Truth HQ by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T R U T H H Q

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

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

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