Consciousness

• seCtIon FoUR: eVoLUtIon
  creature becomes especially intelligent. There is, however, nothing it is like to be
  this creature, or any of the others. They are all zombies.
  One day a strange mutation appears by chance in one of these creatures  – the
  ‘consciousness mutation’. Instead of being a zombie, this creature is conscious.
  We can call it a ‘conscie’. Unlike all the other creatures, there is something it is like
  to be this first conscie. It suffers, it feels pain and joy, it experiences the qualia of
  colour and smell, sound and taste. The birth of the conscie is like Mary the colour
  scientist coming out of her black-and-white room for the first time.
  Now what? Will this chance mutation prove adaptive, and the gene for conscious-
  ness spread rapidly through the population? Will the conscies outperform the
  zombies and wipe them out? Or will the two continue to co-exist in an evolu-
  tionarily stable mixture? Might planet earth even be like this today, with some of
  us being zombies and some of us being conscies? Indeed, might some famous
  philosophers be zombies while others are real-live-properly-conscious people
  (Lanier, 1995)?
  These questions seem to make sense. But we must remember to stick to a clear
  definition of the zombie. The most common definition is that a zombie is a
  creature who is physically and behaviourally indistinguishable from a conscious
  human being. The only difference is that there is nothing it is like to be the zom-
  bie. So what happens?

Absolutely nothing happens. Natural selection cannot detect any difference

between the zombies and the conscies. As Chalmers points out, ‘The process of

natural selection cannot distinguish between me and my zombie twin’ (Chalmers,

1996, p. 120). They look the same and they act the same. They both do exactly the

same thing in the same circumstances – by definition (if you argue that they don’t,

you are cheating). If such a mutation were possible, then it would be entirely,

and necessarily, neutral, and would make no difference at all to the way these

creatures evolve.

This line of thought leads to an impasse. If we believe in the possibility of zom-

bies, we find it natural to ask why evolution did not make us zombies. But then we

find we cannot answer the question because (on the definition of a zombie) natural

selection cannot distinguish between conscies and zombies.

This whole horrible problem is caused by the mis-imagination of zombies, says

Dan Dennett. Zombies are preposterous, but by persistently underestimating

their powers (making them unable to do things we think we need conscious-

ness for), and hence breaking the rules of the definition, philosophers make

them seem possible (Dennett, 1995c). If you imagine complex organisms evolv-

ing to avoid danger without experiencing pain, or intelligent self-monitoring

zombies evolving without being conscious like us (i.e. zimboes, Chapter 2), you

are like someone who is ignorant of chemistry saying he can imagine water that

is not H 2 O.

‘To see the fallacy’, says Dennett, ‘consider the parallel question about what the

adaptive advantage of health is. Consider “health inessentialism” ’ (1995c, p. 324).

Suppose that swimming the English Channel or climbing Mount Everest could in

principle be done by someone who wasn’t healthy at all. ‘So what is health for?

Such a mystery!’ (p. 325). But this mystery only arises for someone who thinks that

DOES BEING AWARE
NOW HAVE ANY
FUNCTION?