Zombies

0:14High Signation, from Slate. It's the opening scene of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, 1968. The first zombie movie in modern American cinema. John and Barbara, a brother and sister in their early 20s, have just made a 200-mile drive from Pittsburgh on an annual visit to their father's grave. At the cemetery, the brother John decides to have a little fun and spook his sister. They're coming to get you, Barbara. Stop it! You're ignorant!

0:47They're coming for you, Barbara. Meanwhile, a tall, very thin man in a tattered suit is off in the distance, slowly closing in on their location. They notice him, but don't pay him any attention until he's close enough to pounce. Oh! No! Oh! Johnny! Help me! That's the first rule of zombie-dom. A zombie has to be slow. Any living person has to be able to outrun it. But it has to make up for it by being strong and gross-looking.

1:23The ghoulish zombie with rotting teeth kills John by throwing him onto the ground as his head hits a gravestone. Then he chases Barbara into the car. She locks it. And the zombie, inexpertly, pounds on the door and windows trying to get in. The second rule is that the zombie has to be dumb. It has to have one very simple desire and walks in one direction destroying barriers to fulfill it.

1:54If a zombie has a mind, it only has a single track. Which makes the next thing that happens particularly interesting. Maybe even a flaw in George Romero's early depiction. The zombie just realized he's not getting into the car. So he pauses, looks around on the ground, finds a brick, picks it up, and chucks it into the passenger side window. He's actually problem-solving. When Barbara finally escapes, she finds herself locked in a farmhouse where she meets other

2:28people who are hiding from the zombies. This would be the third rule of zombie horror pictures. A small group of survivors have to figure out how to repel the ongoing threat of a zombie takeover. When we go to these kinds of films... This is John Edgar Browning, cultural historian and folklorist at the Savannah School of Art and Design. We're not going there to watch and look at these horrible, disgusting zombies.

3:00They are simply a catalyst for what we're really there for, which is the ability of people to collectivize and survive together in these survival spaces. And often they don't do it very well, and that's what leads to them getting killed. The zombie has never had the kind of agency that the contemporary, say, vampire does. The vampire has a name, has goals, but the zombie was always half decomposed in the body, but also in

3:33the mind, right? They're not really minded beings. You know, when we're watching these other kinds of horror movies, particularly these stereotypical or archetypal monsters like Frankenstein's monster or Dracula, or even the Wolfman, we're there to watch these monsters. Yeah, we're there to see if the people survive or not, but we're there to watch and learn from and see ourselves in these monsters. With zombies, we're there to watch the survivalists.

4:05We can see subconsciously a part of ourself in the zombie, but we also see bits and pieces of ourselves, the parts we like and the parts we don't like, in the survivalists. And, you know, they're there to either die horribly because they're not getting along or they're there to die with dignity. One of the things that's running in the background... Christina Van Dyke, Columbia University and co-host of our Monster series.

4:37...of all these questions about monsters is what are we afraid of? With vampires, it's this sort of thrilling fear of being taken over and changed in these, you know, mysterious and maybe horrible but kind of cool ways. But with zombies, I think there are always two fears. There's the fear of being surrounded by all of these lifeless beings that are just gradually going to overwhelm you and take over. And then there's the fear of being a zombie.

5:11From Slate, this is Hi-Fi Nation. Philosophy in story form. Recording from Vassar College, here's Barry Lamb. Today on Hi-Fi Nation, a short cultural history of the zombie and what

Philosophy of Zombies

5:24is involved in becoming a zombie. When George Romero introduced the zombie in 1968, he created a monster that stripped all that was attractive and human about the vampire and left us with something completely inhuman. Something that only inspires fear and disgust and something that you're only trying to kill in the most brutal fashion possible. In philosophy, the zombie is used to think about what makes a person conscious and therefore worthy of moral

5:55consideration. It's one of the hardest problems to figure out, but it's one we have to figure out because we're building things that look a lot like zombies now, but could look like people in the near future. It's AI. Hi-Fi Nation will return after these messages. The thing about zombies, there's many different kinds of zombies. They're all over the culture. David Chalmers is one of the leading philosophers of mind, and he runs the Center

6:27for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at NYU. Among other things, he's a leading thinker about zombies. It's one of the things he's most famous for. What all these different zombies have in common, zombies are always missing something crucial to the ordinary life of a human being. Actually, I think zombies got started with the voodoo or voodoo culture in Haiti. Which is a wonderful religion. It's a positive religion. John-Edgar Browning. And then you have some bokors who are sorcerers, and they might feed someone or give to someone a special

7:06powder that they produce. It makes the person appear dead. There's an example of the late 60s where there was a gentleman named Narcisse who was in a hospital in Haiti, and they had had a death certificate for him. That night is when the bokor arrives and digs them back up and basically gives them something to revive them and then puts the person through a process that convinces them that they are dead and that they are now

7:39a zombie and they are to work for him doing whatever he wants, typically in some kind of plantation-type setting or doing other kinds of manual labor. And often the bokor would continue to feed something to the person to make them kind of high. And eventually he somehow came out of the spell and got away from the bokor and he went back to his village years later and people were like, oh my goodness, it's Narcisse.

8:11But he's dead. We buried him. And eventually his family identified him and they took him to the hospital and the hospital's like, yeah, we have his death certificate right here. And he's one of the few instances where we actually were able to interview him. So these Haitian zombies are beings that lack free will. Haitian zombies, I've discovered, come from the theological beliefs, not of voodoo, but voodoo, the West African ancestor of Haitian

8:43voodoo, which is that there are two types of spirits, two sides of the soul, one of which we would call subjective consciousness. You might call that the self. And that's what makes people unique. And that's what Dave thinks consciousness is, like that subjective inner self. That's right. So they had that. They believed that there was that. And then the other part of the soul, this other part of the spirit, is that which controls motor functions.

9:16Oh. That's the part that's hijacked by the bokor in Haitian zombification. But only that one part. Oh, that's so creepy. What's terrifying about that is that when the person is buried, they're perfectly cognizant and aware of what's going on. They just can't say anything. We're scared of becoming a Haitian zombie because it would be a matter of having your consciousness trapped in a body it couldn't control. But a Haitian zombie is still a human.

9:47Victims of a bokor still deserve moral consideration. They should be rescued. They have needs and interests that we should respond to. The George Romero zombie from Night of the Living Dead doesn't have these traits. The only thing we're supposed to do is kill them. It seems a key property of Hollywood zombies is they're actually dead. Dead and reanimated. The crucial thing they seem to be lacking is life. And maybe something like higher cognition. They're just creatures of some very basic appetites.

10:21They eat people. This makes the Hollywood zombie not all that distinguishable from an animal that preys on human flesh. It's the reanimated body with rotting skin part that is particularly disgusting. It comes really close to losing all humanity, all of our sympathy. But even death and dumbness is not enough to be fully inhuman. Without altering their disgusting appearance, Romero and his copycats start developing more and more sympathetic zombies over the course of

10:52their films. In fact, even in the first film, zombies have moments of intelligence. Like they start using tools. Oh, wow. Yeah. There's a zombie later on that you kind of sympathize with it that has an individuality. They even call it a name. I think it's called like Bub or something. Oh. Yeah. And that's Day of the Dead in 1985. And according to John Edgar Browning, by Romero's last film, which is after 9-11, the zombies are the heroes. With Land of the Dead, they are no longer representations of evil and

11:30negativity. They are there to point out to us the real culprits, which are often whoever decides what normalcy is. And so in his film there, the last one, Land of the Dead, there you see this huge image, which is this tall skyscraper and this wealth there and this class system. But you see zombies becoming cognizant and actually going into this place to take down this building. And so we're rooting for the zombies in that sense.

12:02Land of the Dead envisions a feudal society in which the extremely wealthy can safely wall themselves off in a city where the poor humans live in squalor. But everyone outside the city is a zombie. But there are good zombies and bad zombies, good poor people and bad poor people. All are motivated by survival and self-defense. In the eventual uprising against the rich, good people and good zombies survive and in the end try to coexist. Monsters after 9-11 became more akin to heroes and the good guys.

12:39Which as an educator like myself and yourself is great for me because my students that I teach nowadays are mostly born after 2000, 2001 and they literally grew up in an era where when they see a monster they realize it's different but they don't judge it until they, in other words, it's innocent until proven guilty which is a remarkable thing. And then you get like iZombie or the Santa Clarita Diet with Drew Barrymore and suddenly it

13:11was like you know, women and homemakers can be zombies too. Even a TV series I think just called Zombies about a zombie high school in LA where the zombies are all kind of discriminated against but they all have reasonable lives and so on. It's not their fault that every now and then they go a little bit crazy. Which is to say that being dead and decomposing eating the flesh of others even infecting others you bite with

13:45a zombifying disease are not by themselves enough to be completely dehumanized and morally worthless. All of the killing of Hollywood zombies are just a matter of self-defense. They're just ravenous animals. Once you understand them and know there are good ones and bad ones you see they have a moral status. It's not until you get to a zombie from philosophical thought experiments that you find out what kind of creature truly deserves no moral consideration. The kind of zombies I'm interested in people call this the

14:22philosophical zombie. And the crucial thing about a philosophical zombie is that they lack consciousness. a philosophical zombie is physically identical to an ordinary human being. You can't actually tell the difference from the outside. They behave in perfectly normal ways for a human being but they're not conscious at all. That's to say they have no internal subjective experience. It feels like something to be an ordinary human being. it feels like nothing to be a zombie. Dave, could you talk about what the difference is between a philosophical

15:00zombie? Like you said they lack consciousness Hollywood zombies lack life. What's the difference between those things? Yeah, well, a Hollywood zombie it's like do they for example have subjective experience? I don't know does it taste like something for a Hollywood zombie when they eat their victims? It probably does. Okay, well then they have what I call consciousness because if you have any subjective experience you're conscious. If you feel pain as a subjective experience then you're conscious and that means they're not philosophical zombies.

15:37Dave, if I were a Hollywood director or a screenwriter and I wanted to depict a philosophical zombie in a story or on screen how would I do that? So let's take a movie like Lord of the Rings and now let's remake it as a zombie movie a philosophical zombie version of Lord of the Rings it's going to look exactly the same it's just that none of them have consciousness and consciousness you can't depict can't observe from

16:11the outside what I'm hearing is the kind of movie that you couldn't make with philosophical zombies is any Woody Allen's movies where he's doing the voiceover of like his thoughts in the background oh yeah that's good maybe how about being John Malkovich where you actually get to go inside John Malkovich's head and experience what John Malkovich is experiencing if you made being John Malkovich with zombies maybe you'd go inside his head and you experience nothing you'd

16:45find all is dark inside John Malkovich what's really interesting about philosophical zombies is that you have this question what if anything about human beings transcends or goes beyond just physicalism I think the connection with the Hollywood zombies and even the Haitian zombies is the idea that if all we are are these sort of physical beings that are moving through the world with the aim of reproduction right yeah exactly with the only kind of aim vaguely being

17:19reproduction and continuation that that misses a huge part of what we take the human experience to be and so Dave is interested in talking about philosophical zombies to identify what consciousness might be so what it might be that sets apart a zombie that's doing all the things that we do and looks just like we do from someone who's experiencing their life in this first person narrative subjective inner kind of way what is it you think that

17:55having subjective first person experience gives us that's valuable to us because it's clearly very valuable it's valuable enough that it makes for a particular kind of monster that we fear so what it gives us in some sense is the ability to narrate our lives you can think of yourself as a certain kind of person you can plan your life in certain kinds of ways you can adopt certain values and reject other values and without that phenomenological

18:30experience you're just missing so much about a meaningful life that I think that ties into these worries about you become a zombie effectively when you give up having that kind of inner life and just stare at your phone all the time or punch your time clock and go do data entry and then leave at the end of the day we will return to the rest of hi-fi nation after these messages lately just to combine one thought

19:06experiment with another I've been thinking about what I call the zombie trolley problem you've got a trolley going down the track and it's either going to kill five zombies or one conscious person would you rather the train kill the five zombies or would you switch it so it kills the one conscious person and I don't know what your reaction there is but many people say kill the zombies save the conscious person they have moral status their

19:41life has meaning and value the zombies do not so therefore kill the zombies consciousness seems to be the thing that gives something moral status it's not free will it's not even live flesh a true philosophical zombie can be killed at will without any guilt or remorse you don't even have to be defending yourself against it it's like killing a very lifelike animatronic robot if that's right we need to know what in the world has first personal

20:17experiences so that we know what's intrinsically worth saving if it were threatened the problem is we don't know and that'd be fine if we weren't in the business of building philosophical zombies but we are I'm talking about AI can AI be conscious I think we don't know Eric Schwitzgabel philosopher of mind UC Riverside I think we have very little understanding of how consciousness arises in the world there are just a huge number of theories about that

20:52so depending on what theory is true maybe AI already is conscious maybe AI never could possibly be conscious or maybe it would take something but we don't know what it could be in the near future it could be in the distant future it's wide open is this because we don't understand consciousness or we don't understand AI well it's mostly because we don't understand consciousness my sense is that we're pretty close to having a philosophical zombie assuming

21:27AI isn't conscious because the language generation is getting pretty good like when I look at GPT-3 and its renditions it's not perfect you can kind of tell some of the times but that's if you're comparing it to really intelligent conscious agents right but if you compare GPT-3 GPT-3 to to the worst case of a speaker or a talker but who is clearly conscious as a human being it's almost there and then if you just add to

22:01it something like deep fake voices I find a deep fake of your voice and then just have it do GPT-3 when I'm interacting with it it's so easy to get to the point where well what's the difference between doing that and putting that in a human like looking silicone machine thing right no I agree the philosopher Susan Schneider has tried to come up with some AI consciousness tests that basically involve asking many probing questions of an

22:36AI system about consciousness just say your AI system says things like oh I know I'm really just a silicon system but from the inside I feel like so much more if it says that then maybe it passes the consciousness test so in your conception of zombies the way that you've been using them in philosophy the idea is that if you asked a zombie to describe their inner life they would just tell you that they don't have

23:10one no that's the thing no okay good do they think they have an inner life basically yes insofar as they think anything at all but here's the thing about zombies at least in the extreme case of zombies of they are behaviorally indistinguishable from normal human beings they behave just like humans and among that behavior is the things we say as part of our behavior including the things we say about consciousness I as it happens talk about

23:45consciousness a lot so if I go to my zombie twin this is a creature that's physically and behaviorally just like me but without consciousness well my zombie twin still writes books with titles like the conscious mind the character of consciousness and he will tell you all about his rich conscious states even though by hypothesis he has none so that's freaking weird as they say so then how would you be able to tell the one from the

24:19other in principle you can't and this also brings out zombies zombies are wonderful for raising another classical philosophical problem the problem of other minds there is no test of consciousness that comes just from interacting with an AI it can be unconscious and still act in exactly the same way as a conscious person of course it can also be conscious and also act the same way as a conscious person you have to go outside of interacting with

24:54the AI look for some other features that make consciousness possible the problem is we have no idea what that is and when we have no idea everything is up for grabs animals conscious or dogs or cats conscious most people think so what about flies or worms then we start to argue there are people out there who think it goes all the way down you mentioned panpsychism the idea that everything is conscious so yeah some people think

25:25even a particle like an electron might be conscious or you go all the way up there's a view called cosmopsychism it says the whole universe is conscious maybe there's some kind of cosmic consciousness that permeates the universe we could ask about groups is the united states conscious is new york university conscious eric schwitzgable uc riverside let's paint this picture of this gpt3 bot that you've imagined we put it in an embodied robot that has an emotionally expressive face right they're working on emotional expressions in robots so now you could interact with this thing almost like

26:00you interact with a person at some point it's going to be quite convincing to people that you really have a conscious entity here and some researchers based on how liberal their theories of consciousness are might start to agree and they might say there's something it's like to be this robot it can really feel pain and it really thinks about its future for example and other people might say no this is just a an empty machine with no more experience than a rock and now you want to shut it down and the machine says no no

26:36no don't shut me down oh please please please i want to keep living the first researchers will be like don't shut it down and the other researchers will be like no you're just being fooled by dumb audio outputs from a machine it doesn't have any real moral status so i think this question of moral status is huge imagine we create at some point millions of ai machines and some researchers and some people in the public and some policymakers think these machines are conscious just like you just like me they have real experiences they have a

27:11real sense of themselves as continuing entities with goals and plans they really feel pain and then other people think no they're no more conscious than a laptop computer is in 2022 if policy follows the second group then we could be committing mass murder and mass slavery against these beings if they really are conscious there's a kind of tragic dilemma here right so let's say we have these beings and we don't know whether they really have conscious experiences or not we have a choice either we treat them as moral equals to us or we don't if

27:46we don't treat them as moral equals we risk perpetrating the equivalent of a whole holocaust and genocide against them if it turns out that they really do deserve moral consideration on the other hand if we decide okay let's be cautious let's give them full moral consideration equal to that of humans and now let's suppose that that's wrong then when you treat something as having full moral status of a human being you sacrifice for it right so if there were six of these robots in a fire and five humans in a fire you can only save

28:22one group and you treat the robots really as equal to humans then you go out and save the robots and let the five human die that would be a tragedy if those robots are just essentially laptop computers so when you treat something as having genuine moral interests similar to humans then you commit to things like saving it giving it the vote and many other things we treat them as genuinely equal even if we don't treat them as genuinely equal we don't treat all non-human animals as genuinely equal but a lot of them are conscious maybe

28:57even all of them are conscious we do bear some moral considerations of them even if it's not equal is that right yes that's right I mean so for example in scientific research we normally think that you have to follow certain procedures in the treatment of vertebrates and of course there's an ethical vegetarianism movement that's gaining steam in California where I live if you leave a dog unattended in your car and it dies as a result you can go to prison for six months would you want to do that for an AI program that you left

29:32on your laptop in your car and it fried somehow once we give them the moral status of even kind of vertebrates that's not trivial if we start to give them the moral status of humans that's you know even more not trivial I'm not saying we shouldn't I what I think is it's a it's a tragic dilemma as long as we're ignorant there are huge moral risks on both sides given this tragic dilemma you actually propose a particular kind of way forward when it comes to building new AIs right why don't you tell a little bit

30:08about what you're proposing so I think the way to escape this dilemma is to not create AIs whose moral status is unclear Mara Garza and I have called this the design policy of the excluded middle right either create only AI that are simple enough that you know they don't deserve much moral consideration or go all the way to creating AI that is fully equal with human beings and you know that it's equal and avoid that perplexing middle this is only possible if we had a good idea a decisive test that tells us when an AI

30:43is conscious and not just some philosophical zombie acting exactly as we've designed for it to act fooling us into thinking it's conscious if we don't have that test there are only two categories things we know aren't conscious and things we aren't sure of whatever our AI zombie overlords decide for us in the future it's clear to me at least that if there's a bad guy if there's a monster it's not the zombies hi-fi nation is written produced and edited by barry lamb associate professor and chair of philosophy at vassar college co-host this week is christina

31:18van dyke executive producer of slate podcast is alicia montgomery senior managing producer for slate podcast is june thomas managing producer for slate podcast is asha seluja editor of slate plus is me chow too production assistance this season provided by jake johnson visit hi-fi nation.org for complete transcript show notes and reading list for every episode that's h-i-p-h-i nation.org follow hi-fi nation on facebook and twitter and at the website for updates on stories and ideas you