Hey everyone, Mathew here. Welcome to Philosophical Zombie Productions: where philosophical entertainment meets creative, real-world solutions!
I wanted to kick things off with a Q&A of some questions you might have as someone checking out this site.
1. First off, who are you and where did you come from?
Had almost 15 years of academic philosophy training, including a PhD at a big research institution. However, I realized there was a dilemma we faced there: either do everything you can to try to succeed in the professional philosophy world or, instead of chasing the philosophy dream, go in more of a business route. And I was drawn to both of those, for different reasons.
That’s where Philosophical Zombie Productions comes in! Where those two worlds collide, to see what I can find in that space.
2. What is philosophy?
To me, it’s a certain style of thinking, like a detective or a computer programmer, or even bringing an intuitive wisdom. But in a way that’s not just about some narrow goal, but more open-ended. To borrow an idea from Bertrand Russell, it’s in the space between science and the spiritual unknown.1 It often pushes us to grow as people, maybe to become wiser (or sometimes just more confused…)
3. So, what’s a “philosophical zombie”?
It’s a kind of metaphysical creature popularized by philosopher David Chalmers. A philosophical zombie looks just like a human, talks just like one, and if you examined its brain in a laboratory, you wouldn’t find anything weird. But, the philosophical zombie goes through the world without a conscious experience of life. There’s ‘nothing on the inside,’ like a machine. An empty shell.2
But here’s the thing: How could you ever know that it’s a zombie? If you asked it, the zombie would deny that it is one. It would say exactly what a regular person would say. And any test you put the zombie in, its brain cells would fire and respond in a way that seems normal, but without an inner experience.
I’ve always been drawn to that idea. Not a zombie myself. (Although, I’d still say that even if I was.)
4. What do philosophers produce?
Ideas and perspectives are our starting materials, but we can shape them into all sorts of things. Not just talks or texts – anything that has that spark of creativity.
Like, one of my favorite examples is M.C. Escher, who made philosophical paintings that brought paradoxes to life:
» https://www.wikiart.org/en/m-c-escher/
His works included staircases that rose higher and higher but somehow ended up exactly where they started, hands drawing themselves into existence, flocks of birds whose silhouettes fit perfectly together like puzzle pieces, and the list goes on.
And finally,
5. Artificial intelligence: Is it going to take over philosophy?
Well, it can do some of the things that philosophers do. It’s getting really good at writing articles (if you look it up, you can find reports about AI-generated papers passing the academic journal review process), and it can serve as a sounding board for ideas.
However, I think that part of what we care about isn’t just the finished product, but also what led to it. Part of why we get drawn to Nietzsche and Socrates is because those were some real interesting people! We aren’t just seeking out a philosophy; part of it is wanting to connect with the philosopher behind it.
And for a lot of things in philosophy, it might be important that it’s coming from a human perspective, like ethics. Do you really want something deciding the rules you’ll live by that doesn’t even know firsthand what it’s like to be alive?
So the way I see it, philosophy – real philosophy – is always going to be by the people, for the people!
– Mathew
