Out of mind

Why zombies are real
January 20, 2003

Mrs O'Grady is showing me photos. There are three albums on the coffee table. There she is at Katie's wedding: nervous and neat in a pale green suit. Two months on, there she is at Stephanie's. Beige this time. "I feel guilty," she confides. "I still haven't told Steph. I suppose I should, don't you think?" "Yes," I say. "She'll understand."

Mrs O'Grady grabs my arm and leads me to a corner and stands back, a picture of curiosity. She steps forward and stands back again. She can't make me out. The facial musculature shapes apprehension, building to dread. Then she goes blank. She walks to the other side of the room, smacking her lips and tugging her collar. I follow her to the kitchen where she stands by the stove picking her nose. She fills the kettle, but doesn't switch it on. She fetches mugs and places them on a tray. From time to time, she seems to be aware that there is someone else in the room. She looks at me, but I am too much to fathom. I feel semi-transparent. I speak but there is no response. Am I really here? She fills the mugs with cold water from the kettle and carries the tray into the living room. We sit quietly. I am thankful this hasn't developed into a thrashing, foaming, full-blown fit. After a while she reaches for the third album. "This one's the holidays," she says. "Tenerife." But she knows something is wrong when she sees plain water in the mugs.

Mrs O'Grady takes brief excursions from consciousness. These are known as automatisms. They are a feature of her epilepsy. The conscious mind switches off, but the bodily apparatus carries on in a (more or less) purposeful fashion-feeding the cat, walking round the supermarket, boarding a bus. If she had reached for the bread knife and run it through my heart, I doubt she would be convicted of murder. The law makes provision for automatisms. Watching Mrs O'Grady's unoccupied body scuttling about, I thought of her as a zombie. Students of consciousness are fond of zombies. Not the Haitian living dead, or those shambling ghouls of The Twilight Zone, but even stranger inhabitants of the world of philosophical conjecture. These creatures look and act like ordinary people; they walk, talk, have love affairs, raise families, get drunk, argue about politics. They are, in fact, like us in every way but one: they lack conscious awareness. Their brains regulate internal states of the body and control outward behaviour, but that is all. While the rest of us move about in a bright pod of consciousness, zombies just move about. Their philosophical purpose is to crystallise the mind-body problem. Is it logically possible to subtract mental life from the working brain, in which case there would be scope for zombies (dualism)? Or are brain activity and consciousness one and the same thing (materialism)? Mrs O'Grady is a thought experiment made flesh.

The trouble is, not all her excursions are so brief; hence the guilt over Stephanie's wedding. Her memory holds no trace of the occasion. Physically she was there. She is in the photos. But she was not there mentally, at least not in full. It was too protracted an episode to fit the conventional scheme of an epileptic automatism. More likely, her brain had settled into a stable pattern of dysfunction with low-level epileptic discharges jamming the transmission of sensory information into memory. Her awareness would have been a thin membrane of impressions floating between "now" and "then," and never quite connecting.

There are other circumstances in which human beings appear to act purposefully without the benefit of self-awareness. Sleepwalking is a good example. I was in the Combined Cadet Force in my teens. One night, at camp, I somnambulated through the barracks and mistook the NCOs' quarters for the lavatory. I shuffled in and urinated over one of the officers as he slept. Unfortunately, the following morning, I was fully conscious. But how convenient it would be to turn off consciousness and carry on with ordinary behaviour. Imagine flicking the switch on difficult days, knowing that your body would go about its normal business. No one would notice. A pre-programmed wake-up call would return you to sentience in time for the film or the football. Controlled automatism might be preferable to periods of physical or emotional discomfort, or sheer boredom. If everyone had a consciousness switch, the world, most of the time, would be teeming with zombies. Perhaps it already is.

What troubles Mrs O'Grady is that she remembers one wedding and not the other: Katie's but not Steph's. It seems unfair. In truth, she says, it is not so much that she can't remember as the feeling that she wasn't actually there. Like she didn't bother to turn up. I'm not going to debate it with her, and, for her own peace of mind, I think she should talk it through with her daughters. But I wonder: if they couldn't tell, what difference does it make?

Later, lying in bed, I confess to my wife that I am a zombie. We had a malfunction with the transcranial magnetic stimulator. It zapped my awareness module. I thought she should know, but maybe we shouldn't break it to the kids yet. I say I hope it won't change the way she feels about me. But she is already asleep.