Why zombies lurch

Even without the FX, Hollywood zombies are more realistic than philosophical zombies because they usually lurch when they stumble toward you - Hollywood seems to understand that trying to get by without a consciousness makes things like walking difficult, not to mention talking. Philosophical zombies, on the other hand, are supposed to be indistinguishable from us, by any known test, and yet lack so-called "inner states" altogether. And from the apparent fact that such a chimera is a "conceptual possibility" (see David Chalmers, "Self-Ascription Without Qualia: A Case-Study") we can apparently deduce that these inner states - consciousness, qualia, whatever - are entirely dispensable, "epiphenomenal", or just "along for the ride". Now, maybe it's just me, but, with apologies to David Chalmers, this looks very much like a case of assuming that which you set out to prove - i.e., of begging the question. The alternative view - namely, that inner states, including qualia, are highly desirable if not indispensable for any kind of complex behavior control - is no more defeated by a mere conceptual possibility than a theory of gravity would be by imagining that someone could levitate.

But what Chalmers and others are doing in making this sort of argument, of course, is appealing to the same sort of deeply rooted intuition that has anchored philosophical debate in this area for a very long time - the simple idea that we can, in principle, follow the so-called "physical processes" underlying any given mental state to completion and never encounter the actual state itself - hence that state (which we can hardly deny, though some try to) is simply some mysterious extra, a superfluity, an "epiphenomenon". Zombies are just one more kick at that can (as are, for some strange reason, examples from things Chinese - e.g., Block's "Chinese Nation" or Searle's "Chinese Room"). Thus, goes the argument, in all its forms, the ineradicable gulf between mental states and physical processes.

Like many things that won't go away, there's something at once both superficial (the reason we'd like it to go away) and deep (the reason it won't) about this reasoning. On a superficial level, it sometimes seems like this kind of argument is just some sort of level mistake, like someone saying they followed every process occurring in the City Hall, but never encountered the city government itself - hence, city government must be either an illusion or an "epiphenomenon". But no, obviously, it's simply an abstraction, a way of grouping a set of concrete activities and entities. The problem with trying to explain away dualism in the same way, though, is that the situation is somehow reversed: unlike a city government, the mental states under investigation seem to be the very essence of concrete, primary, irreducible experience, and are the raw material out of which any concept of "physical process" must be made. And this is only part of what makes the issue a deep one - there are also matters involving the very nature of "explanation" and of "awareness".

For this and other reasons, qualia remain at the crux of the issue of consciousness itself. Still, the clumsiness of movie zombies ought to give us a clue about the functional efficacy of an "inner life".