A little window popped up and told me that a Zombie is an animated corpse raised by magical means. Now, I’ve talked about the difficulty in classifying the different kinds of zombies across the meta-verses of lore, but I, myself, don’t much like the “magic” type zombies.
But I clicked the link and it went to Wikipedia, and more importantly, it took me to the page about Haitian voodoo zombies. So “magic” here does not mean “in a world where magic is real, such as described in a fantasy novel.” Here, “magic” means “a word we use to describe what people think makes their religion work.”
I’m no fan of religion, but that seems a bit condescending.
But nevermind that. Wikipedia is great about letting you know that there are alternatives to what you thought you were searching for. It told me that could instead read about zombies from films at Zombie (fictional) or I could see Philosophical zombie or I could go to the disambiguation page.
The disambiguation page, as expected, mentioned the use of the word zombie in the titles of things, like movies and games and songs and drinks. Lots of those. But I was, of course, most intrigued by Philosophical zombie.
P-zombies are people who don’t consciousness or sentience, but are indistinguishable from normal people Apparently these hypothetical people are used to argue against philosophies that boil human existence down to non-conscious parts.
It has something to do with Descartes arm wrestling Kierkegaard in Plato’s Cave. And Star Trek teleporters. Fascinating stuff, really, but hardly a metaphor—the word zombie is a convenience for these philosophers, and brings with it none of the delicious connotations of:
Blood and guts and brains and shotguns and hunger and terror and all that fun.
Ah well. Back to the disambiguation page. I wonder why the Cranberries called their song that?
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