Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

well as refuting Cartesian dualism, also makes a case for our understanding of the world to be much more immediate. So, less mysterian, as with Kant and Schopenhauer, or indeed Descartes, and more like the ‘embodiment’ understood from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, amongst others. (Merleau-Ponty’s work is partly derived from the phenomenology of Edmund Gustav Albert Husserl. Dasein is most famous from Heidegger.) We might usefully define this phenomenology type of foundational truth-seeking as embodied truth.

Philosophers sometimes use zombies as an illustration of the problems raised by separating mind and matter. They don’t mean the kind of flesh-eating monster of Hollywood movies. A ‘philosophical zombie’ is taken to be a creature that outwardly seems fully human and appears to respond to physical stimuli in the same way as a normal person — will go ‘ouch’ when pricked by a pin, for instance — but actually the zombie has no internal mental state. How does someone know that they are not, in fact, a zombie? It’s surprisingly difficult to prove. It may be that I am the only person with an internal mental landscape, or it may be that some others (and animals) have it, but not others. The zombie illustration is also used in trying to explain consciousness where there is assumed to be only physical matter — that is, where consciousness is assumed to be only the workings of the brain.

A further variation on the philosophical zombie theme is the mutant. Unlike zombies, mutants are conscious, but they have different experiences. For instance, when they hear

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