Two Minds Blog

No, not that kind of zombie. I want to talk about a kind that behaves like a normal human being, but isn't: something that has been called a "philosopher's zombie." You could also think of this kind of zombie as a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI), one that's capable of passing the Turing test . It is a being that fools us into thinking that it is conscious based on its behavior, but that has no real conscious awareness. It is a very good mimic of behavior, to the point where it can even make verbalizations that seem to describe inner experience: Statements such as "I don't feel like a zombie." I described philosophers' "zombie problem" once before, in a post about  free will , but it's actually more encompassing than whether we control our actions. A true philosopher's zombie not only has no control over its behavior , it also has no internal experiences  of its world. It looks, acts, and talks like we expect fr...

My 11-year-old asked, “have you ever been in a dream where you realized you were dreaming?” She said this had happened to her several times. That experience — lucid dreaming — is a cross-cultural phenomenon that more than half of people experience at some point in their lives, with nearly a quarter of people saying that it happens to them once a month or more. Researchers have found few factors, in terms of either demographics or personality, that predict who is likely to have lucid dreams. To cultivate lucid dreams, people have developed various techniques that can be used to determine whether you are currently dreaming. My older daughter said she had heard you could test whether you were dreaming by counting your fingers, because people in dreams have only eight fingers. This was news to me, but is in fact a known strategy for generating self-awareness during dreaming. The specificity of having eight fingers isn’t essential — instead, lucid dreaming practitioners look for some type...