Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

isn’t this more obvious to us than the way the world outside of us is structured?

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. These zombies won’t 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

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