albertine

So this is what I've been working on in the past week:

Does anything follow from the existence of consciousness, that would not follow just as readily if we were all Zombies who merely acted exactly as if they were conscious?
Think about it: Zombies who acted exactly as if they were conscious: Acted for how long? Well, for a lifetime obviously. And what does "exactly" mean? It means that there is no way to tell them apart from one of us based on anything they do. Zombies are functionally equivalent to and functionally indistinguishable from ourselves."So cut them apart," you say, "and check what's inside. If it's different from what's in us, that's still an observable difference, and we could conclude from that that they were just unconscious Zombies."
But could we really draw that conclusion if they were made of different stuff? Would the fact that their innards were different be enough to convince you that they didn't feel pain when they were pinched and screamed?Is there something about that that guarantees that their screams are not genuine?

.... It's part of the voice off for an amazing short film. I wrote it. And we finished the recording last night. Cannot wait to see the final editing.

The related idea is that of the zombie within, which has recently gotten some play in psychology and neuroscience. It turns out that quite a lot of human activity can be accomplished unconsciously -- e.g. unconscious perception, memory, and learning. And some have argued that there are major neural pathways devoted to unconscious processing of visual inputs that leads directly to motor action. This has led some to suggest that each of us contains a "zombie within" that unconsciously produces many of our motor responses, without our realizing it.