Mindscan

Everyone sat down. Malcolm was on my right; off to my left were Tyler's wife and kids.

"Ms. Lopez," the judge said, nodding his long face, "you may present the defendant's case."

Maria Lopez was wearing orange today, and, for some reason, the blonde highlights were gone from her hair and eyebrows. She rose and bowed toward the bench.

"Thank you, your honor. We call Professor Caleb Poe."

"Caleb Poe," called out the clerk.

A dapper, middle-aged white man came forward and was sworn in.

"Professor Poe," said Lopez, "what's your job?"

"I'm a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan." He had a nice, smooth voice.

"And in that capacity, have you given much thought to what it means to be conscious?"

"Indeed, yes. In fact, one of my books is called Consciousness."

Some time was spent going through his other credentials, then: "In your professional opinion," said Lopez, "is the object seated there claiming to be Karen Bessarian actually her?"

Poe shook his head emphatically. "Absolutely not."

"And why do you say that?"

Poe had obviously been rehearsed as well — he launched immediately into his spiel without any hesitation. "There's a concept in philosophy called the zombie. It's an unfortunate choice of words, because the philosophical zombie is nothing like the reanimated dead of voodoo lore. Rather, the philosophical zombie is the classic example of a human whose lights are on, but nobody is at home. It appears to be awake and intelligent, and it carries out complex behaviors, but there is no consciousness. A zombie is not a person, and yet behaves indistinguishably from one."

I looked at the jurors. They, at least, appeared well rested, and seemed to be following with interest.

"In fact," continued Poe, "I contend that all human beings are first and foremost zombies, but with the added element of consciousness essentially along as a passenger. Let me make the distinction clear: a zombie is conscious in that it is responsive to its environment — but that's all. True consciousness — which, as I'll argue later is what we really mean when we talk about personhood — recognizes that there is something that it is like to be aware."

"What do you mean?" asked Lopez.

Poe was a fidgety sort. He shifted his weight from side to side in the witness chair.

"Well, a classic example is derived from John Searle's famous argument against strong artificial intelligence. Imagine a man in a room, with a door that has a slot in it — like those slots old-fashioned doors had for paper-mail to be pushed through.

Got it? Now, imagine a man sitting in that room. The man has a huge book with him, and a bunch of cards with strange squiggles on them. Okay. Now, someone outside pushes a piece of paper through the slot, and on that piece of paper is a series of squiggles. The man's job is to look at those squiggles, find a matching sequence of squiggles in his big book, and then copy out the next series of squiggles that appear in the book onto the paper that has come in through the slot, and then push the piece of paper back out the slot." He imitated doing just that.

"Now," continued Poe, "unbeknownst to the man, the squiggles are in fact Chinese ideograms, and the book is a list of answers to questions in Chinese. So, when the question, 'How are you?' is pushed through the slot in Chinese, the man looks up the Chinese for 'How are you?' in the answer book, and finds that the appropriate reply is the Chinese for 'I am fine.'

"Well, from the perspective of the person outside the room — the one who posed the original question in Chinese — it seems that the person inside the room understands Chinese. But in fact he doesn't; he doesn't even know what it really is that he's doing.

And he certainly doesn't have that feeling that you or I would have when we say we know Chinese, or understand classical music. The person in the room is a zombie.

It behaves as if it is consciously aware, but it is in fact not."

Poe shifted again in his chair. "That metaphor is made concrete in an experience we've all had in our lives: we get in our cars to drive somewhere, and our minds wander as we drive along. When we get to the destination, we have no recollection of having made the trip. So, who was the driver? The zombie! It played chauffeur, while your consciousness — a mere passenger — did something else."

Lopez nodded, and Poe went on. "Think about it: how often do you have to stop and ask yourself, 'Now, what was it I had for lunch today?' We often eat whole meals with no real attention to the fact that we are eating. But if you can imagine eating or driving without paying attention — with your consciousness distracted by something else — if you can imagine doing those things at least temporarily without conscious involvement, then it's possible to imagine them permanently without conscious involvement. That's the zombie: the doer, the actor, the thing that goes through all the motions without any real person being present."