Philisophical Zombie Abuse

I’ve mentioned it before but it bears repeating: brain research leads to zombie culture. Once again, while researching and writing for the Great Brain Robbery, I came across another reference to zombies.

Can’t say I agree with the assessment offered, this time. 

“In director George Romero’s 1968 horror classic Night of the Living Dead, terrified people trapped in a Pennsylvania farmhouse try to survive zombies hungry for human flesh. 

But real zombies aren’t like that, …. The word ‘zombie’ is a surprisingly technical term, introduced by philosopher David Chalmers.

This is very misleading. First of all, there are no such thing as “real” zombies. In as much as philosophers have taken the word zombie to as a metaphor to describe beings in a thought experiment, they’re as real as anything else you can think up. For zombie lovers, every zombie move is a thought experiment; every video game is a “what would you do” scenario. Reality = zero.

Nor is “zombie” a technical term. It’s a metaphor. Its descriptive—and in every introduction to thought experiments that use “zombies,” there’s by needs a lengthy explanation of what that means. Then the “term” is as “technical” as any other co-opted word.

And of course. David Chalmers may have “introduced” the use of the word, but not the word itself. As any dedicated undead enthusiast already knows, the word comes from Haitian Creole, “zonbi,” which itself probably comes from an older word “nzumbe” which means “ghost.” Interesting, isn’t it, that the above article claims “Consciousness is definitely the modern conception of the soul” and then tries to confound a “soulless” being with a word that originates from the concept of the soul itself.

But, you know, that’s what we’ve been saying here at Zombie for Life: zombies are a thing. Zombies are here to say. People are going to use the word in metaphors, co-opt the term in new nomenclatures, and in general, abuse the concept like an erstwhile apocalypse survivor abusing trusted colleagues, while outside the brain eaters bar him in from precious resources.