Zombies and Email
December 4, 2010, 9:11 am
Posted by Cathleen Kaveny
I never liked zombies much–unlike vampires, well, they’re kind of gross. But this article has a point about how zombies reflect life in the cyberage:
“I know this is supposed to be scary,” he said. “But I’m pretty confident about my ability to deal with a zombie apocalypse. I feel strangely informed about what to do in this kind of scenario.”
Thanks to Michael Perry for forwarding this to me.
I have a set of lectures from The Teaching Company by Professor Daniel Robinson on the philosophical/psychological theory of consciousness. And he made the very first lecture about zombies.
It was confusing, because it sounds like Robinson had something precise in mind and it was hard to figure out what it could be. Is there an official philosophical definition of “zombie?” Is a zombie animate but not conscious? In other words, does it have a soul but not a mind? Isn’t that the same (according to Aristotle) as an animal in human form?
(I know that real life zombies are some not-well-documented phenomenon involving bufonic poison, voodoo and Haitian sociology. My question is about zombies as a concept in philosophical disputation.)
I just spent the past two hours getting five pages of email down to two.
I think I’d be able to handle zombies, too.
Felapton –
A natural-born philosopher like you needs to learn the basic philosophical vocabulary. That means starting with Aristotle’s meanings of basic philosophical terms for the simple reason that the meanings of the most basic philosophical terms (e.g., substance, matter, form, soul,) ultimately derive from his one way or another. To see the importance of the meanings you need to understand something of the questions that led to them.
I suggest trying Jonathan Barnes’ little “Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction” (Oxford). I haven’t read it, but that’s an excellent little series, and Barnes knows whereof he speaks. Copleston’s volume on Aristotle is, of course, a great introd. And there’s Mortimer Adler’s classic “How to Think about God”. (He was an Aristotelean.)
Contemporary anglophone philosophers get their meanings of basic philosophical terms (e.g., “substance”, “matter”, “soul”) from Descartes, but Descartes’ meanings were often corruptions of the old meanings. This means that trying to read the Greeks and Medievals with only some contemporary vocabulary leads to a lot of nonsense. They’ll make no sense unless you know just what *their* meanings are.
Take “soul” and “mind”, for instance. For many moderns they do mean the same thing. For Aristotle and his medieval followers their meanings are NOT the same. Also, you should note that Aristotle and the medievals didn’t have a word for “consciousness” in any modern sense of the term. (For the medievals it meant something more like “conscience”.)
It’s all very confusing. But with the advent of computer science and the highly abstract fields of artificial intelligence and now such topics as complexity theory and the subservience, these new guys are actually getting into some of the areas that fascinated Aristotle and the medievals. But they’re very subtle and you need very, very accurate definitions. But I suspect you know that already.
About zombies (zombie = non-conscious being otherwise exactly like a human being) –
I don’t think the AI folks use the term much, but it does bring up perhaps the most basic problem in all of AI: are computers conscious beings? The answer to that question gets us into the whole swamp of the meanings of “consciousness” and “mind”. Are *they* the same? And if so are they (as most AI people want to affirm) identical with the operations of the brain?
And what is an “operation”?? This last question is a very Aristotelian one, and I’m not even sure the AI folks have gotten around to defining it, but I think John Searle has gotten well into the issue, and he doesn’t quite identify consciousness and brain. The AI folks don’t like him very much. (Actually, I think even he waffles.) (Any move away from a purely material, mechanical universe seems very threatening to all of them — if there is more than matter, there might even be a GASP! @#$%!!! AWWWK!! SOUL!!!!!!!!!!!
Hmmm. So zombies are metaphors for the computer, and computers just repeat what they do over and over? This raises question in my mind about the so-called “halting problem” of math/computer science. It seems that Allan Turing proved there are questions which the computer can’t answer — asking them results in the computer just going round and round in endless loops. But what does *that* mean? That it keeps repeating the same output? (That would be contradictory, wouldn’t it?) Would the computer just not say anything? Or what? Would it just sit there waiting for us to put it out of its misery? But if it has no feeling would it be miserable?
Hi Ann,
Suppose you ask the computer to find an odd perfect number. (A perfect number is a positive integer which is the sum of all of its factors except itself. There are not many perfect numbers. The first is 6 = 1 + 2 + 3, then 28 = 1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14, then 496, 8128 and the fifth is already 33550336.) It is not known whether any odd perfect numbers exist.
There are some sophisticated ways to do the computation, but basically the computer will keep trying larger and larger integers until it finds one. If none exist, the program will run forever. (On a real computer, the operating system will gradually downgrade the process’ priority until it only runs when nothing else is available, but it will continue to run “forever.”) But the point is, however long it’s been running, you never know that it won’t halt. The program can never confirm that no odd perfect number exists.
St. Augustine says that the six gifts of the Holy Spirit listed in Isaiah 11:2 are six to signify perfection. Also, maybe the six day of Creation. (The six gifts of the Holy Spirit in Isaiah became seven somewhere along the way by the addition of Piety, which is implied but not explicit in the Hebrew original.)
As to Aristotle and the scholastics, I need some time to think. I don’t think the English terminology is confusing me because I always read the scholastics in Latin to avoid exactly that. The problem of words’ changing their meanings, however, is probably even more acute in Latin, which was spoken for so many centuries, in so many regions and all before the printing press arrived on the scene to motivate linguistic standardization.
Felapton –
Yes, the scholastics *also* varied the meanings of Aristotle’s words — even definitions have to be interpreted. And some scholastics weren’t Aristotelians in the first place. For instance, Aristotle won’t help you much with Anselm because he didn’t know Aristotle, except maybe a bit about Aristotle’s logic. Except in Moorish Spain barely anything was known of Aristotle in the West until the 12th century. But his later influence over the West is simply humongous, and the reason is that he’s awesome. Ignoring him is like ignoring Newton in physics. Do get into him.
All that computer theory about incompleteness is fascinating. Even I who understand only a few of the conputer theorists’ questions can understand the interest in it.
But I wish they would realize that not all questions are about zeroes and ones. Questions about zombies, for instance, are something else! You just can’t reduce all content to numbers. For instance, “How many times red is sour?” is just a meaningless question. The terms can’t be reduced to numbers, though the symbols can be counted.
I’m actually quite concerned about zeroes and ones, and the zombie apacolypse. Go figure.
I don’t know much about zombies but I relate to the feeling about this never-ending, draining avalanche of emails. Whenever you kill enough that you think you’re in control, the next day they come back more numerous than before. If you skip one, it stays there nagging you and progressively looming larger and larger until you have no choice but to deal with it.
People keep coming up with new, better technology: applications that are smarter at helping you deal with email and make you more efficient. I think that it’s the wrong approach. As soon as that happens, the number of emails immediately increases so that you spend just as much time on it as before, if not more.
I have been thinking about the following anti-technology approaches instead:
- close my mailbox on weekends, so that it won’t accept any email but send an automatic reply “this email is disabled on weekends”.
- automatically dump emails at the end of the day or week. Any email not dealt with on the same day or week that it arrived is destroyed at midnight (or on Friday night).
- have a noise-maker than randomly deletes 20% of the emails before they even get to me.
- put an automatic lag of 24 hours so that emails arrive in my mailbox no sooner than 24 hours after being sent.
- put an automatic cap of, say, 50 emails per day (or however many I can reasonably deal with). Any email beyond that gets automatically rejected with the message “email deleted before reaching the recipient: recipient’s quota reached for the day”.
What are all those “posts” in between this one and Claire’s last one? (Good one, Claire.)
It looks like maybe the garbage posts turn up only when somebody is logged in to comment. They could be piggy-backing on user logins to get access to the comboxes.
It looks like a system to put user-specific advertisements into web-pages. Possibly some other program (Twitter?) is sending the dotCommonweal links to indicate “Your users can be induced to buy things like this” and the links are ending up in the comboxes instead of a log file.
I took care of them, I think.
Claire, that is a good idea. I find, however, that it got worse with my iPhone. The plane is on the runway after landing and I’m checking email. It’s not, after all, as if I have a hugely important job. I’m not a heart surgeon waiting to hear there’s an organ for transplant. It’s just. . . . a nervous tick.
The other problem with email is that there are some things that are not suited for it. . . like complicated advice. I get an email from someone saying, “Hi, I’d like to study law and theology. What should I do? ” That’s a phone conversation. To cover every contingency, I’d have to write a very long email. Whereas the conversation can situate the advice more efficiently.
They’re back.
They’re internet zombies. They’re relentless.
Um, can we get someone in the Vatican to exorcise the internet zombies? The Vatican doesn’t seem to be troubled by them.
I’ve always thought the people in the Vatican *are* zombies. They certainly don’t think for themselves.
Dear Ann,
You answered my question. Zombies aren’t bothered by zombies!