How Social Cognition Creates Consciousness and Kills Philosophical Zombies
In October 2018, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) published a new page on its website. But this wasn’t dedicated to a new disease, warnings for an upcoming pandemic, or information about a novel form of treatment. In bold letters, the page reads: “Zombie Preparedness”.
The page includes links and information about preparing for natural disasters, helping their long standing goal of getting more people to prepare in advance for the unexpected. In branding it as “zombie preparedness”, they found the perfect entry point into the mind of the public.
From 28 Days Later, to World War Z, to the countless TV shows and memes, Zombies have taken over mainstream culture. In the same year that the CDC page was published, there was not one, but two zombie-themed Romeo and Juliet Zombie romance movies. No one knows exactly how or when it started. But once it did, there was no stopping it. Pun intended, the zombie trend is an insatiable obsession that has refused to die.
Beyond the cultural fascination, zombies themselves represent an interesting concept. In everyday language, describing someone as zombie-like is to say they are merely going through the motions of whatever it is their doing, without thought or feeling. Zombies act and operate in the world, but completely lack an internal experience.
In other words, zombies lack consciousness. As such, zombies provide an interesting philosophical jump-off point for examining the mystery of our own consciousness. We're physical organisms, so why do we (and not zombies) have an internal, subjective world?
Consciousness and the Philosophical Zombie
When you think about it, just about everything we do can be done without consciousness. Imagine interacting with a person, who looks and acts just like a person, but is in fact, a zombie. If you were to pinch them, they would recoil its hand reflexively, but without actually experiencing any internal pain.
Similarly, there might be zombies that behave nice, or mean, or angry, but without any emotion, or internal feeling of what it’s like to be any of these things. If you were to meet one, a zombie person would act and appear indistinguishable from a consciously feeling person.
This scenario is known as the “Philosophical Zombie”. Posed by the philosopher David Chalmers, it’s not an argument about who's conscious and who isn't. Other people (and many animals) are conscious, just like we are. Instead, it acts as a thought experiment, provoking questions about consciousness. If we could get by without it, what is consciousness good for? How could you tell if someone or something is conscious? And most pressingly, how does consciousness emerge?
This last question is what Chalmers describes as the classic “Hard Problem of Consciousness”. How do we go from a completely physical system (the brain) to a completely subjective internal experience (consciousness)? The question is hotly debated, and there is a wide range of theories. One of the most promising ideas has to do with something zombies are also completely lacking: social skills.
Social Cognition: Modeling the Consciousness of Others
Humans are inherently social creatures. Our sociality may even be the hallmark of our species: We’re not the fastest or the fiercest, but we have a greater capacity to work together than any other animal.
To navigate the social world, we have to understand who we’re interacting with. Not just what they look like, or what they’re doing, but what it's like to be them. We need to understand their own, internal experience. Of course, we can’t exactly know what another person is experiencing, and so we construct a model of it. This process goes by many names including mentalizing, Theory of Mind, and social cognition. Ultimately, it comes down to this: we create a representation for another person’s consciousness.
Imagine looking at someone on a train and wondering what it’s like to be them at the moment. This is a complex computation requiring our brains to integrate several features about the person: their body language, demeanor, and facial expression.
We also track another person’s eye gaze extremely carefully: what someone is looking at is a reliable indicator of what they’re thinking about. And If we’ve met the person before, we also integrate this background knowledge into the mix. All in all, we seamlessly integrate all of this information to create a working model of that person’s moment to moment conscious experience.
At the level of neuroscience, there’s strong evidence suggesting that a region known as The Temporoparietal Junction (TPJ) is heavily involved in all of this. Using fMRI, research has found that this area is sensitive to social cues which allow us to piece together our model for another’s consciousness. In addition, individuals who have damage to this region have selective difficulty in being able to understand the beliefs and mental states of others.
Using Social Cognition to Model Our Own Consciousness
How do we get from social cognition to our own consciousness?
We know that we have an advanced system to effortlessly and automatically monitor the conscious state of others. We also know that we must have a system in the brain that gives rise to our own consciousness. Could these systems be one and the same?
This idea is core to the Attention Schema Theory of Consciousness, pioneered by Neuroscientist Michael Graziano. It posits that the same social cognitive tools that we use to understand other people’s minds are turned inwardly, to understand our own mind.
We only directly experience our own consciousness, and we model everyone else’s. If these rely on the same basic mechanism, we might expect that they rely upon similar regions of the brain. And here, the TPJ may provide this important link. For example, neuro-imaging research indicates that the TPJ also helps us keep our own consciousness “in check”. It is recruited in the classic False Belief Tasks, which require us to differentiate our mental state, from the mental states of others. We also use a similar mechanism to ascribe mental states to the dead.
Additionally, several experiments have demonstrated that direct stimulation of the TPJ perturbs our own conscious experience. For example, placing direct electrode stimulation over this area can create out of body experiences; the distinct feeling that we’re hovering over our bodies, looking down at ourselves from the ceiling.
There’s a lot to say about out of body experiences, and why we might experience them. But suffice to say for the current conversation, is that there appears to be significant overlap in brain regions that support social cognition and support our feelings of consciousness.
Implications for Humans and Zombies
Whether of our own, or someone else's, the brain creates a model of consciousness. And just like we can’t be certain of the contents of another person’s mind, we can’t completely understand our own mind either. Only a very small percentage of the brain’s neuronal processing ultimately reaches this space of conscious awareness.
Even while you read this, countless millions of neurons are buzzing away on tasks you scarcely ever think about. Tasks like measuring the pH levels in your blood, consolidating memories in your hippocampus, and controlling unconscious movements such as swallowing and blinking.
One strange feature of human nature is that our brain represents, and brings into consciousness, only a small percentage of its own processing. This means that ‘us’, the conscious self, is only aware of a small sliver of our own minds.
If correct, The Attention Schema Theory has deep implications for the Philosophical Zombie. As Graziano writes in Rethinking Consciousness,
The attention schema theory allows for the possibility of zombies: maybe a zombie could be built artificially or evolve on another planet. But if the theory is correct, we could never turn a normal person into a walking, talking, philosophical zombie by taking out a part of that person’s brain. We couldn’t remove consciousness without leaving the person unable to function in everyday life. (p. 86)
Overall, the theory suggests that what makes us conscious is core to who we are as social creatures and how we operate within it. In this view, any creature that could develop this level of social cognition could become conscious by simply turning this mechanism on themselves.
Here, zombies ironically, fall short: for all their obsession with other people’s brains, zombies are very bad at understanding them.
Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash
About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
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