Snow White and the Zombies

There are philosophers who are very fond of zombies. This is not to say that they are fans of a certain kind of 1950s horror movie. Of course, they might be. Indeed, rather stranger things have happened. I have read somewhere that both the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the logician and code breaker Alan Turing loved Walt Disney’s film of Snow White above all others and would seek to see it whenever it was available. Their love for the film seems to have come about quite independently. There is no evidence that they ever went to the cinema to watch the film together although the possibility remains that they did. Indeed, I like to imagine that the two anguished and lonely geniusesmight have found some comfort and solace sitting there in the dark together entranced, munching their popcorn and even holding hands in the scary bits. Brief encounter with big brains. It would have been at Cambridge, of course, and they would have gone to an almost empty matinee performance. Outside it would have been cold and gloomywhen they went in and beautifully covered in freshly fallen snow when they emerged. A transformation scene. Lovely. Actually their yearning for Snow White is a bit galling. All those times in one’s tediously well spent youth, going along to gloomy or incomprehensible films by Bergman or Bunuel or Renais and trying to look intellectual and all the time the real heavy weights had been getting down to pondering the deeper aspects of life, logic and language whilst humming ‘Hey ho, hey ho, it’s off to work we go’. So back to zombies. Some philosophers, mainly since the time of our ill-fated non-couple, have exploited the idea of the zombie to explore ideas and intuitions about the nature ofminds and bodies. They use them in thought experiments. Basically the philosophers’ zombie is a creature that looks identical to a human being and crucially behaves and reacts and speaks as a human being but who lacks consciousness. The key question is could such a creature exist? Is the very idea of such a being coherent or not? If your answer is ‘yes’, one is left with someweirdpossibilities. (It canget you looking at your friends and colleagues in a distinctly corrosive kind of way.) But if the answer is ‘no’ then the next question quickly follows, ‘why not?’ and that is a corker. And although people put forward various arguments, it seems to me that answers either way are based mainly upon intuitions. It seems difficult to think of any tests, logical or empirical, that could get a definitive answer to the zombie question. I got to thinking about this kind of stuff when considering an issue in the epidemiology and psycho-social promotion of eating disorders. (To tell the truth I was bored and needed a bit of distraction. I turned on the television and there was an old science fiction film, not actually a zombie movie but somehow it got me thinking along those lines.) The only discernable link between the philosophers’ zombie question and my eating disorder issue was that people could legitimately havewidely contrasting intuitions about it. The issue is that we often use ‘eating attitudes’ as a proxy measure for actual eatingdisorders and/or risk of actual eatingdisorder to get around problems of numbers. The question is ‘Is it possible to have a population with high levels of apparently risky or problematic ‘‘eating attitudes’’ but a very low rate of actual eating disorder or vice versa?’ Itwould be really interesting ifwe could find examples of either or both of these. Unlike the zombie issue these are readily answerable questions but I am not sure that we are near the answers yet. Sowhich answer does your intuition support? No, not to the zombie question, the other one.OK, I agree that the zombies are more interesting but . . .