Philosophical Zombies: A Thought Experiment About Consciousness
Philosophical zombies are a thought experiment conducted by Australian philosopher David Chalmers to question materialist explanations about the functioning and complexity of consciousness.
Through this experiment, Chalmers argues that it is not possible to understand consciousness through the physical properties of the brain, which can be argued if we imagine a world like ours, but inhabited by zombies.
Philosophical Zombie Thought Experiment: Some Background
Describing and locating the components of consciousness is a topic that has generated not only scientific and philosophical debates that are constantly updated. the classic discussion about the mind-body relationship but has even led us to imagine worlds in which it is impossible to discern between who is human and who is not, as science fiction or the development of artificial intelligence shows us.
There are those who defend that our consciousness is nothing more than a set of material elements that can be found inside the brain. In contrast, there are those who argue in favor of the existence of mental states and subjective experiences, which, although they have organic substrates, cannot be defined solely based on biological or physicalist explanations.
Both theses have been defended and refuted by different means. One of them is mental experiments, tools used in philosophy to pose hypothetical situations that allow you to imagine the logical results of an experiment and based on this, draw conclusions and argue theoretical positions.
In the 90’s and with the intention of questioning materialist explanations about the functioning of the human mind, David Chalmers carried out a mental experiment published in his book The conscious mindin which he suggests that If materialist explanations of mental states were valid then human beings would be nothing more than a bunch of zombies.
With his thesis, the idea of philosophical zombies became popular in an important sector of philosophy, however, David Chalmers has not been the only one interested in discussing the properties of human experience through its comparison with pseudohuman characters.
Why aren’t zombies human beings?
The philosophical zombie thought experiment goes like this: Suppose there exists a world that is physically identical to ours, but instead of being populated by humans, it is populated by zombies.
Zombies are beings physically equal to humans, They can learn the same behaviors and have the same cognitive functions But there is a difference that is fundamental and that defends that it is not possible to explain consciousness by the mere existence of physical components: although zombies have a physical composition identical to that of human beings, they do not have conscious and subjective experiences (elements called ” qualia” within philosophy), with which, they do not feel, and cannot develop an awareness of “being” (a zombie). For example, zombies can scream like people, but they do not have the subjective experience of pain.
From this experiment, Chalmers concludes that consciousness cannot be explained in terms of biological determinism, so the proposals of materialism are inadequate. He concludes that zombies are conceivable as long as it is possible to imagine them, and if they are conceivable it is because their conditions of existence are not determined only by physical properties, which means that physicalist explanations of the existence of consciousness are also inadequate.
Chalmers’s double-aspect monism
The philosophical zombie experiment is an attempt to answer a question based on the mind-brain dilemma: Can a physical system develop conscious experiences?
What this experiment implies is that consciousness is not identical to a physical fact, and vice versa, a physical fact does not completely explain consciousness, because it cannot fully explain the presence of qualitative and subjective experiences.
That is to say, explanations based on physical or materialist theory are not sufficient to explain the world, because the world is not composed only of physical properties but of subjective experiences that are phenomenal properties.
In fact, the thought experiment of philosophical zombies is usually included in the set of arguments in favor of double-aspect monism, also known as property dualism a philosophical current that broadly maintains that consciousness is not an entity that exists apart from the physical world, but at the same time, conscious or subjective experiences (phenomenal properties) exist beyond physical properties.
