The Zombie Conundrum

After re-reading my last post, I was reminded of the Zombie Conundrum, which refers to the philosophical construct of a zombie: a person who has no interior life to speak of, but who behaves in exactly the same way the rest of us do. Assuming this individual was able to mimic human behavior in a convincing way, even, perhaps, to the point of saying things like “I feel sad” when s/he in fact has no capacity to “feel” “sad,” it would be impossible to determine whether or not this individual was, in fact, a psychological zombie, or whether s/he actually “felt” these “feelings”.

There are the people you see who “cheerfully” go about their workdays, engaging in “witty” “banter,” and “worrying” about how they’re going to have a little “fun” after “work.” They go out for “happy” hour, or they go home to their “lonely” apartments, “enjoy” their dinners and go to “sleep” to have “dreams” of perfectly banal topics.

Sounds a lot like us, until you compare this to the responses of an interview subject -- let’s call her “Mathilde” -- who, while not of the Tzombi race, demonstrated many of the traits of the Tzombi psyche:

…but I feel invincible. My flesh is rotting, I know it. I have no organs. I am obsessed with my own skeleton and the knowledge that it is stepping out of my skin, like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. This is the part of me that is eternal, and I feel an invincibility knowing that it is going to be released. Life is the shroud and Death the unveiling. I find myself drawn to decay, and rot. I feel my breath rattling up and down my windpipe and know that when I am dead it can rattle through the empty spaces between my bones. What is it that keeps me moving, even though I am dead?