Z-qualia

If zombies are lacking humanity, what is humanity? It obviously does not depend upon the appearance of being human.

Generally, zombies are vectors of a dehumanizing contagion. A case of the zombies strips anyone exposed to it of the qualities that give life to life. Symptoms include the loss of speech, loss of ability for complex planning or tool use, necrosis of the body, lack of fine motor skills, and the increased ability to sustain physical injury. These symptoms point to a being or sub-being that doesn’t appear to have an internal life, or qualia, as the philosophers like to say. What exists instead is a dead body driven to seek out the light of the living in order to extinguish it.

What do the features of zombiehood tell us about nonzombified humanity? It seems critical that there is no ability to speak or communicate, but it may in fact just be the obvious sign that there are serious deficits of some kind. Zombies lack the ability to talk, which often allows some unsuspecting fool to get within biting range. But more importantly, uncommunicativeness overcomes the questions regarding necessary evidence of qualia in another mind. If there is an inability to communicate or to use tools, then there is probably a lack of qualia, and therefore & voila, zombie! or maybe the neighbor’s dog. The Turing test cannot be administered to beings who cannot formulate any kind of parsable sentence.

This question of other minds is an interesting meditation on what is sufficient for anyone to believe in the existence of an external reality, or any intelligent life. Or at least intelligible life. In a way this is the crux of human life, at least to me. I can comprehend the idea of perception and can extend it to other beings that appear to behave in manners similar to my own, but I can just as easily remove the privilege of equal existence as soon as I feel their behaviour has breached my own personal criteria of acceptability. This hidden moral code is based solely on the concept of self, is egoistically driven, and is therefore egoistically flawed.

This is the place that zombies come from. Zombies on film are the projection of our own inability to deal with the problem of other minds. Zombies are instantly recognizable because they possess the lack of paradigmatic human traits, such as speech, vivacity, etc. It is the dehumanizing force of the ego that removes any humanity from zombies. Any good zombie movie worth its salt explores this dynamic. What was once a fight against death itself becomes a meditation on the difference between self and other. Is it just that eternal gap between one’s own sensation of life and its external appearance in an other?

This is the crux of human life because we insist on being social. If we were content to live purely solipsistic existences, then we would never have to extend our selves to include the idea of others. Of course, we might never have developed the idea of a self in the first place.