Chapter
Two
What is it like to be.. .?
and simply cannot imagine it being identical to our culture, perhaps that does tell
you something.
Some philosophers think the whole debate is misguided. Patricia Churchland
calls it ‘a demonstration of the feebleness of thought-experiments’ (1996, p. 404).
Dennett thinks it is based on bogus feats of imagination. As they point out, being
able to say that you can imagine something counts for nothing. If you know no
science, you might say you could imagine water that was not made of H 2 O, or a
hot gas whose molecules were not moving fast. But this would tell us more about
your ignorance than about the real world. Chalmers (2010) disagrees, arguing
that we might conceive of a situation (say a twin-earth world) in which water is
still H 2 O but in which there is also a watery stuff that is not H 2 O. The twin earth
is metaphysically possible and is accessed by the act of conceiving. He distin-
guishes between different forms of conceivability and possibility and defends the
legitimacy of using one as a guide to the other.
This debate goes right to the heart of how we perform thought experiments and
why. But even those who are sceptical about stepping from conceivability to
possibility or necessity, as Dennett is, continue to find the thought experiment a
tempting tool. To help us think more clearly about zombies, Dennett introduces
the concept of the zimbo. Imagine there is a simple zombie: some sort of creature
(biological or artificial) that can walk about and behave in simple ways appropri-
ate to its needs. Now imagine a more complex kind of zombie. In addition, this
complex zombie also
monitors its own activities, including even its own internal activities, in an
indefinite upward spiral of reflexivity. I will call such a reflective entity a
zimbo. A zimbo is a zombie that, as a result of self-monitoring, has internal
(but unconscious) higher-order informational states that are about its
other, lower-order informational states.
(1991, p. 310)Imagine a conversation with such a zimbo. For example, we might ask the zimbo
about its mental images, or about its dreams or feelings or beliefs. Because it can
monitor its own activities, it could answer such questions – indeed, it would do
so in ways that would seem quite natural to us, and would suggest that it was
conscious just like us. As Dennett concludes, ‘the zimbo would (unconsciously)
believe that it was in various mental states – precisely the mental states it is in
position to report about should we ask it questions. It would think it was con-
scious, even if it wasn’t!’ (p. 311). This is how Dennett comes to make his famous
claim that ‘We’re all zombies. Nobody is conscious – not in the systematically mys-
terious way that supports such doctrines as epiphenomenalism!’ (p. 406). What
he means is that we are complex self-monitoring zombies – zimboes – who can
talk and think about mental images, dreams, and feelings; who can marvel at the
beauty of a sunrise or the light rippling in the trees. But if we think that being
conscious is something separable from all of this, we are mistaken. On this view
there is no fundamental difference between phenomenal and access conscious-
ness (Dennett, 1995a).
At its simplest, the zombie debate amounts to this. On the one hand, if you believe
in the possibility of zombies, then you believe that consciousness is distinct from
‘I take this argument
to be a demonstration
of the feebleness of
thought-experiments’(Churchland, 1996, p. 404)‘people can,
without conceptual
inconsistency, think the
“impossible” thought
that H 2 O is not water’(Papineau, 2003a, p. 361)‘The philosopher’s
debate on zombies is
really just the qualia
wars.’(Sutherland 1995, p. 312)