By Harry Echtman ’18

Are you prepared for the zombie apocalypse? Just warning you, it may be a little bit different than you thought… When most people think of a zombie they think, rotting flesh, craving brains, attacking people in swarms. Well, what if they looked like this photo?

 “But that’s just a normal person!” you might say. Well, maybe not. A philosophical zombie, simply put, is a normal human, just without a consciousness. Now, considering that this is a rather abstract concept, a large majority of the Newark Academy student body does not know what a philosophical zombie is. Before I explained this concept to Ms. Graham, an eighth grade English teacher, she said, “I’m not sure, because I thought a zombie was a person whose brain function had been destroyed and their muscular function still works.” Ms. Graham’s definition of a zombie is close to a philosophical zombie’s. The only difference is a philosophical zombie has a brain, but is not self-aware of it.

A common misconception of philosophical zombies is that since they do not feel pain, they would not react if they burned themselves. In a survey, Maxwell Sundue ‘20 said, “I think a philosophical zombie, if you poked them with a pencil, they wouldn’t react.” Although it’s a very intelligent comment, it’s not necessarily true. A philosophical zombie would react to the stimulus in the same way that you or I would. The only difference is, they would not feel it. Like Metaphysics Research Lab, CSLI, Stanford University says, “zombies behave just like us, and some even spend a lot of time discussing consciousness.”

If you asked a philosophical zombie if it was a philosophical zombie, how would it respond? As Katy Kim ’18 put it, “Suppose if you never saw the sky and you did not know what color it was; and you asked me what color this ‘sky’ was, and I said that the sky was green. You would never know if I was lying or I was telling the truth.” Now, everyone knows that the sky is blue, but if you didn’t know that, how could you tell? The same thing could be said for consciousness. If you ask someone, “Are you conscious?” they would say yes. But how could you know if they are lying? You can’t get inside someone’s brain, so you can’t know. This brings up other interesting questions like solipsism, which, according to Dictionary.com, means, “the theory that only the self exists, or can be proved to exist.” How do you know you are not the only one in the universe and everyone else is just a figment of your imagination?

Descartes is a famous philosopher; he was one of the people that came up with the idea of philosophical zombies, calling them automata. You may have heard the word automaton, another word for robot. That word is based off of automata. One of his famous quotes is, “I think, therefore, I am.” You may have heard that somewhere, or just from the title. That’s solipsism in one simple quote. You can’t know that people think. If they don’t, that person is a philosophical zombie. According Ms. Graham, “You can’t call them not human.” That is a good point. Where do we draw the line? Descartes thought them not human, and only existing to serve us.

However, this idea is so outlandish, there are many arguments against it. There is behaviorism, which says that if something acts in a way, it feels, because the two things go hand in hand. Also, physicalism says that everything is in your brain, so a philosophical zombie would have to be effectively be missing parts of its brain to not feel these sensations, making it not functional, so it would not react at all, or its brain functions would be completely destroyed considering how many neurons are spread across your brain.

The question still remains, are philosophical zombies conceivable? Claire Dempsey, an 8^th grader, says, “Why are they even alive?” I do not have all of the answer, nor do I even know. “I think, therefore, I am.” And if you don’t, well…