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