Jason asked:

What is a human that is not human but has all the human actions and expressions?

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The answer is, a Zombie.

But this is no ordinary zombie. What we are talking about has nothing to do with Voodoo, or Night of
the Living Dead.Our creature is strictly a product of logical analysis: a philosopher's zombie.

One of my Pathways students, Glyn Hughes drew me a cartoon of a philosopher's zombie which I
liked so much it is now a permanent feature of the Pathways Launch page. Have a look, then come
back here.

The title of the cartoon is, 'Zombie with Qualia'. (Sorry, Glyn, I had to use the recognized term, not
'Quales'!)

This is how the analysis goes. All we can ever know about a person comes from their physical
manifestation, their bodily presence in the world and the physical effects that their actions are able to
bring about. Yet all that could be done by a creature that was nothing more than physical stuff, atoms,
molecules, flesh, bone, skin, nerves, muscles, sinews, brain.

Yet I know, looking inside myself, that there is something extra that a purely physical me would not
possess, thisconscious experience, thesefeelings that I am having now. A physical duplicate of me
could laugh, cry, do philosophy, keep up this web site, even though all was dark within. Even my wife
couldn't tell us apart.

Philosophers tempted by this argument call the extra 'something' that I have but my zombie double
would lack, 'qualia' (the plural of 'quale', pronounced 'kwar-lay' — it's taken from the Latin). The
conclusion of the argument is a form of mind-body dualism.

In order to see why there has got to be something wrong with this argument, consider the statement,
'I have a quale of green'. I am looking at the leaves of my house plant, so there is quite a lot of green
in my visual field at this moment. But if Ican say, 'I have a quale of green', then a being physically
indistinguishable from me in every way, but which lacks qualia — in other words, my hypothetical
'zombie double' — would have to say exactly the same thing!

So the zombie-with-qualia theorist is committed to accepting that it is perfectly possible for a creature
to utter the words, 'I have qualia' even though it lacks qualia. It follows, that even though Imay find
myself moved to utter the words, 'I have qualia', it doesn't follow that there actually exists an extra,
non-physical 'something' or thisthat my words refer to.

Geoffrey Klempner

Second opinion:We have to be careful here to avoid chauvinism. There are two senses we can use
"human". One is a biological sense used to designate a physical creature with certain characteristics
such as hands, faces, gene sequence. A second more difficult sense of the use human is better
termed "person", a being that is a moral agent, has thoughts and the like.

Now it is important not to confuse or equate the two, for if we do this can lead us to disregard beings
as persons just because they are not humans. The two concepts are separate, one need not be a
human to be a person and not all humans are persons.

For example a zombie — a perfect replica of a human being with all the physical properties of
humans able to perform any and all human actions and expressions is not a person. Also non-human
beings (first sense) may have human (second sense) characteristics, such as the monkeys who use
mirrors to groom themselves and this may make us more inclined to treat them as persons, but we
have to be careful here too, in order to avoid liberalism — regarding a creature as a person just
because it shows a slight resemblance to us.

Just because a being can act and look like a human does not mean that it is a human and just
because a creature can act like a person does not mean that it is one.

Brian Tee
Dept of Philosophy
University of Sheffield.