Popular Culture Review Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer 2012 | Page 23

And Say the Zombie Responded? 19 incredibly stupid. Perhaps the only good thing that ever came out of Descartes’ delusion was the 1959 movie by Ed Wood entitled Plan 9 From Outer Space— and the word “good” here is being used rather loosely—in which Cartesian aliens reanimate human corpses and turn them into zombies by stimulating their pineal glands. Descartes was concerned that it was impossible to experience the consciousness of another person and thus there was no guarantee that there really were other sites of consciousness beyond his own. Historically, philosophers call this “the problem of other minds.” More recently, the problem has been restated and renamed “the philosophical zombie problem” such that one worries about creatures that could exist who would act like human beings in every way but would not have the internal conscious life of a human—they would, for instance, do something or experience something but not be conscious that they are doing or experiencing that thing. All of this is only a worry, however, if one takes the mind to be something separate from the body. And one of the lessons of zombies is that this simply is not the case. Zombies are more in line with French philosophy that came three centuries after Descartes. Consciousness, argues Maurice MerleauPonty, is in the flesh, it is of the body: to be incarnate is to be conscious.18 As phenomenology teaches us, there can be no Other, no possibility of other consciousness, without flesh. The body of the Other is the site of consciousness; the mind lives in the flesh. Far from being a question of brain-waves, consciousness is always spread throughout the body and thus without the body there can be no possibility of mind—no possibility, that is, of the true presence of the Self or the Other.19 Think of the way in which it is your body that knows how to ride a bicycle. Think of the pianist’s or the guitarist’s hands that know where to move across the piano and the guitar. Think of the manner in which you inhabit space and your self has heft, of the way in which you constitute yourself as immediately in the world and not really as “looking out at it from inside”—as if the body is merely a vessel, a prison, and not the site of consciousness itself.20 Zombies, as consciousness incarnate, thus represent another important realization for humans: though our culture is fully Cartesian and embraces the notion of the body as mere object (forcing us to disembody ourselves and think of our own consciousness as something that is apart from the flesh), the truth is that what it means to be minded is to be enfleshed.21 If, then, zombies are conscious in a fundamental way, why is it that they lack the ability to communicate? Why do they moan and groan, at best asking only for brains, and, more typically, saying nothing at all? If we recall the reporter at the Grammys we note that the horror was in thinking that something bad had happened to this woman—something bad had happened to her brain—but we also note that what is truly frightening about the incident is the way in which she continued to talk to us as if she were still communicating, as if she were still saying something. Part of the horror is, in