Truth HQ by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T R U T H H Q

7. Zombies See Red

The zombie is a favourite example in philosophy, used to illustrate any number of contentious ideas. But are things sliding in an odd direction? Our own minds, free will and choices in the world are under threat, as the questions become not so much whether zombies could be like us, but whether we might be made into zombies!

I don’t mean the undead that want to 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

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