This philosophical idea of zombies being physically like us, yet lacking conscious experience comes to us from Chalmers, being of course based on popular. If we are absolutely certain that these zombies have no consciousness, instead of being potentially unfairly judged in comparison to other’s consciousness, then I would have to agree with the prevailing idea that they are incapable of enjoyment or fun. If however this is a question of degree of cognition, then there is no one way of determining what enjoyment is, as everyone has a different definition of what they consider fun. In the end, this is a thought experiment, or perhaps even an intuition pump as Dennett defined, in that it may be artificially directing us past what matters by making a firm stance on we don’t fully understand, meaning we may be looking past something that is merely lower on the continuum of conscious experience due to the firm insistence that it in no way exists in these beings. Some human beings after all go through the motions every day, being socially motivated to participate in activities deemed fun by the group, but that the individual may not enjoy if they paused to consider it. This doesn’t mean these people aren’t capable of cognition on some level, it just means they have not fully developed to that point of realization. Yet if what defines a zombie is this essential lack of conscious features, then almost by definition a zombie wouldn’t be capable of fun. Although I don't think Hume would think this accomplishes much in the end.

Considering we ourselves don’t fully know how to define consciousness, then how does that affect our ability to create it, or better yet, to appreciate it once an artificial being has become aware? While I do think it is possible that we may someday build a conscious robot, the question for me isn’t whether or not there will be conscious robots (provided we live long enough to make them) the bigger question is whether or not we could ever accept them as being truly conscious. I am not approaching this from a sci-fi perspective; I am looking at it more from the dehumanization perspective. Humanity often times dehumanizes others, whether it is in wartime or peace, in order to feel superior or to not worry about the fate of others less “human” than they. Combine this trait with the possibility that we may always look at a robot as fundamentally inferior due to its artificiality (especially in the event that it is man made), such perspectives may forever cloud our judgment. So, to reiterate: 1. What exactly is consciousness? 2. What is it that makes something conscious? 3. Can we develop something conscious? If we don’t understand what consciousness is? 4. If we develop something that could be considered conscious, would we be able to recognize it immediately? Or ever? 5. Would we be able to accept an artificial, non-human intelligence as conscious, one that we built ourselves? Even with overwhelming evidence suggesting they are equal or greater awareness than ourselves, could we ever accept it? 6. If we are the one’s defining what consciousness is and isn’t, would we change that definition for our own self interest? Also, would we even consider our ancient homo sapien ancestors to be conscious? What about the less fortunate raised today in an environment of ignorance? If consciousness is at least partially the result of language and internal dialogue centered around the self, then what of those with decreased or even non-existent language skills? So many questions to be answered first, it almost seems ridiculous to speculate on whether or not we could build something to be conscious. It’s almost like asking if we could build something to communicate with god, or to build a machine to perceive with a sense we ourselves don’t have and can’t imagine.

Alien hand syndrome (AHS) is characterized by reported unconscious movement unwilled by the patient. This raises interesting questions about self consciousness because the “alien” hand seems to have a will of its own and performs non-goal orientated actions, and in some severe cases the hand is actually dangerous and attempts to harm the patient. Disowning of the body may be contradictory to autophenomenology and disprove the infallible quality of first person accounts of consciousness and so should be studied. This syndrome can also show interesting insight into consciousness by studying the deficits of unconscious movement and how those link to normal functioning.

One interesting way to understand what is going on in the brain during occasions of alien hand periods is to study localized activation of the brain during willed and unwilled movement by using functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI. This is what was done initially by Assal et al when they studied the brain areas activated by both willed and unwilled motion by an AHS patient. Interestingly, what they found was that the same motor function-related part of the brain was activated in both willed and unconscious movement showing “motor pathways can function in the absence of motor awareness” (Assal et al 2007). In comparison, voluntary movements activated more areas of the brain, not only the motor areas but also the pre-motor cortex and inferior frontal gyrus which is associated with higher logic functioning and decision making (Assal et al 2007). This study was then followed up with a more in depth study as technology progressed, and the activated areas of unwanted movement expanded to an area of the brain that is associated with first person perspective talking and experiencing self agency (Schaefer et al 2010). This brought into question if the movement of the alien hand was really a reflection of a conflict of agency in the brain, also strengthened by the data showing that this conflicting activation was not present in willed movement. It looks as though the brain is trying to control unconscious movement, even though from an autophenomenology point of view this movement is unconscious. Being unaware at the microscopic level of the intricacies of the microscopic reactions taking place in the different areas of the brain definitely gives credit to the theory that first person accounts of consciousness are not infallible. There is much more to the inter-working of the brain than only unconscious “magical” movement of the alien hand, and these studies show excellent support that “heterophenomenology” may be the correct approach to understanding consciousness.

These unconscious movements could instead be thoughts that are isolated from other areas of the brain- lending itself to supporting the global workspace theory- which states that consciousness, or in this cases the sense of self, may be found as the holistic functioning of multiple areas of the brain (Van Gulick 2011). The sense of self has been fragmented in these patients and this is most likely due to localized activations of different areas of the brain that are not being connected to other areas of the brain such as the logical reasoning areas in the frontal cortex- which would introspectively appear to create a situation in which someone else is control of his limbs or I do not have full control over myself. While in healthy people this dilemma would not be evident because there would “communication” between the different regions of the brain- this phenomenon is easy to study in patients were there is a deficit and learn important repercussions this would have to understanding what exactly is going on when we are conscious with an intact sense of self.

There was a study done with schizophrenic patients and normal subjects in which the experimenters shielded the subject’s hand from view and the subject would watch a video camera displaying a hand. The camera would display the subjects hand in real time or play a video of an alien hand. The schizophrenic patients were not always able to distinguish when the movement of the hand on the screen was the real time movement of their hand or only a video of a hand moving. This lapse of understanding autonomous movement has been attributed to a “fail in monitoring their willed intentions, including those related to expression of thought” (Daprati 1997). While this is not unwilled moving of the patient’s hand this study also brings into light interesting questions about how dependent our consciousness is on being able to discriminate what is autonomous motion and what is external motion. Often these patients attribute their actions to external sources, similar to alien hand syndrome, and this impairment at monitoring thoughts gives evidence for the multiple draft theory (Daprati 1997). Having information that is accessible to all parts of the brain could be an ideal description of the processes going on during consciousness, and this impairment of this process and resulting loss of willed “ownership” of the patient’s body shows and interesting effect of a malfunctioning of information accessibility.

The real nature of our self may also be called into question as we ask, if there are two areas of the brain that are not communicating- which causes unconscious movement- could there also be two different consciousnesses going on? This however does not seem to be the case and I do not believe that there is a major and minor consciousness. There is instead one bundle of experiences that makes up what we know to be our sense of self that is a collection of our past and present thoughts that can be seen as the center of our personality and agency. In AHS patients this is disrupted because there are unconscious movements, but I think those movements can be separated from the sense of self because they are isolated from the rest of the functioning and communicating brain. This is consistent with the bundle theory because then there is only one dominant center of experiences- as well as only one dominant thought which would be the only conscious thought instead of the unconscious brain functioning that is isolated from the other areas of brain that are able to communicate with one another. Therefore AHS is able to explain much about where our sense of self originates as well as how the global workspace theory holds up when areas are not functioning together to create one sense of consciousness, because there is a deficit in these areas for these patients that allows us to understand what is going on in a healthy philosopher though he may not be able to see this clearly with only introspective reasoning instead of a third party observer whom is able to collect this data as an outside source with physical measurements instead of speculation that can be biased.

In conclusion, these studies indicate three important qualities of consciousness that are not necessarily intuitive or consistent with the folk psychology of people who have not studied this abstract idea in depth. Functional MRI data shows that in AHS patients, there are hidden activations of the brain that somewhat control alien hand movement, though from a first person perspective there does not seem to be any control. Those two studies also show interesting data supporting that basic motor movement can be done unconsciously by lower logic level areas of the brain, but that higher decision making thinking is needed for conscious movement. This data is then an excellent opening statement to the theory that multiple areas of the brain are activated for functioning, however, the accessibility of that data to the rest of the brain is how consciousness is manifested or absent. This global access theory is not intuitive in that consciousness is the interrelated working of the brain as a whole instead of some extra special thing that is ineffable and outside of the material plane. However, when these studies are contemplated in depth, these abstract theories do seem to be supported if consciousness is thought of as something that can be studied from a third person point of view.

Works Cited:

Assal, F., S. Schwartz, and P. Vuilleumier. “Moving with Or without Will: Functional Neural Correlates of Alien Hand Syndrome.” Annals of Neurology 62.3 (2007): 301-6. SCOPUS. 12 Oct. 2011 <www.scopus.com>.

Daprati, E., et al. “Looking for the Agent: An Investigation into Consciousness of Action and Self-Consciousness in Schizophrenic Patients.” Cognition 65.1 (1997): 71-86. SCOPUS. 12 Oct. 2011 <www.scopus.com>.

Schaefer, M., H. -J Heinze, and I. Galazky. “Alien Hand Syndrome: Neural Correlates of Movements without Conscious Will.” PLoS ONE 5.12 (2010) SCOPUS. 12 Oct. 2011 <www.scopus.com>.

Van Gulick, Robert (2011). “Consciousness”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

The most surprising concept from this course would have to be that it is possible to examine our consciousness from a third person perspective. I think this was a fundamental ideal that the course seemed to take for granted, yet I do not believe this is necessarily an intuitive notion. Before starting the course-though I have taken one general philosophy class before this- I would have thought that the best way to understand consciousness would be through introspection and I would have fallen to the grievous assumption of folk psychology that everyone must feel the same way I do about qualia and other mental states because I have no other way of collecting such data. Though I do think of myself as a scientist I would not have initially tried the scientific approach, but would have instead fallen back to some flowery way of explaining what consciousness that would loop back on itself and not really explain anything. The most interesting aspect of this class was that it not only gave us thought experiments to explore what our intuition told us, but it also gave us a way to structure those intuitions into experiments that may or may not have been possible- but this course asked us to find a way to study what feels like an internal phenomenon in a material way from a third person perspective. This class not only taught me some interesting concepts that I would have otherwise never come across, but it also gave me tools and mind sets that I could use to tackle new problems that will arise after this class. The most interesting thing I will take away from all of this will not necessarily be all of the vocabulary or specific concepts I have learned, but I will always be able to use this new inquisitive frame of mind that allows me to think of a thought experiment or new challenge that life throws me in a light.

I think that in the future we would be able to build a conscious robot, though our technology is not powerful enough to do this yet. I am aware that this is a dangerous set of mind to have, to believe that science and technology will always progress and that eventually someone somewhere will figure it out. Nevertheless, I still believe that eventually we will be able to generate something so complex it is able to function in the same way we do. Believing in functionalism, I am on a dangerous pathway to believe that even vending machines are able to feel consciousness-however I am talking about something more than just feeling beliefs and desires. The holistic functioning of the brain has been showed in scientific research to be greatly related to conscious actions of premeditation and goal oriented movement, and I believe that once a robot is able to learn as we do and bridge those gaps of relying on many areas to create a conscious thought- he will be conscious. I believe that we introspectively believe is our conscious is nothing more romantic than the electrical firing of nodes and the release of chemical compounds into a defined, closed system- and once a robot is able to encompass those and becomes plastic enough to learn from his past actions- he will be able to predict new outcomes from what he has learned and thereby become a fully conscious robot.

I would like to start out this paragraph by saying I do not think philosophical zombies could exist. I believe the entire thought experiment has a fundamental hole in its theory, but I will still postulate whether this impossible phenomenon could experience fun. To start with the theory, a zombie would be able to outwardly behave exactly like us, but lacks whatever extra special mental state that makes our consciousness. Keeping this in mind, it is evident that a philosophical zombie would be able to say he is having fun, but he would not be able to feel the qualia we experience when enjoying ourselves. I think enjoying something is the holistic working of the brain tissue reacting to electrical impulses and chemical stimuli that we have labeled with language to mean “the experience of having fun,” so if a zombie secreted all of the same hormones he would be the same as us and really feel everything we feel when we have fun and speak just as eloquently as we do about the experience. However, I come to this conclusion with a strong basis that zombies cannot even exist- so I do believe he can say he is having fun and really have fun because he is no different from you and I since he is functionally the same and neither of us are missing some existential vital life component that makes us aware and conscious.