Episode 99 - Zombies
Transcript
David: 0:12
Hello, and welcome to Overthink.
Ellie: 0:15
The podcast where two philosophy professors sometimes tie our own weird professional debates to pop culture and history.
David: 0:21
I'm David Peña Guzman.
Ellie: 0:27
The Last of Us got super popular when its first season came out pretty recently, I think last year. And this show has, I think, reinvigorated the discourse around zombies. Granted, zombies never really go away in pop culture, since 1968 when Night of the Living Dead came out. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. But this show, which in fact has a girl named Ellie as its protagonist, I swear to God, all the young people these days. are named Ellie. It was like a somewhat unusual name when I was growing up and now everybody in Gen Z and Gen Alpha has my name and I'm just like this weird older person with the trendy kid's name.
David: 1:05
I do not know what the trends are for naming, so I'll just take your word for that.
Ellie: 1:09
the Ellie's are coming for you.
David: 1:10
I know, they're
Ellie: 1:11
but
David: 1:11
like, like zombies.
Ellie: 1:12
exactly. Oh my God. I was going there. I was going to make that joke too. Nice one. I swear to God, we're just like one mind meld at this point. But yes, The Last of Us, what I think is interesting about this show, which is based on a video game, Is that it's actually trying to give a background account for the possibility that zombies might actually emerge in the real world. So of course it's fictional, but the idea is that there is some sort of fungus that mutates and starts turning humans into zombies. And there's this pandemic that leads to the zombification of millions of people. So I think this feels very timely in the wake of COVID. And so the show, although it's a fictional thought experiment, differs from other zombie films and TV shows in trying to give an actual scientific account of how this could happen, which I think makes it really scary.
David: 1:59
So the one thing I know about that show is that it is modeled on a real fungus that does turn animals into zombies called the cordyceps fungus. And what the fungus does is that it takes the host and it takes control of their nervous system. And it makes the animal migrate to an environment where the climate is more hospitable to the fungus itself. So basically it turns the animal into a zombified moped and just
Ellie: 2:32
drives
David: 2:32
it to like the beach.
Ellie: 2:35
Oh, I feel like I saw some headline about that when this, show was first getting popular, but I had forgotten about that and didn't know the details. Okay, that's also really interesting because as we'll come back to in a moment, that sort of reflects the actual origins of zombies more than, I think, some of the contemporary discourse around zombies. This idea that the, there's a master of the body that is dragging or that's forcing the body to drag it around and do its bidding.
David: 3:06
That there's an alienation of will and intentionality. Yeah, so that definitely happens.
Ellie: 3:12
Okay. That's a much better way of putting it.
David: 3:14
that definitely happens with these animals. And then on top of that, the fungus eats the nutrients of the animal from within. So there's also this kind of extraction of the living energy, of, the vital principle of the animal that also has a connection to the way in which zombies are understood in certain traditions, where it's not just like taking control of your body, but in some way sucking the life or the spirit out of you. So Last of Us, it's scientifically real and it's gonna happen.
Ellie: 3:48
in 2024. Who knows? Anything could happen. I have been obsessed with Zombies, David since undergrad, so I'm really excited to talk about this episode today. And I got excited by it from an Anthropology of Religion course that was taught by a professor named Leslie Desmangles, who is a world expert on Haitian voodoo. And so I am so excited to bust out my undergrad notes a bit later in the episode and share with you, the research that I got really into based on this class.
David: 4:18
also on a personal note here, this past year in 2023, I did a trip to Benin country in West Africa. That is. the birthplace of voodoo, which of course is what we associate zombies with. And so I, as a person who doesn't know a lot about voodoo and about zombies, went and did this trip with actually a friend of the podcast, somebody that listens to us very frequently, my friend Manuel Covo, who is a historian at UC Santa Barbara. You've
Ellie: 4:47
Hey, Manuel. Yep.
David: 4:48
yeah. Hi, Manuel. and so we did this trip to Benin and one of the things that emerged from all the guided tours that we did. is that one of the big differences between West African voodoo, like in Benin and Nigeria and Haitian voodoo is precisely the notion of the zombie. So from the perspective of West African practitioners and believers in voodoo. This zombie figure is something that emerges specifically in Haiti, that some of them actually see as a slight deviation away from the principles of quote unquote original voodoo practices. And so this trip was just really eye opening for me in terms of understanding not just the basic principles of voodoo, but also how the social role that it plays in contemporary West African societies.
Ellie: 5:43
Today we're talking about zombies.
David: 5:45
How does the figure of the zombie emerge out of voodoo metaphysics and colonialism in Haiti?
Ellie: 5:51
Why are analytic philosophers so obsessed with the conceivability of zombies?
David: 5:56
And how would debates about zombies in philosophy change if we had a culturally appropriate conception of the zombie?
Ellie: 6:06
Voodoo is the folk religion of Haiti, and it has traditionally existed alongside a more officially accepted religion since colonialism, which is Catholicism. This is something that my former professor Leslie Desmangles wrote a really interesting book about. And voodoo was brought largely by enslaved people from the Congo and Dalmay, which is now Benin, which David, you mentioned having visited. And the term voodoo comes from the Dahomey language where it means deity or spirit. But voodoo in Haiti doesn't have a straightforward relationship with zombification either. You mentioned that people in Benin really want to resist the idea that zombies are associated with voodoo, but the same has historically been true of voodoo practitioners in Haiti. The figure of the zombie, yes, it's associated with Haitian voodoo, but it's always existed as a sort of black magic alongside or outside of the official religion at the margins. It's been the subject of a lot of secrecy and is practiced by sorcerers or bokos in this region.
David: 7:05
Yeah, and the bokor is going to be a really important figure in our thinking about the zombie because in voodoo, the bokor is the priest that is willing to dabble in black magic. But one of the things that's really important about voodoo is that its theory of nature is fundamentally ambivalent. Things are not good or evil, they're always ambiguous. And so the same person who is a bokor in one context can also be, let's say, a sanctioned priest of voodoo practices in a slightly different context. Speaking to that duality.
Ellie: 7:35
Yeah, but then they would definitely have to be secretive about that because there are in voodoo burial practices, there are a lot of precautions that are taken against the possibility of a zombie being made of the body. So oftentimes there's a trimming by the official priest of nails and hair so that the. If the body is tampered with, it will be very obvious. It's oh, this nail was trimmed by the priest, but whoa, this other nail is trimmed. That means that a sorcerer got to it. There will be branches laid over the body with really specific numbers of seeds. And so then again, the official priest can see if the body has been tampered with because zombification is something that is very scary. among voodoo practitioners in Haiti. Granted, it's not scary in the way that we tend to think about it because they don't think of zombies as people who are gonna,
David: 8:23
Eat you.
Ellie: 8:24
yeah, like chase after you, eat your brain, but it's a really sad fate, right? And I think that's something that we'll get into, David. So tell us a little bit about how zombies are made boko.
David: 8:37
Yeah. So again, this is going to be drawn primarily from one important book on voodoo and zombies, which is a book that came out in the 1980s called The Serpent and the Rainbow by a Canadian anthropologist by the name of Wade Davis. And Wade Davis was, a student of anthropology whose mentors, after graduation, invited him to go and study zombification practices in Haiti, in 1981, 1982, because at the time there was this interest in figuring out whether Western medicine could reap the benefits of zombification practices and rituals in Haiti.
Ellie: 9:15
Classic.
David: 9:17
because if you could figure out the secret that voodoo practitioners had for making zombies, which means like really taking control of the body and making people not feel pain, the idea was that you could use that in medicine for surgery as a kind of anesthesia so that you could do surgery without putting people under general anesthesia. Anyways, in this book, The Serpent and the Rainbow, Wade Davis talks about going to Haiti and making connections with a number of local informants who then gave him this like unfiltered access. It has a little bit of a braggadocious anthropologist male from the 1980s attitude of I infiltrated these secret societies. But he does give a really good account of how zombies are created in voodoo. And in short, zombification entails two steps. There is first and foremost, the use of a potion, reportedly. Where somebody is brought into a death like state that is not truly death, and once you bring somebody into that position, it means that other people will think that they have perished, that they've died, and they will bury them, but they are, quote unquote, undead in some liminal space between life and death. And the second stage of zombification is when once they're underground, then you have a bokor, again this sorcerer, basically bring them back as zombies in order to make them typically do forced labor. And so zombification is putting somebody into a catatonic state, and then bringing them back to life without their rational capacities and without them being in control of their own behavior. And so then he talks a lot about how is this actually done in the book is all about that
Ellie: 11:09
And I know his account of how it's actually done has been criticized because he's it's this poison from the pufferfish and there's been no real evidence for that point. But it is still, like you said, a really classic account of these practices to make a zombie. And, As many scholars have noted, it's absolutely no coincidence that the figure of the zombie emerges in Haiti under colonialism because the zombie is a metaphor for the enslaved person. It's somebody who, as you mentioned David, is forced to do labor for somebody else, the sorcerer. I want to fill in the picture of the creation of a zombie a bit more based on what you said, because for example, there's a couple of different kind of zombies. So there's the zombie that you mentioned, David, which is the resuscitated body that is forced to do labor on behalf of the Bokor. And in fact, in Haitian folk stories, it's not uncommon to find that, somebody's maid will be a zombie. It's oh, stay away from that person. They're undead. They're not scary. They're, again, not going to eat you, but they are not, a fully alive person. But then there's also a zombie astral, which is like a bottled non corporeal version, yeah, of a, zombie. Yeah, this is a spirit. And it's really interesting to think about how the figure of the zombie is possible on the basis of the metaphysics behind the voodoo religion. The voodoo conception of body and spirit and soul is influenced by Roman Catholicism, but it's also coming from a very different place from this West African tradition where voodoo is the deity or spirit. And I think there's a different kind of conception of body, soul, spirit that's going on there.
David: 13:02
And essentially what it all boils down to is that according to voodoo metaphysics, A bokor, a sorcerer, can steal what is called your petit bon ange,
Ellie: 13:12
which literally in French means little good angel.
David: 13:16
So cute.
Ellie: 13:17
very cute. And in Creole, it's just Ti Bon Ange, not Petit Bon Ange. They lose the, pe part. And then there's also the Gros Bon Ange or Gros Bon Ange in Creole. And that is the big good angel. So what we call the soul or spirit in Haitian voodoo is actually these two aspects. It's the Ti Bon Ange and the Gros Bon Ange, and then there's the body. So you mentioned, David, that the sorcerer is stealing the Ti Bon Ange. And the Ti Bon Ange is the seat of moral conscience. It is the seat of the personality. It has to do with individuality, will, etc. And it's really prized in Haitian voodoo to be able to, express your personality, to have a Conscience, let's say.
David: 14:04
Yeah. To be an individual.
Ellie: 14:06
to be an individual, like there is a prizing of the individual there. This is something that I was reading about from various sources. The Gros Bon Ange is the condition for the possibility of the Ti Bon Ange. The Gros Bon Ange has to do with our sort of more physical capacities, but the ones that have to do with us as animated. The Gros Bon Ange is associated with breathing and motion. And it's also what's described, this is from the Des Moines book, as the invisible driving force that generates action in a person's body. So we might think about it as like an impersonal animating force. And Davis notes in the book that you've been talking about, David, and I read this in another article by the Professor Ketty Thomas, that the distinction between the Gros Bon Ange and the Petit Bon Ange among Haitians is often described as the difference between your kind of core shadow and the lighter penumbra that is on the outside or margins of your shadow. And that ephemeral outside is the Ti bon ange, whereas like the core that just the simple reflection of your body as the shadow is the Gros Bon Ange.
David: 15:16
Yeah. I read that in the Wade Davis book where he uses this metaphor of shadows, which I really like. And just to put different terms to it, he says the Gros Bon Ange is sentience. It's something that we share with all other animals. And he says it's undifferentiated. So your Gros Bon Ange, Ellie, is the same as mine. And the Tibonage is what differentiates us. It's the principle of individuation that has to do with personality.
Ellie: 15:43
yeah, what we would traditionally call the ego. And I think this is really interesting to think about because it's different from the standard conception of body and soul that we have in philosophy, which is that there's really just body and soul, or more commonly mind. And like I mentioned that the Haitian voodoo metaphysics here is also influenced by Roman Catholicism, which like does have a distinction between soul and spirit. But I think in our basic everyday intuitive understanding, if we can say that, in American culture, we have a dualism. We have a dualism between mind and body. And this even shows up, I think, in some of the ways that we tend to talk about zombies. So not to put you on blast here, David, but earlier when you were mentioning the creation of a zombie, you said it's a splitting off of the mind from the body. And that's actually the same way that Zora Neale Hurston, the famous black American author, described the creation of a zombie. when she did field work in Haiti in the 1930s. So she got this Guggenheim grant to go to Haiti and do anthropological research, and she described the zombie as the living dead, which, is a totally standard way of putting it, but also as being a body without a soul. And I think when you dig deeper into the voodoo picture, that's not quite the case, right? The zombie, as you said, David, has had its ti bon ange captured and its body is still animated though by the gros bon ange. So this is why the zombie appears to go about its everyday functions in the way that we would expect because it actually is, like it still has that animating function. The difference is it's no longer autonomous and I think that this is something that's really important to think about when we're thinking about the zombie in its original form. The zombie has been alienated from its own spirit by the sorcerer, and so it's now doing its bidding. And Keta Thomas, the scholar that I mentioned a moment ago, says that because of this, we actually shouldn't be thinking just about the zombie as a splitting off of the ti bon ange from the body and the gros bon ange. But we should be thinking about zombification as producing the Bokor or the sorcerer, the community, and the remains of what once was an individual. So she thinks that we should be thinking about the zombie more in that kind of ecological or community based term.
David: 18:08
And I would add to this that there are actually very different ways of creating a zombie for a book horror. So the one that has played the largest role in anthropological work is again, this turning somebody into undead and then bringing them back to life. Wade Davis makes clear that if you're a really, powerful bokor, you can actually create a zombie astral when somebody dies a natural death if you just capture their petit bon ange at the right time. So all that you really need to do is intervene into the assemblage of metaphysical forces or elements that make up a person at a moment when they are vulnerable, like at the edge of death or in the moment of death in order to steal. The benefit of the typical zombification where you make somebody catatonic without really killing them is that then because their body still has that animating principle that you mentioned, Ellie, then you can bring it back to life and make it do forced labor. And that's where you really see the connection between that kind of zombification. And the forced slavery of colonialism.
Ellie: 19:18
Yeah. And I think that's where the community comes in, right? Because I mentioned that Haitian voodoo burial practices include precautions that are taken against the creation of a zombie in precisely this way. The idea that the bokor could just come in at the exact moment of time and snatch up the ti bon ange. And you can see how that is an externalization Of the fear of what actually was happening to Haitian people under slavery, which was the forced labor, the lack of autonomy, et cetera, et cetera. And certainly, I think you can say that a big difference between enslaved people and the zombie is that there's still a conception of individual dignity and, individuality, right under the conditions of enslavement, right? I think that's one thing that people often point to in terms of resistance is you can't get my soul. But I think that fear of getting the soul speaks to the conditions of forced labor under which these Haitians were working and under which, of course, they couldn't actually exercise their autonomy in efficacious ways.
David: 20:22
Yeah. And that fear that you're talking about Ellie is so real that it's not just that people in their day to day practices and in their burial rituals take precautions against being zombified, but it's actually that zombification is banned by the Haitian criminal code. There's an article that says. Zombification is illegal, and the funny thing about that law from a legal perspective is that it says that zombification practices through this kind of like black sorcery are to be considered as equivalent to murder, independently of the ultimate consequence of the zombification on the actual body of the person. So whether the person's body is still alive. And in doing forced labor, as long as zombification has happened through the capture of the Ti bon ange, it's still murder, even if the person is alive. So in theory, you could go to jail for murdering somebody who is alive as long as you can prove that their autonomy and their will has been alienated through
Ellie: 21:27
the capture of the Ti bon ange. Wow. Wow. And this is, this could take us a whole different direction, which I don't want to go down. Maybe we can come back to this in the bonus or something, but this is actually why I think Get Out is the most interesting zombie movie of this century, even though it's not traditionally seen as a zombie movie, because it's actually, I think, more representative of the original notion of a zombie than
David: 21:50
than the, Hollywood
Ellie: 21:51
yeah, or like The Walking Dead, I don't know, that's obviously a TV show, not a movie, but those kinds of representations of zombies.
David: 21:59
No, you're right. And, the point that really crystallizes this for me is when, Davis says in Haiti, people don't fear zombies. They fear zombification. And they fear it to the death.
Ellie: 22:17
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David: 22:38
Listeners, by now you have gotten a heavy dose of overthink information about zombies and zombification in Haitian voodoo. You know a good deal about what zombies are, how they're made, and maybe the social function that zombification plays. Now, weirdly enough, in European and North American academic philosophy, analytic philosophers are obsessed with talking about zombies. Yet, most of the discussions that unfold around zombies in philosophical circles are almost entirely ignorant or at least dismissive of what zombies mean in the tradition of Haitian voodoo that originated them. What are your thoughts about this, Ellie? That all these largely North American and European philosophers are talking about zombies left and right, but never mention voodoo at all. I
Ellie: 23:34
would say this, the case is even stronger than you presented it. It's not that they almost entirely ignore, it's that they entirely ignore. The entire Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on zombies, which is, quite interesting in many ways, does not mention Haitian voodoo. once. And it seems to me that philosophers, this is like such a classic analytic philosophy story, watched Night of the Living Dead in 1968. In the 1970s, we're like, whoa, that thought experiment's kind of interesting. Let's consider it. And let's think about it in the, let's be honest, the most boring possible terms. Okay. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm getting ahead of myself. We're going to give the debate a fair shake. but which was the, Question of physicalism, is everything in the world physical or dualism? Is there some mental stuff that is non physical? And, see if the Zombies that we watched on Night of the Living Dead have anything interesting to tell us about this debate. it's a very odd situation, and in fact, I was looking forward to making that criticism and then our Overthink assistant Emilio sent us a really interesting quote from the scholar Justin E. H. Smith. On precisely this point, Smith has an article called The World as a Game, where he criticizes the analytic literature on zombies for precisely this point. And he says, it's not that there's anything misguided about the particular thought experiment, I think there is, but we'll get back to that later, but only that the choice of the zombie as this experiment's vehicle reminds us of the limitations intrinsic to a philosophical tradition that considers, say, the oeuvre of George Romero, the director of Night of the Living Dead. Part of its general culture, but not say ethnographic reports from rural Haiti or indeed the profoundly learned anthropology of the Jesuit intellectual tradition. So his claim is that analytic philosophy in its obsession with these abstract thought experiments just picks and chooses things. at random from the world. Not even at random, actually, not at all at random. Let me think about that a little bit more. It's instead things that are low hanging fruit, right? A popular movie that you might have watched and shows very little interest in the history, the ethnography, the interdisciplinary inquiries, not to mention the religious roots of something like the zombie.
David: 25:57
Yeah, and one really good place to see this at work is the book, The Conscious Mind by David J. Chalmers, which is widely considered in analytic circles, like the go to place for thinking about analytic debates about the philosophy of mind and the role that the figure of the zombie plays in them. And a lot of the argument in this book hinges on his thought experiment about a zombie. But in the index, the word Haiti or voodoo doesn't appear. And when he introduces a zombie, same thing. He says, Oh, look, this is not the zombie that you hear elsewhere. Like in movies, it's a different kind of zombie, but he doesn't even bother to say. It's also not like the Haitian voodoo zombie, like even that dismissal.
Ellie: 26:43
He probably didn't know. He probably didn't know it, let's
David: 26:45
Yeah, I know. And then I was like looking through the index and I was like, he doesn't mention voodoo at all. And then I noticed that even though he doesn't mention voodoo, he does mention UFOs in the index. But I want to talk about this book in particular, because it, as I said, it's the go to place for thinking about zombies in analytic debates about consciousness. And basically the argument here is as follows. David Chalmers is somebody who believes that consciousness, our conscious experience of the world, and by that he means phenomenal experience, like our ability to taste coffee, to see colors, to hear sounds like the sensorial felt dimensions of human experience that you and I really care a lot about as phenomenologists. He says, All those aspects of our experience are irreducible to physical explanations. So there is something irreducible about experience that means that all these people who think that you will just reduce mind to matter are mistaken in their belief. So the book in many ways, I really respect because it's a big swing. against contemporary movements towards reductionism, like all these people who say, oh, just give us a little bit more time. We will find out exactly the neural correlates of consciousness and we will decipher the material basis of the brain. And so the question is, why is somebody who is interested in debates about the relationship between physics and mind talking about zombies at all. And essentially, the work that he wants zombies to do for his argument is that he thinks zombies are conceivable, right? We can imagine a zombie, i. e. a person who is just like you and I, Ellie, in every regard, but who doesn't have the capacity for that kind of lived phenomenal experience. And basically what he wants to argue is that because we can imagine these zombies, because we can think them and conceive them, it falsifies a position that is quite common against contemporary philosophers and scientists, which is that reductionist position. According to which the physical determines the phenomenal such that you cannot have a change in the phenomenal without also having a change in the physical. And basically he says zombies are the refutation of that claim.
Ellie: 29:11
And ultimately, Chalmers is trying to defend dualism, this idea that conscious experience is not reducible to physical processes. The problem of trying to explain conscious experience through physical processes is what in other works he has called the hard problem of consciousness, for which he is very famous. In using the zombie figure for these purposes, he's resurrecting, if I can say that, a debate that had begun already in the 1970s when the figure of the zombie was first brought up in philosophy to test intuitions about whether everything in the universe is physical or whether there is some stuff in the world that is not physical, right? debate between physicalism and dualism. And Chalmers is really putting the focus here on consciousness with respect to that debate. Let's deepen the claim that you mentioned earlier, David, about why zombies are, I don't know, useful here. And the answer has to do with their conceivability, which you mentioned. So the conceivability argument for zombies is basically that we can conceive of zombies. Anything we can conceive of is possible. Therefore, zombies are possible. And zombies are only possible if you are not a physicalist. Why is this? Okay, for this we need to say what Chalmers means by zombie. What he basically means is a body without a mind. Is that fair to say? David? it's somebody who has the exact same behaviors as humans, but who doesn't have anything up there. They don't have conscious experience. There's no what it is like to be them. So maybe we wouldn't even want to say mind. I don't know.
David: 30:59
No, yes, no, we, would want to say mind, except with the addendum that according to Chalmers, the philosophical analytic zombie does everything that we do. So my zombie twin would do everything that I do. It would be indistinguishable from me. So they would perform all the functions that I perform. They would speak, they would go to class, they would teach philosophy, they would do an overthink podcast about zombies in which they talk about Haitian voodoo and criticize Chalmers for his analytic biases. Anyways, so they would do everything. That's the unique thing about this kind of zombie. It's just that they wouldn't have that Inner reality that felt experience of phenomenality, or what sometimes is called qualia, like the qualitative aspect of experience. So you're right. They would have no mind. Keeping in mind that mind here means that rather than other functional capacities.
Ellie: 31:55
And this thought experiment goes back at least as far to Descartes, who famously in the meditations says, I can't reach the minds of anybody else in order to know that they're even there. All I see is other people's bodies. so it could be that everybody around me is actually an automaton. I have no way of knowing that they are conscious. And Chalmers using the zombie figure is More or less updating that now I want to think about whether or not he's right that zombies are conceivable because Daniel Dennett, another very well known philosopher of mind has famously and very boisterously argued that zombies are not conceivable. And said that the whole zombie debate is an embarrassment to philosophy. I read Dennett's article on the preposterousness of zombies as research for this episode.
David: 32:51
Such great
Ellie: 32:53
it it is. Yeah, let me make sure I'm getting that actually. Yeah, the unimagined preposterousness of zombies. So are you ready to hear what Dennett's critique of this conceivability argument is?
David: 33:03
Yeah. And it better be preposterously good.
Ellie: 33:07
I don't know if I can say that, but this article actually had me laughing out loud at various moments, sometimes with Dennett, and I think sometimes at Dennett. So I will tell you, no, no disrespect, I should say sometimes at Dennett's words, perhaps I am not laughing at Dennett the man, but, Yeah, this article is written in a really funny way to me. So Dennett thinks that the conceivability argument just doesn't make sense because when we imagine that zombies are possible, aka these beings who walk like us, speak like us, behave like us in every fashion, but don't have a, what it is like of experience aka. They don't have consciousness. We are failing to take into account a really important aspect of human behavior that he thinks more or less is the same as consciousness, and that is higher order reflective thinking or higher order reflective informational states. This is our beliefs about our other beliefs and states. So One of the examples that he uses, you said it better be preposterous, and I think this is like a great example of that, is he says that humans don't just enjoy sex, we find sex sexy. Just like thinking about sex, like thinking about our beliefs about sex, I don't know, is sexy, if we can say that? We, have beliefs that sex is sexy, that sex is good, etc. We don't just have beliefs about sex. there's this, extra order. There's a, level of reflection on our beliefs, that is a really important aspect of not just human consciousness, but also of human behavior. And so he says, if you really were to think of a zombie, you would have to think of a creature that had higher order reflective intentional states. I am so delighted to report to you that he calls this zombie with the capacity for higher order reflective states. a Zimbo. There is a philosophy article that coins the term Zimbo by Daniel Dennett.
David: 35:16
I, just imagine now a zombie bimbo,
Ellie: 35:20
I think of a himbo, but to your point, I posted about this on Twitter because I thought it was hilarious and somebody had an excellent response. This is from the account. SIU casmite. Zimbos like OMG totally. I so love your outfit. Like it's absolutely idyllic. I'm gonna eat your brains in a way that minimizes the splatter on the top on that top and your Prada shoes. They're to die for. Like literally.
David: 35:45
That is really good.
Ellie: 35:47
Yeah. So there's just I read this. There was this line from Chalmers that just literally had me cackling.
David: 35:54
wait, you mean From Dennett
Ellie: 35:55
Sorry. Sorry. Yes, I do. I do Thank you. Thank you. He says, In Dennett 1991, I introduced the category of a Zimbo, by definition a zombie equipped for higher order reflective informational states, e. g. beliefs about its other beliefs and its other zombic states. This was a strategic move on my part, I hasten to add. Its point was to make a distinction within the imaginary category of zombies that would have to be granted by believers in zombies, and so on and so forth. I just share that quote because I feel like it's so simultaneously serious and absolutely hilarious.
David: 36:27
and I think this highlights one of my problems with the entire analytic literature on zombies, which aside from being entirely. itself alienated from the specificity of it also just gets lost in these logical puzzles whose consequences for our thinking about conscious experience. breaks down very easily, and that, for example, with the proliferation of like new versions of zombies where you like take something else away to see what happens or you add something like higher order intentional states, but at some point it just ceases to make any sense. And then there is this whole debate at the center of this literature. about what exactly is lost and what isn't when you remove conscious experience. Because people can't agree about what is part of conscious experience. for example, with Dennett, there is this question that we can ask, which is, would a zombie have beliefs, whether higher order or lower order, it doesn't matter, would a zombie have beliefs at all? It would depend on whether you believe that beliefs themselves have a phenomenolological feel to them. If there is, then zombies couldn't have it because they don't have phenomenal experience. But if there isn't, then they could have it. And so it becomes really unclear what is taken out, because in some articles that I've read in the past, people start making claims that just make it clear how much of, honestly, it becomes like a circle jerk of intuitions where people are just like, my intuition is this. So just to give you an example of this, some people say, Oh yeah, zombies totally have orgasms. And I'm like, what? I thought the whole point is that they don't feel that they don't have, maybe they act. Maybe they moan. That's a functional, that's a behavioral thing, but they wouldn't have the feeling of orgasm. In other words, they wouldn't orgasm. Or there are people who are like, Oh yeah, my zombies definitely appreciate the beauty of melodies and the aesthetic properties of art. And they go to the museums and I'm like, you lost the very concept of zombie, even as you've defined it.
Ellie: 38:36
Okay. I want to go on record and say that if zombies were conceivable, which I don't think they are, about which maybe I'll say in a moment, they would have orgasms because Chalmers defines a zombie as a complete physical duplicate of a conscious human being with the same brain structures, but no subjective experience. And in as much as an orgasm has. physical, it's physical, right? we would say that a zombie would have an orgasm, it just wouldn't have a subjective experience of an orgasm.
David: 39:07
So I, that's where I disagree because I think the zombie would experience, let's just say, I'm sorry for the language here, it would experience like a discharge in the culmination of sex.
Ellie: 39:18
we did a whole episode on orgasms, so I don't think you have to apologize for
David: 39:20
language. I know, they would experience, the physical correlates of orgasm. But when we talk about orgasm, we talk about a feeling of intensity. That's orgasm. And so they wouldn't have orgasm because they don't have inner feeling. And so for me, that's where it just loses coherence as a debate. And I just bail out. And I draw the conclusion that the philosophers themselves are zombies who look like human beings but don't really have an inner world.
Ellie: 39:48
hold up a second on, on that because I, think actually the question of feeling would have to depend on whether we're defining feeling as physical or as subjective experience, like does feeling, is feeling physical but has a subjective correlate or is it just subjective? You're saying the latter, but I think maybe I'll be agnostic about that for the moment. I do want to. give this debate a little bit more of a fair shake, though, because I actually think Dennett is right about the inconceivability of zombies, but perhaps for slightly different reasons than, he gives. So the idea that a zombie would have to have higher order beliefs about its intentional states in order to count as a zombie, aka a zombie would have to be a Zimbo, has to do with the fact that there are aspects of human behavior that depend on the presence of those higher order intentional states. My reasons for thinking that zombies are inconceivable though would come from a slightly different angle. And I suspect they might be ones that you agree with, David. We probably don't have a ton of time to get into this, but just to mention as a phenomenologist, I think that consciousness is so deeply tied up in our physical processes that you just can't break them apart. the whole dualist premise doesn't get off the ground for me. nor does actually the Haitian metaphysics that we talked about earlier with the distinction between the Ti Bonange and the Gros Bonange. I think that's getting things more right than a sheer dualism between mind and body. But I don't think that the mind and body are separable to begin with.
David: 41:23
yes and no, in the sense that there is here a question about the relationship between consciousness and physics, right? if the universe is just physics, how do you get conscious experience out of that? How do you get mind out of matter? So that's a fundamental question. And Chalmers, at least, not here talking about Dennett, thinks you just need to posit consciousness as a sort of fundamental principle of the universe, just like other physical forces, and basically expand your theory of physics. Now, in connection to Dennett, what I dislike about Dennett's position is just that I disagree with his claim that consciousness is higher order beliefs. As an expert on animal consciousness, I move away from that because I think it's unhelpful to think about consciousness in those high end cognitive threshold terms. And so my beef with the zombie debate is that I actually just disagree with the premise that you could have somebody who is just like me without inner feeling who nonetheless fools everybody else into thinking that it is real me. I don't think that a zombie could fool other people into real and really mimic my behavior a hundred percent if it doesn't have inner subjective reality because I see inner subjective reality as something that would in the real world be essential for you generating the kind of behavior that I do. And that's where I just don't really care that much about logical possibility. I mostly care about material possibility. And I just don't think zombies are anywhere remotely possible in the kind of world that we inhabit.
Ellie: 43:05
you do think that even if they are possible, they aren't necessarily zimbos. I
David: 43:09
if anything, we've established based on the last of us that if there is a materially possible zombie, it's going to be the one that turns us all into mopeds and uses our bodies to drive itself to better weather because that's the one that's doing that to plants and the insects already.
Ellie: 43:46
Think a little bit now about how the debates within philosophy about zombies might change if we had a culturally appropriate conception of the zombie. And I want to soften a claim that maybe came across In the previous segment, which is that analytic philosophy about zombies is flat out ridiculous because it doesn't engage at all with the Haitian tradition of zombies. Because I don't think it's flat out ridiculous because of that. I do think it's fair to say that There are certain debates and thought experiments that might be divorced from cultural background and that's not necessarily a bad thing, like it's not as if analytic philosophers are actively harming the Haitian voodoo community by not talking about zombies, but I do think that the analytic debates about zombies, if we want to preserve them at all, like Dennett certainly doesn't, but if we want to preserve them at all, would be really beneficially enriched by considering the Haitian tradition because it shows that there may be a very different set of intuitions around the relationship between consciousness and the body.
David: 44:51
And so let's ask that question and really run with it. How would our conception and thought experiments lead to different debates if we had a cultural and culturally appropriate understanding of zombies. So one place where my mind goes for this is on focusing, not so much on are zombies possible or conceivable? What are the limits of our imagination? So on and so forth. But if we take out theoretically, Phenomenal consciousness, this thing that, according to Chalmers, is what the zombie wouldn't have. What do we actually lose as a consequence of that? So instead of insisting that my zombie twin is just like me, but without inner experience, I want a debate about zombies where we really start thinking about what the role of inner experience is in enabling the full range of experiences that I have, such that the loss of phenomenality would entail also other losses. do you see what I mean? So I, want to understand in what ways my zombie twin would be different from me because they truly have lost something that is very important.
Ellie: 46:03
and if we're going from a voodoo perspective, it wouldn't be that they have simply lost their Consciousness. It would be that they have lost their ti bon ange, so they have lost their conscience, their will, their autonomy, their ego, but they have preserved the animating life force. What do you think about that? Oh,
David: 46:29
I think that's right. And In connection to Haitian voodoo, they also have lost their personality, which means their individuation. And so it would mean that if we take this voodoo perspective, that means that all zombies are indistinguishable from one another. so there is no such thing as zombies that act just like me or just like you. they have lost the very possibility of even being seen as individuals because the only thing that they can perform are those basic life functions that are associated with sentience, with just like physical movement overall, like in the basics of breathing and the like.
Ellie: 47:09
This is really interesting because, yeah, I think I was coming at it from an angle of, they would still have the Gros Bon Ange, and so maybe, there's still a soul like element that an analytic philosopher would not see in the zombie. But you're adding a compatible, but I think even richer dimension to that, which is that, but they would lose the personality. And so we actually cannot envision a zombie who would be like us in every way, but not be us.
David: 47:40
Yeah, that's right. and It means that the behavior of zombies would be very minimalistic, and it would just depend on, it would be a reflection of the will of the master of the zombie, of the bokor, whoever, takes the petit bon ange, captures it, and then manipulates it in the same way that fungus manipulates the bodies of ants and other insects. Yeah, another way in which we can think about this is if we switch the focus in the way in which Haitian voodoo demands away from zombies towards zombification. And the reason for this is that in the philosophy of animality, There is a lot of criticism about people who basically see animals as zombies, right? Like animals, look, they don't do anything. They don't have a rich inner life. They don't have conscious experience and higher order beliefs. And one of the arguments that is often made by people specialize in animal consciousness and animal experience is that this image of the animal as a zombie is not an accurate reflection of who animals are, it's a reflection of who animals become under human dominion. So for example, think about an animal that's completely broken down in a laboratory because they've been experimented on a lot. Of course, that animal will look like a zombie. It won't, it will lose its will to live. But there, it would be a mistake to conclude that this zombie like behavior that we observe in laboratory animals is a reflection of the zombie like nature of the animal in question. Rather, it is a consequence of the fact that we have zombified the animal. And so I think thinking about sentient creatures whose lives we diminish, or we perceive as diminished, as being victims of a kind of intellectual zombification on our part as humans is really interesting. Like we do this to animals, either through research or through abattoirs, or even just like by denying them mental states, when we refuse to see other animals in this way, we zombify them. So I, I think the focus on the process is interesting.
Ellie: 49:53
Yeah, which I think also reminds me a bit of the Haitian voodoo practice of metaphorically zombifying enslaved people, right? We said that it's not the case that the state of slavery is exactly a state of zombification, but obviously there's a deep connection there. And I think it is fair to say that there's at least something like a zombification that is going on in the practice of enslavement.
David: 50:19
Yeah, no, that's correct.
Ellie: 50:21
I'm gonna totally pivot here, David, because I've been wondering when to mention this, and I think I, I promise I'll find some way to, to segue it. But when I was in grad school and I was first really into the work of Jacques Derrida, I wrote a term paper called Derrida and the Zombie because I wanted to like, use my knowledge about Haitian voodoo anthropological accounts of, zombification and tie it to Derrida. And I think I ended up trying to give a different philosophical angle on the question of zombification than the one we get in analytic philosophy, but it ended up being pretty much a dead end because I wrote a paper
David: 51:02
pun intended.
Ellie: 51:03
an undead end, because I wrote a paper arguing that the figure of this Edgar Allan Poe story, M. Valdemar, who ends up speaking after he's dead, which about in his book, Voice and Phenomenon, is not only a figure of the zombie. Maybe. But also that the practice of zombification can be a fundamentally ethical act.
David: 51:26
Like we ought to zombify people.
Ellie: 51:30
Arguing it metaphorically, and I was saying, it's not like doing it, it's not like the way that the Bokor does it, it's this other way. And I presented this at the Derrida Today conference in, I don't know, maybe 2014, 2015, something like that. I thought I was hot shit. I remember some senior scholars came, including one of my mentors, Geoffrey Bennington, a Derrida specialist. And at the time, people were pretty positive about it. They were like, Oh, this is an interesting argument. I posted on academia. edu and because the words Derrida and Zombie were a hot combination, it ended up getting viewed a thousand times, which for me as a baby scholar, still in grad school was unheard of. I know I was like, Oh my God, people are really interested in this argument.
David: 52:11
Oh my God, I better write my, I better like fashion my entire career as a zombie specialist, but specific to deconstruction only.
Ellie: 52:19
I know, I was arguing that deconstruction is a form of zombification and that's like an ethical act. So I took it down from academia. edu because I was going to fashion it into an article and I didn't want it to be public while it was going through the process of peer review. I ended up not finishing it. And later, Bennington told me, he was like, I'm so glad you moved away from that zombie stuff. That was really weird. Like, why were you arguing that zombification was ethical? Now you're working on much more interesting stuff, which was, nice to hear. But then I was like, why didn't you tell me that then? Why didn't you tell me that this was bad? So
David: 52:55
saw you burn.
Ellie: 52:58
I know. So this is like a continental version of the analytic debate about zombie, which is just that it's like really boring.
David: 53:04
You said that you presented zombification as an ethical act, and you also mentioned that it was based on this Edgar Allan Poe, where a dead person is a zombie. is made to speak again after their death. So I'm just connecting A and B here, and I'm concluding that your argument is that zombification as an ethical act entails making, speaking for the dead or trying to, make the dead speak again so that their voice is not forgotten. Is that, was that the argument?
Ellie: 53:34
Okay, so it wasn't as good as that. But I think this is a good segway for what we're talking about because, within philosophy, there's a divide between analytic and continental philosophy. People like to say it doesn't exist anymore. They're unfortunately very wrong about that. I've presented on that in a YouTube video and at conferences, I've written an article that should be forthcoming about it at some point. I would love to see the distinction overcome, but it's alive and well. It is, neither dead nor undead. It is very much alive at this point. And I think The Continental version of the analytic debates about zombies was like something that I was maybe trying to start and failed at but I do think that there is something zombifying that we as Continental philosophers tend to do and which actually we do constantly in this podcast and which I don't think is a bad thing but is worth thinking about a little bit more and that is, like you said, speaking for the dead. Continental philosophers tend to be specialists in figures rather than just in topics. And what we are doing when we are presenting our interpretation of such and such figure is to some extent reanimating the body of whoever we're talking about and saying, this is what Foucault would have said about cancel culture. That is. Metaphorically speaking, of course. but it's a form of zombification, no?
David: 54:59
Oh, I like that actually. So I don't think it's as horrific as your mentor made it sound to be. And it depends on whether we see it as like revivifying the body. That's one. that's the corps cadavre version of zombification. But you could also describe it as the zombie astral where you're trying to capture the essence of their thought.
Ellie: 55:18
Yeah.
David: 55:19
your own writing, right? So like it's actually both, is it's a zombie astral and the flesh cadaver, zombie at the same time. So I like that. And I don't think I talked to you about this, but for a while I was working on this book project that I abandoned, at least for the time being, about the phenomenology of reading, about what it is that we do when we read text.
Ellie: 55:43
you not working on that anymore?
David: 55:44
Oh no, I, abandoned that. But the point is that I was also working with what I'm now realizing was a zombification like understanding of the process of reading, where what we do when we read a text is we zombify ourselves. And that's because the phenomenology of reading texts, whether they're philosophical or literary or whatever, is a fundamentally passive and self effacing practice, where once you get in the flow of reading a book, it's as if the author who is dead, or is at least not present in your environment, is thinking their thoughts through you, right? the thoughts that you're reading on the page and that you experienced inside your mind, are not your own. And so you are turning yourself into a vessel for the consciousness of another person who is not present. And so there, it's a kind of willful submission, a giving up of the reader who turns into a zombie. And whose thoughts are controlled by the author.
Ellie: 56:52
Yeah. Okay. So here we have two very different concepts of what's going on. Yeah. So this notion that we are the zombies rather than the author that we're resuscitating being the zombie. And I wonder whether we could add an additional metaphor to it, which is that the metaphor of zombies as brain eaters has really taken hold. This idea not only that zombies are cannibals, but also that they're brain eaters comes about with the filmic depictions of zombies. There is some weird contingent connection to Haitian voodoo here because even though zombies in Haitian voodoo are not cannibals, there was some scandal in the early 20th century a group of voodoo practitioners who were cannibals. And so then the, there was like a tying of the notion of the zombie and the cannibal, even though neither of them are at all mainstream within voodoo. But I think we see this idea, yeah, of the zombie as the eater of the brain. And I wonder how that might fit into this picture as Well,
David: 57:57
I don't know. My brain does turn to mush when I read something for a long time. That's very hard. So I do feel as if the book is eating my brain away. But yeah, no, that's not exactly what you were alluding to. But insofar as the act of reading and writing. So reading somebody's text and then in your version, writing about them and making them speak entails consuming one another's energies and living through the other, it would be a kind of mutual cannibalism, where the author gets to live through me. And so I am the author's master, like when I read Foucault, or when I read Heidegger, I'm the master that like pulls the string. But when I'm reading them, the relationships are reversed. And so this would mean that intellectual labor is just zombification all the way down that produces the illusion of subjectivity at the end. like when I finally speak in my own voice, that, but that would just be an illusion. And before that, it would be nothing but brain eating practices from one to the other and back again.
Ellie: 59:10
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