Haven’t you ever been driving and thinking about something, and come back to yourself to realize you have no awareness of driving the last few miles? You didn’t crash, you didn’t wander out of the lines, you had automatic routines reacting to the environment and executing the necessary actions of driving for you. A philosophical zombie, as opposed to a Hollywood zombie, is an exact physical duplicate of a human being that lacks consciousness. In other words, how I react in the morning without coffee. Call it what you will. A routine, a robot or a zombie.
I remember having heard of two kind of people making us question the nature of consciousness (also relating with eyes, it turns out). The first kind have functioning eyes, but think they are blind, and can’t be convinced otherwise. However, ask them to stroll along a corridor and they’ll instinctively, unconsciously, avoid obstacles that they have no conscious knowledge of seeing.
The second kind is the opposite, and even more intriguing: they are blind, but believe themselves not to be. When asked how many fingers you’re holding in front of them, and giving a wrong answer (except for sheer luck), they’ll accuse you of lying. Or they might pretend they didn’t see quite well because of tame lighting, or something else. This one is fascinating: their brains reshape their memories to make sense of the world according to their “beliefs”, in a sense.
In both cases, what I find deeply troubling is that you can’t “get” to them: no amount of logic or persuasion can make them realize the reality of their condition. And that, more than anything, correlates with this idea, I think: entities responding to sensory cues in a mechanical way devoid of self-awareness as we try to describe it, just “broken” enough for us to realize it’s there.
Human consciousness most likely evolved as part of an increasingly sophisticated way of responding to the world. Consciousness is basically the ability to make a mental “model” of the world around you — and then include a model of your own self in that model of the world. This ability is just an extension of the intelligence that our ancestors evolved to deal with the world as successfully as possible — to notice patterns, make predictions, and thus increase the odds of survival. In other words, it’s just a form of “sophisticated response.”
The upshot is that on the one hand, making a hard distinction between “sophisticated response” and actual “awareness” seems a bit artificial — the latter is really just an extra-complex, expanded form of the former. On the other hand, our society was built by people who evolved their “responses” to the point of self-awareness, so I don’t think an entity that lacked awareness could function smoothly in our world. A ‘zombie’ might be able to handle many daily tasks, but sooner or later, some need for a complex interaction would arise where a lack of ability to respond with the same sophistication as the average human would stand out clearly. Evolution doesn’t like waste, after all — we wouldn’t develop consciousness, and then waste it. We use our ability to mentally model the world, and ourselves, on a regular basis, and the absence of such an ability would be missed, sooner or later.
-Dagobot
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