The Conscious Mind

Featured Audio

“Zombies”

Philosopher David Chalmers, King of the Zombies

I act like you act,
I do what you do,
But I don’t know
What it’s like to be you.
What consciousness is
I ain’t got a clue.
I got the zombie blues.

Where Kant chose to stay in, David Chalmers prefers to go out, apparently as far as possible. The philosopher most closely associated with zombies presides by tradition over a biennial uproar called the Zombie Blues and Poetry Slam that marks the close of the University of Arizona’s “Toward a Science of Consciousness” conference. Listen

The weird creatures celebrated here in song and verse aren’t the B-movie zombies that rise from the dead to eat our brains; they’re not Voodoo zombies mysteriously enslaved to their masters. These zombies are a thought experiment. They’re our unconscious doubles, physically identical to us in every way, but with no subjective experience. There’s nothing that it’s like to be them. The philosophical significance of these insensible automata, and how they became the unofficial mascot of a scholarly conference on consciousness, seemed worthy of further inquiry, and what better place than the traditional End of Consciousness Party? Listen

Psychologist Jonathan Schooler with John Rieger
at the traditional End of Consciousness Party

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