Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

emotions often have to be suppressed, simply in order to function. (Indeed, grief, fear and despair have to be suppressed even in order to address the causes of grief, fear and despair!) So the zombie has to learn to suppress emotions where appropriate.

But what exactly happens when an emotion is suppressed?

Humans also fake emotions in order to navigate social interactions. So our zombie must learn to fake a fake! And then humans have personalities. Part of having a personality is to get emotional responses wrong in characteristic ways. So, in order to pass as a human, our zombie must pretend to sometimes get their fake emotions wrong.

And finally, humans are fickle, so will sometimes randomly contradict their habitual emotional reactions. So the zombie must somehow fake this too.

Here we have to ask, what is it exactly that a philosopher has in mind when they give zombie illustrations? Is it, perhaps, to show that consciousness is a very complex thing that’s very difficult to understand? Is it to show that complexity is actually just built from very simple foundations? Or something else? I think the answer is ambiguous. There’s a subtle reductionism going on — and we see it already in the examples above. If everything can be reduced to information then the zombie ceases to be a problem. Not only that, the zombie becomes a model for how consciousness is built. Or even — how we might build consciousness!

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