philosophical zombies. The exact replicas of human beings become the centre of philosophy in the movie. These indistinguishable genetically modified philosophical zombies are manufactured for carrying out dangerous works on Earth, which reflects the nature of debased humanity and the power of technology to kill and destroy and narrows down the gap between the humans and machines. Resistance on the part of these zombies bags them death in the hands of blade runners. It depicts a very genuine love between a human and a philosophical zombie, who makes the human question his own actions and humanity and the humanity of the zombie too. They do exhibit some human like mental properties due to the genetic modification like superior memory but not conscious experience and they lack free will. So does a thing despite its programmed mental intelligence constitute a human? The life span they have been bestowed with has a battery life of around four years only which put them under great constraint and doubt as a human.

Such movies and forms in popular culture delineate complex aesthetic systems and oscillating philosophies of mind. They challenge us to answer the questions: what constitutes a true human being? Can imitation with coherence alone is feasible to produce logically imaginable and technologically possible human machines which are even more human than humans? How does it affect the relationship between people? With time these superior machines attain programmed

1 Alan Mathison Turing was an English Computer Scientist, logician, theoretical biologist. 2 John Roger Searle is an American philosopher and Slusser professor of philosophy at the University of California. 3 Robert, I. Damper. The Logic of Searle’s Chinese Room Argument. 2006. 1-22. International Research Journal of Commerce Arts and Science http://www.casirj.com Page 404

CASIRJ Volume 9 Issue 1 [Year - 2018] ISSN 2319 – 9202 feelings and emotions of love, mercy, compassion which makes them forget that they are nonhumans or maybe they don’t even “know” that they are mere machines and live like normal human beings displaying characteristics lacking in the actual humans in the film. Or is it that they imitate human behaviour and human emotions. Automation makes such possibilities popular food for feeding fantasies.

The question that affects the conceivability of this concept is whether we can differentiate between humans and philosophical zombies? Oris there any way to know whether the person in front of us is not a philosophical zombie? It is difficult to differentiate as the consciousness can be experienced only in first person and speculation can occur only in the mind of that very person. It is through the actions of the other person that we can assume other person’s mental state, as is the case in the movie Robot, where when the Humanoid machine abducts the heroine, the creator of the robot disguises himself and imitates the robotic behaviour which confuses the robot itself, just like the philosophical zombies can confuse humans.

Now a daysmultinational techno-science aims to substitute computers and humanoids for human beings wherever possible, in order to exert as much control over the environment as it can because they have no thought processes to resist their subjugation. Francois Lyotard called this move towards inhuman, as a means to eliminate difference from the world while some theorists see these philosophical zombies a threat of the inhuman, and some feminists’ responses collect this as a possibility of liberation from biological constraints made apparent through Donna Haraway’s concept of “cyborg”. It can be affirmatively concluded that human beings have thoughts because they function in similar ways and can recognise this similarity in other humans. The process of interaction of a mind with other minds helps one learn the meaning of fear and becomes a way to realize what it means to be afraid. This learning process through experience was very much hailed by empiricist John Locke.But the notion of qualia is still a conundrum which can only be resolved by some extraordinary new physicsor by what Chalmers calls “a very different sort of explanation, requiring some radical changes in the way we think about the structure of the world”(The Conscious Mind,225).

International Research Journal of Commerce Arts and Science http://www.casirj.com Page 405

CASIRJ Volume 9 Issue 1 [Year - 2018] ISSN 2319 – 9202

Works Cited

Chalmers, David. “Is Consciousness Logically Supervenient on Physical”.The Conscious

Mind.NewYork: Oxford University Press. 1996. 104-6. Web. 19 April 2017.

Ibid., “The Two Mind-Body Problems”. p. 24.

Ibid., “Towards a Theory of Consciousness”. p. 215.

Ibid., p. 225.

Ryle, Gilbert. “The Origin of the Category Mistake”.The Concept of Mind.London:

Routledge. 2009. 9. Web. 21 April 2017.

Bibliography

Chalmers, David. “Introduction: Taking Consciousness Seriously”. The Conscious Mind.By

Chalmers.NewYork: Oxford University Press. 1996. i-xi. Web. 20 April 2017.

Chalmers, David. “The Two Mind-Body Problems”.The Conscious Mind.By

Chalmers.NewYork: Oxford University Press. 1996. 24-25. Web. 20 April 2017.

Chalmers, David. “Towards a Theory of Consciousness”.The Conscious Mind.By

Chalmers.NewYork: Oxford University Press. 1996. 213-242. Web. 21 April 2017.

Crockett, J.Larry. “The Turing Test in the Light of the Frame Problem”.The Turing Test and the Frame Problem. New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation. 1994. 1-17. Web. 21

April 2017.

Descartes, Rene. “ Concerning the Nature of the Human Mind: That it is Better Known than the Body”. Philosophical Essays and Correspondence.Ed. Roger Ariew. Cambridge:

Hackett Publishing Company. 2000. 104-7. Web. 18 April 2017.

Ryle, Gilbert. “Descartes’ Myth”.The Concept of Mind.By Ryle.London: Routledge. 2009.

1-12. Web. 20 April 2017.

Ryle, Gilbert. “The Will”.The Concept of Mind.By Ryle.London: Routledge. 2009. 49-62.

Web. 20 April 2017. International Research Journal of Commerce Arts and Science http://www.casirj.com Page 406

..

Shri Param Hans Education & Research Foundation Trust www.SPHERT.org

भारतीय भाषा, शिऺा, साहह配य एवं िोध ISSN 2321 – 9726 WWW.BHARTIYASHODH.COM

INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY ISSN – 2250 – 1959 (0) 2348 – 9367 (P) WWW.IRJMST.COM

INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH JOURNAL OF COMMERCE, ARTS AND SCIENCE ISSN 2319 – 9202 WWW.CASIRJ.COM

INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT SOCIOLOGY & HUMANITIES ISSN 2277 – 9809 (0) 2348 - 9359 (P) WWW.IRJMSH.COM

INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH JOURNAL OF SCIENCE ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY ISSN 2454-3195 (online) WWW.RJSET.COM

INTEGRATED RESEARCH JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT, SCIENCE AND INNOVATION ISSN 2582-5445 WWW.IRJMSI.COM