A Socio-Mystical Theory of the P-Zombie
Firstly, what is a ‘P-Zombie’? A ‘P-Zombie’ or philosophical-zombie, is an argument/thought experiment in philosophy of mind. The argument holds that it’s conceivable that a being without conscious experience, qualia, or sentience which is physically identical to and indistinguishable from a human being could exist. If, for instance, a P-Zombie was poked with a sharp stick, it would not inwardly feel pain, yet would outwardly act (mechanically) as if it did feel pain, externally emitting all the known expressions of what it is for a truly conscious being to feel pain. From this argument, it can equally be hypothesized that a P-Zombie world exists. Let’s look at some of the arguments for the conceivability of zombies from David Chalmers (the philosopher most well-known for his defense of P-Zombies):
“Consider: if it is logically possible that my functional isomorph might lack qualia entirely, it seems equally logically possible that there could be a qualia-free physical replica of me. We have already seen that there is no conceptual entailment relation from the functional properties of a system to the qualitative properties; it seems even clearer that there is no entailment relation from the non-functional implementational details to qualia. (What conceptual entailment could neurophysiological detail possibly provide that silicon, or even Chinese nations, could not?) So let’s consider Zombie Dave, my qualia-free physical replica. Zombie Dave is almost certainly not an empirical impossibility, but he is a conceptual possibility.
First, let us ask: Does Zombie Dave have beliefs? It seems to me that he does. If we ask him where his car is, he’ll tell us that it’s in the driveway. If we ask him whether he likes basketball, he tells us that he does. If we tell him that there’s a basketball game starting across town in half an hour, he’ll immediately head for the driveway, an action that seems to be best explained by the hypothesis that he wants to go to the basketball game, believes that his car will get him there, and believes that his car is in the driveway. All of the usual principles of psychological explanation sanction attributing beliefs to Zombie Dave; explaining his action without the attribution of beliefs would be a fearsomely complex task. (It might be objected that Zombie Dave lacks the external grounding required for belief contents, but we can avoid this problem by stipulating that his environment and history are physically indistinguishable from mine.)
Goldman argues in Section 8 that beliefs, like perceptual states, are typically accompanied by qualia; but much more would be required to conclude that qualia are essential to a state’s being a belief. (Searle (1990) has given an argument in this direction, but it does not seem to have been widely accepted.) Zombie Dave’s beliefs may not be colored by the usual phenomenological tinges, but it seems reasonable to say that they are nevertheless beliefs. Beliefs, unlike qualia, seem to be characterized primarily by the role that they play in the mind’s causal economy. (To illustrate the difference, note that it seems coherent to be an epiphenomenalist about qualia, whether or not one finds the position plausible; but there seems to be something conceptually wrong with the idea that beliefs could be epiphenomenal.) So qualia-free believers like Zombie Dave are quite conceptually coherent, and qualia don’t seem to be an essential part of our concept of belief.” (http://consc.net/papers/goldman.html)
Also, differentiation between types of P-Zombie:
The unifying idea of the zombie is that of a human completely lacking conscious experience. It is possible to distinguish various zombie sub-types used in different thought experiments as follows:
- A behavioral zombie that is behaviorally indistinguishable from a human.
- A neurological zombie that has a human brain and is generally physiologically indistinguishable from a human.[17]
- A soulless zombie that lacks a soul.
- An imperfect zombie or imp-zombie that’s like p-zombie but has slightly different behavior than a regular human. They are important in the context of the theory of evolution.
- A zombie universe that is identical to our world in all physical ways, except no being in that world has qualia.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie)
In this short ‘paper’ I’ll mostly be focusing on the behavioral zombies and soulless zombies, and their synthesis. A zombie I will, in time, for certain reasons, name a ‘Descension-Zombie’, or D-Zombie. The first problem I ran into with this piece is the very same problem philosophers have been running into for decades, that is the hard problem of consciousness. However, not the problem in itself, of what it is, but how to define the abstraction of what it is. That is to say, in putting forth my argument of regarding D-Zombies who are void of consciousness, I need to attempt to define consciousness. The easiest and most practical way to do this is to begin with the dictionary:
The common usage definitions of consciousness in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1966 edition, Volume 1, page 482) are as follows:
- awareness or perception of an inward psychological or spiritual fact; intuitively perceived knowledge of something in one’s inner self
2. inward awareness of an external object, state, or fact
3. concerned awareness; INTEREST, CONCERN—often used with an attributive noun [e.g. class consciousness]
4. the state or activity that is characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, or thought; mind in the broadest possible sense; something in nature that is distinguished from the physical
5. the totality in psychology of sensations, perceptions, ideas, attitudes, and feelings of which an individual or a group is aware at any given time or within a particular time span—compare STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
6. waking life (as that to which one returns after sleep, trance, fever) wherein all one’s mental powers have returned . . .
7. the part of mental life or psychic content in psychoanalysis that is immediately available to the ego—compare PRECONSCIOUS, UNCONSCIOUS
Almost immediately we, of course, run into the problem of the inner world made external, and how we can never qualify another’s internal experience. I need to find a pre-existing spectrum, or something quantifiable as a means to qualify my argument. That is, I need to utilize various signifiers of what is considered a ‘conscious life’ as a means to quantify the conscious life of another. This form of quantification brings me to an addition that is critically needed within the philosophical discussion of the ‘P-Zombie’. Namely, the addition of levels of being.
Let’s turn first to the Great Chain of Being. First theorized as to be decreed by God, it is a chain that descends through angels, humans, animals, plants, and finally minerals/rocks. Or:
God
Angels (entirely spirit/higher consciousness – unchangeable)
Humans (spirit and material body/flesh)
Animals (body and discernible consciousness)
Plants, Rocks and Minerals (matter)
Roughly speaking, as one descends the hierarchy of the ‘chain’, the ‘level’ of being – or consciousness – is lessened. Now, I’d like to turn to re-appropriation/re-adaptation of the Great Chain of Being called the Ray of Creation. Gurdjieff‘s Ray of Creation is understood in relation to the solfege do, re, me, fa, sol, la, si, do, which is a factor of 7, with 7 levels which are thus (first number relating to the level in the hierarchy, the second number is the number of ‘laws’ it’s under):
1 – 1 – Absolute
2 – 3 – All Worlds
3 – 6 – All Suns
4 – 12 – Sun
5 – 24 – All Planets
6 – 48 – Earth
7 – 96 – Moon
The Ray of Creation, much like the Great Chain of Being, begins with that which we can is a higher-body, or in the case of this essay we can under abstractly as that which has a higher-consciousness. This understanding of consciousness is taken in relation to the aforementioned ‘laws’, note the second number in the above hierarchy. The former number simply denotes the place of that ‘body’ within the ray itself, that is to say, The Absolute is 1 = first in the Ray of Creation. The second number is the number of laws the related body is under. The Absolute (God) is itself the entirety of the Ray, and thus only under the singular law of itself. Gurdjieff taught via the law of three (I don’t want to go too deep into Gurdjieffian cosmology here) that the Absolute held within it 3 holy laws, which thus created All Worlds, which thereby were under 3 laws. In turn, creating All Suns which are under 6 laws (three new ones and three from All Worlds), then descending 12, 24, 48 (Earth/us), and 96 (Moon).
Each level after the Absolute has a bigger number of laws that govern it. Therefore, the further the level is away from the Absolute, the more mechanical the living things in it are. By this comparison, it is claimed that there are 48 laws governing the life of living beings on Earth, thereby also claiming that life on Earth is quite mechanical. Or, we can state that the more laws one is under, the further one is away from the Absolute, and the lower their consciousness is, the weaker it is. The further from the Absolute one is, the less consciousness they have. As an aside (which allows for the development of the ‘D-Zombie) Gurdjieffian cosmology and practice begin with the understanding that no one is born with a soul, but that soul is something that is earned (via various means).
“You all don’t have souls. Unless you achieve a crystallization of your being, you will live and die just as a signature on the sand; winds will come and you will be forgotten. There will not be left a single trace of you.” – Gurdjieff
To draw everything together thus far, I am putting forth that the concept of a P-Zombie exists on the Great Chain of Being/Ray of Creation, it exists upon the spectrum of consciousness. A spectrum that is bilaterally inclusive of both the quantity and quality of consciousness on a single line. A line that looks like this:
Every being on this line/spectrum is indiscernible, indistinguishable from one another. That is, the ‘dead’ P-Zombie, the ‘normal person’, and the ‘Enlightened man’, if one were to meet all 3 at once, would all seem like normal, conscious people, despite their internal differences in quality, with one being entirely devoid of consciousness at all. Now, luckily for us (loosely), defined parameters have already been given with regard to the lower and higher regions of this spectrum. In fact, I mentioned them earlier in this piece:
- awareness or perception of an inward psychological or spiritual fact; intuitively perceived knowledge of something in one’s inner self
2. inward awareness of an external object, state, or fact
3. concerned awareness; INTEREST, CONCERN—often used with an attributive noun [e.g. class consciousness]
4. the state or activity that is characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, or thought; mind in the broadest possible sense; something in nature that is distinguished from the physical
5. the totality in psychology of sensations, perceptions, ideas, attitudes, and feelings of which an individual or a group is aware at any given time or within a particular time span—compare STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
6. waking life (as that to which one returns after sleep, trance, fever) wherein all one’s mental powers have returned . . .
7. the part of mental life or psychic content in psychoanalysis that is immediately available to the ego—compare PRECONSCIOUS, UNCONSCIOUS
I will use these 7 defining traits as a means to define a qualitative relationship to our understanding of what it is to be conscious. That is to say, such traits can be utilized in their definition to understand where one stands on the spectrum. And thus, the argument of this piece is that, yes, ‘P-Zombie’s’, but they do on the aforementioned spectrum of consciousness, which thus posits that P-Zombies can be artificially created/’born’ by any such environment which actively deteriorates their consciousness. At a certain juncture on the spectrum, a ‘normal person’, becomes effectively ‘dead’ = a P-Zombie. However, the term ‘P-Zombie’ denotes a definite state and isn’t inclusive of the aforementioned spectrum. And so I am arguing that there can exist such a being (or, unbeing) as a ‘D-Zombie’ or ‘Descension-Zombie’. As I mentioned a D-Zombie, is a synthesis of both a ‘behavioral zombie’ (a zombie whose behavior is indistinguishable from a ‘normal’ human’s) and a ‘soulless zombie’ (a human-zombie that lacks a soul), both forms understood as synthesized amidst the spectrum of quality-of-consciousness. Thus stating that as much as a human-being can become Enlightened by way of increased quality of consciousness, or increased work towards the development of a soul (as per Gurdjieffian cosmology). So to can a ‘normal – middle-of-the-road – human’ equally allow their consciousness to devolve or ‘descend’ (hence Descension Zombie) into the state of a P-Zombie’s. In short, given the right societal circumstances, men can, quite literally, become the living dead. Now, I will put forth the fact that we are living (especially in the hedonic, moralistic-free-fall West) in exactly the right circumstances for this to happen.
To attempt to back up this statement I must prove 2 things. Firstly, certain circumstances devolve and degenerate man’s quality of consciousness, and secondly that those circumstances are prevalent in the world today. For the first, I will rely on the aforementioned 7 loosely defined parameters of consciousness.
- awareness or perception of an inward psychological or spiritual fact; intuitively perceived knowledge of something in one’s inner self
Immediately we are struck by the extreme looseness of discussions of consciousness, hence why the ‘hard’ problem of consciousness is so hard. It is, for all practical purposes, impossible to quantify another’s perception regarding an internal fact. In attempting to prove the descension of another’s internal life, objectively speaking, we’d need access to that life – which is literally impossible. However, one notable example of a quantifiable way of assessing another’s internal perception is to ask about their faculties of internal perception themselves, beginning with their internal monologue. It is estimated that 2% to 5% of the population have a lifelong inability to generate any images within their mind’s eye. (link). But such oddly specific scientific examples of descension don’t exactly prove whether one knows themselves, with an intuitively perceived knowledge. So let us take a Gurdjieffian example as a mystical qualification:
You decide that you are going to walk to the store from your house, luckily for you, it is only a street-length walk of ten houses until you get to the store, a minute at most. – You believe, as all men do, that you have free-will. You believe, as all men do, that you have use of a faculty you don’t even possess. – You begin your walk, the first few seconds of which are focused solely on what it is you’re going to purchase from the store, but immediately a bird flies overhead and your attention is drawn to its movement, it goes out of sight just past a tree, that reminds you that you need to call the tree-surgeon to remove that annoying stump in your back-garden; you do wonder if your wife managed to get out in the sun today; you’re not sure if she’s enjoying her job at the moment; you think of whether or not you could do what she does for work; suddenly a car drives past and you remember you need to put air into your front-left tire; how much did it cost to replace them all last year; you need to move money from one account to the other…and before you’re even aware you’re entering into the store, all this ‘freedom’ in the space of just a minute, and all this from a man who believes himself to be free and yet cannot, for just a minute, be attentive of the most basic form of existence, walking. Nothing can be expected of this man but mechanical actions.
The so-called ‘spiritual facts’ of one’s internal life, are the only things we can never cling to for more than a second, despite our constant pronouncements of ‘free will’. Our internal knowledge of ourselves is indebted to a self-assumed ‘unity’ regarding the concept ‘our-self’, which is taken in the singular. But as one can see from the above, all-too-common example, we are not one, unified person, but many selves within a singular possibility of consciousness. A unified man would be able to focus his consciousness towards a singular aim, via the conscious-function of attention, which is all consciousness is in lesser or greater degrees. Attention, as the functional capacity of consciousness to enact itself as a living reality, arguably stands in for consciousness-in-practice, it is consciousness as much as we can utilize it. For instance, when we are asleep, that is, quite literally unable to pay attention to anything due to a drastically-lessened-conscious-state, are we not temporarily dead? And, as a counter-example, those moments of extreme danger whereby our lives are/were at risk, do we not say that the memory is extremely vivid? Why, because we paid greater attention, and thus increased (temporarily) our conscious state. Therefore, those who pay zero attention are P-Zombies. Those who are slowly paying less attention are D-Zombies.
In fact, when we look at drastic extremes that appear on the spectrum, for instance, someone in a coma at one end, and a conscious or ‘Enlightened’ person at the other, we are really witnessing a gargantuan discrepancy in personal attention. The person in the coma, is, unarguably alive, and yet entirely unable to pay attention to anything, and thus we would regard them to be as close to ‘dead’ as one can be whilst one is alive (in terms of the Ray of Creation, they would be closer to a rock, than to a human). However, on the other side of the spectrum, we have the ‘Enlightened’ person, whom, if various historical records hold weight, consistently is understood as someone who is terminally aware and attentive of their reality, their presence itself is pure attention.
2. inward awareness of an external object, state, or fact
This second factor is much like the first, except it’s in relation to external states, as opposed to internal states. However, the definition overlooks the fact that the external and internal – unless one has reached Enlightenment – are always connected. If one is to once again re-read the previous example of how modern man attends to the modern world, that is, he is ‘away with the fairies’. One will realize that his internal state is intrinsically linked to external events, a single external event can lead his internal state to devolve into a sleep which can last hours. Of course, as we’re now talking about externalities, we can begin to rely on external statistics. Let us look at the statistics regarding attention:
the average human attention span shrunk by nearly a quarter between the year 2000 and 2015, and we’re now lagging behind the humble goldfish in terms of being able to focus on a task or object.
According to research, our attention span has markedly decreased in just 15 years. In 2000, it was 12 seconds. Now, 15 years later, it’s shrunk significantly to 8.25 seconds.
25% of teens forget major details of close friends and relatives. 7% of people forget their own birthday from time to time, and studies suggest that each week, 39% of Americans will forget one basic piece of information or lose one every day item.
On the average web page, users will read at most 28% of the words during a visit, with 20% a more likely expectation. The average page visit lasts less than a minute and users often leave web pages in just 10-20 seconds. (link)
(link)
Of course, one’s ability to pay attention to the entirety of an advert isn’t an acceptable test for the development of their consciousness, possibly quite the opposite. And yet, one’s ability to pay attention, in general, is a test of consciousness itself, the developmental capability of attention in itself is a factor of a higher-conscious. It’s not about the content that attention is paying attention to, but the act of attention itself which begets a strengthened form of consciousness.
3. concerned awareness; INTEREST, CONCERN—often used with an attributive noun [e.g. class consciousness]
Quite surprisingly, we can actually turn to external statistics to somewhat help us with this one, with Levels of empathy fell by 48% between 1979 and 2009 (link). But even if we’re to abstractly reduce the concept of ‘concern’ to a statistical variable, it’s undeniable that interest in the world has significantly reduced over the last century, a statement itself overlapping with the previous comments on attention.
4. the state or activity that is characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, or thought; mind in the broadest possible sense; something in nature that is distinguished from the physical
This is something that I dealt with majorly in my essay Avoiding the Global Lobotomy. But, in short, a lobotomy is understood as something which reduces the complexity of psychic life, from which I outline 5 clear ways to the complexity of our psychic life (also understood in relation to the above number 4 defining feature of what it is to be conscious).
Firstly, the entirety of our entertainment, education, and work systems are re-orientated around gamification and dopamine-reward-systems, eventually, we succumb to the mechanism itself and our reason for doing something isn’t for the sake of a qualitative experience, but for the increased quantification of personal dopamine (feel-good) rewards. Our lives become reduced to the experiential complexity of ejaculating, eating, and lounging around.
Secondly, Overton-Window-Compression: what social media and quantifiable discourse is doing is mentally limiting what we can say and do, not by way of oppression, but by way or ostracization, alienation and peer-pressure. If you don’t post X, Y or Z which are deemed the things to be posting right now, due to their greater dopamine feedback response, then what you’re posting must be weird or horrible. The Overton window then begins to be compressed into a tighter and tighter spectrum of acceptability, not due to any lack of original thought, but due to the majority of its actors, agents and big-players adhering to the compression itself, for if they venture outside the Overton window they risk losing it all, fame, status, popularity, wealth, all of these ride on remaining inside the window and therefor contributing to the positive feedback of acceptable-thought compression.
Thirdly, Normalcy-Compression: This largely thought and mental-based compression of the Overton window begins to infect corporal and material reality by way of self-panopticonic policing, that is, people begin to constantly check both themselves and others for any traits of weirdness or non-normality. They don’t do this consciously, because most people are largely unconscious, if not – for all practical purposes – asleep. What Deleuze and Guattari call ‘the little fascist in all of us’ begins to police and cross-reference everyone’s behaviors with the compressed mode of normalcy given in a single present. Thus, normalcy, normality, and what is considered to be normal is a perpetual process of tightening wherein the end-game is roughly 3 or 4 seemingly different thought loops that lead back to precisely the same reality, one wherein you are born, you go to work, you consume, you produce and you die, and you do not question whether or not you want to do this, whether you like to do this, or whether you even thought about any of this in the first place.
Fourthly, Limit-Compression: Limit-compression then is relatively simple, from all these forms and modes of compression combined and built up, we end up in a reality where everything is continually compressed for the sake of adhering to an increasingly tightening mode of normality. The project of atomization is the great illusory emancipatory freedom layered over an ever-constraining normality, atomization allows only for greater normality to be imposed on an individual level, away from families, groups, and communes which will potentially have a sturdy and stable enough leader to disrupt the process of modernity.
Finally, Time-Compression: The final bastion of modernity, the one it really doesn’t want you to break. Time-compression is all the previous modes of compression combined into an absolute chimera of control. Control via time-compression. Time becomes constrained to the point where one is not ‘living in the present’ in a Buddhist or Taoist sense, but merely existing at the whim of the latest dopamine feedback response, whatever spontaneous social-media based or dopamine-inducing masturbation session the user succumbs to that day is their nano-present; we are at the whims of a cybernetic master whose taken control of our most basic brain functions and is slowly performing a lobotomy by inducing various degrees of compression, limitation, and constraint, degrees which we accept, agree with and eventually, promote. – And if the primary function of consciousness is to experience time via our ability to be attentive (pay attention) to time, then time-compression is the disallowance of possibility for the growth of consciousness. Or, practically speaking, the modern world is arranged in such a way as to drastically reduce our quality of consciousness.
5. the totality in psychology of sensations, perceptions, ideas, attitudes, and feelings of which an individual or a group is aware at any given time or within a particular time span—compare STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
6. waking life (as that to which one returns after sleep, trance, fever) wherein all one’s mental powers have returned . . .
Both 5 and 6 can be understood in relation to the extended points made under 2, 3 and 4.
7. the part of mental life or psychic content in psychoanalysis that is immediately available to the ego—compare PRECONSCIOUS, UNCONSCIOUS
7 is a point specifically in relation to psychoanalysis, and not of interest to me here.
~
So, taking this all together we have what, exactly?
Firstly we have a man or woman full of great potential, the potential to grow, become, awake, live, experience, and be conscious and attentive. We have, in short, a person whose potentiality can go either way on the spectrum of attention/consciousness, all the way from P-Zombie (the living dead) to Enlightened individual. Due to certain societal, industrial, cultural (nihilism), and technological facets of the modern world, the malicious and coerced tendency is for all men to drift toward the existence of a P-Zombie. Note here the difference between the P-Zombie and the D-Zombie. The P-Zombie is simply born that way, the D-Zombie had the potential for both a greater or lesser consciousness and fell towards the latter. In short, we have a world that is actively seeking to push individuals toward the lower end of the chain of being, and thus make them willing, unconscious, living dead slaves. As they move towards the lower end of the chain of being, the soul either A. Withers (if a soul is presumed from birth), or B. is without the possibility of growth. Equally, their actions succumb to a greater number of laws (as per Gurdjieffian cosmology), or a lessened state of being (as per the Great Chain of Being), in either case, as they move towards the lower end of ‘being-potential’ they become not like machines but become machines. They don’t become like zombies but are zombies. Indiscernible from men, but still roaming around amongst us.