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Question by sninctown: How do I know if other people are conscious, ie not soulless “zombies”?
I can well imagine that not have some or all the other people aware. They would still act “normal”, their actions only by chemical processes in the brain, not due to any kind of consciousness. Imagine a person sleepwalking is still acting normal. The person would experience in a deep sleep, would not some experience, but for all others it would seem quite normal. There is no process, brain awareness is. So, how do I know that other people are aware of?
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Answer by antigone76
We can feel the presence of the soul in a normal person. It’s something undescribable with words..Actually, there is alot of ‘Zombies’ in this world..
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You will know them by their fruits……..Consciousness is awareness. “Normal” people are not aware, they go through life sleeping.
emotions…these are the things zombies don’t possess..try kissing one experimental individual..if she/he slaps/punches you, then he/she is not a zombie..
How do you know if you are conscious, ie not a soulless “zombie”?
There will always be a word to bring them out of the trance of perpetual labors
The ablity to recognize one’s own consciousness would make good evidence to knowing if others are not ‘zombies.’ Even thinking about thinking would help.
My ability to convey such information is another way of convincing you that I’m not a soulless zombie.
Also, how would you explain different states of mind when sleep walking and actually awake? I sleep walk and talk all the time and the people who have witnessed it have told me that I act like an angry and irrational child, and that I am not myself. If this is the case for soulless zombies, how are they perceived as completely normal if they have expressed themselves differently at other moments?
Does it matter? If you can hold a decent conversation, fall in love, argue, etc. with a soulless zombie, I say it’s all good.
There is a principle called *intersubjectivity* which means that contained within your consciousness is a grasp of the consciousness of the other person.
Normal people have this all the time as, especially in what would be called intimate or close communes with another, the other’s mind and feelings are encompassed within your own, but at the same time retaining the property of being other.
But about some people being soulless zombies, actually there are a lot of those walking around – if you talk to them, you realize that you have encountered someone who has no intellectual reasoning powers because no such processes are in evidence – instead, what one experiences are mere reactions to perceptual stimuli, as given expressions that you may utter result in certain words and statements the other person may utter – with such persons, there is no ability to grasp concepts as that person’s intellect has essentially been extinguished – a habit of ignoring reason, reality, logic, truth, because it would stand in the way of that person’s perceived advantage is generally the cause of such – such people can strike you as a type of Neanderthal that you cannot relate to – uneducated bumpkins as well as highly educated and accomplished people can fall into this category (but the phenomena of encountering the uneducated as opposed to the educated type of these people are quite different, since the psychology involved is different).
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It is easy to believe in other minds, in fact one may have no choice in the matter, but to have knowledge of other minds does not currently seem to be possible.
As pointed out by the philosopher Richard(?) Malcom, to even posit the possible existence of other minds requires already having knowledge of other minds, or else it is senseless to say that I posses a mind. This deals a blow to the argument from analogy as one must already know the truth of that which is attempted to be proven–the existence of other minds.
The ability to raise the question may simply be founded on a hard-wired belief, one which is unjustified, and perhaps cannot be justified.
It might be true that no other minds exist, yet I am able to form the concept of minds due to an illusion. In such an instance, I would have created a false reference to understand my own mind in relation to illusory minds. This would only require that there are objects which appear very much like I do and exhibit very similar behaviors when provided the same or similar stimuli. This could be the case if it is possible (and I don’t believe their is any ‘hard’ and conclusive evidence to the contrary) that what appear to be persons are just lumps of neurons and other physical properties that give the appearance of being minded. This would, however, tend toward an account of eliminative materialism, squashing the notion of minds in the traditional sense.
The argument from analogy does not even get off the ground. I have to agree with what Nagel wrote in his book, “What Does it All Mean”, “I’ll assume your conscious if you assume I am”.
Join the revolution. We must free ourselves from the Matrix. Or is it Gaia. Hell, if you believe any of that bs you might as well go along with we are dopplegangers sent here to impersonate mankind. Dang….we’re not doing such a fantabulous job of impersonating them either.
There are a lot of zombies in this world, unfortunately.
But you can sense when someone’s conciousness really is there, when their souls are operating and not just their minds.
If they want to eat your brains – they are Zombies!!
Geez, let’s have a hard one next time!!!