Thinking About: All You Zombies

It was probably some kind of teenage angst thing but for a while there I really did consider the idea that I might be the only real person alive. I knew (or at least thought I knew) that I was alive and a real person, but what about everyone else? How could I tell? Of course my head was full of new and strange ideas back then as I voraciously consumed large quantities of SF novels so it wasn’t much of a surprise that my mental stability was somewhat out of kilter – and there was the whole teenage hormone thing going on so my poor brain was being poisoned by various nasty chemicals as part of the growing up process. Interestingly I latter discovered that my rather disturbing musings as a teenager is a recognised philosophical problem – that of other minds.

The other minds problem is deceptively simple. Because you have a dialogue with yourself in your own head it stands to reason that you have a mind in which to have these conversations. There is, it seems certain, a self, a directing force, a personality, directing your actions, speaking through your mouth and making decisions about what you do or choose not to do. You are, in other words, a person. But what about everyone else? They may look like you, or enough so as not to produce too much comment, they communicate in ways you expect (most of the time) and, by and large, react to things that you think you’d probably react in those circumstances but how do you know that they’re actually persons like you? But if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck, right? Probably, but it could be a sophisticated machine designed to do just that and only careful examination might reveal that it isn’t what it appears to be at first glance. You might even have to dissect it to find the mechanical parts. You might even have to look at it under a microscope to be sure and what if, after all that investigation, it still seems to be a real duck? Does that actually make it real or just a really, really sophisticated fake?

You can see how ideas like this are dangerous stuff. If you actually believed that other people are not real – no matter what level you investigate them at - then you could, with a clear conscience, do just about anything to them. After all they’re not real so what does it matter? I’m sure that there are people, hopefully locked up and on major medication, who think just that. But the question remains – how can we know that other people are real? The answer, as far as I know, is that we can’t (ever) unless we get around to the technological equivalent of telepathy and even then we have the fall-back position of citing sophisticated technology (or clever fakery) to explain it. Of course to truly function amongst other people (or zombies) you have to assume that they are actually persons and not just refined automata until that is proved otherwise. Would I be totally surprised if someone I knew turned out to be an advanced machine? I don’t know. I might just stand there, smile, and say “I knew it!” Would I be surprised if I turned out to be one too? Probably not. As proven on several occasions when given free reign my scepticism knows no bounds. I can doubt the existence of other people, I can doubt the existence of the world around me (I did wonder that if I could move fast enough would I catch the film crew or set builders on a tea break not expecting me for another 10 minutes) and I can even doubt my own existence when I take the time to think about it. Knowing what is real is, as far as I know, impossible. I suspect things are as they seem to be. I’m not going to walk in front of a bus or out of a high window because I doubt that the world actually exists. After all in you die in The Matrix you die ‘for real’ too, right? Nor am I going to dissect my friends looking for servo motors or silicon chips so don’t worry about it. As to whether or not you guys are actually real…..? Well, I haven’t quite decided yet.