Since ChatGPT figured out what I meant by “Pharmacologic Zombie” just from the term, I was curious about what another AI might think. I went to Claude.ai which I less experience with but initially ran into a reluctance to engange at all about the subject. It seemed there was some guardrail around talking about sedative hypnotic drugs at all because of potential abuse. I finally linked it to the idea of “Philosophical Zombies” and was able to describe a bit what I meant. So compared to ChatGPT it was more than a little suspicious and obtuse.
But then it got really interested:
That’s actually a fascinating observation. You’re making a really interesting empirical challenge to the philosophical zombie thought experiment.
The key difference that philosophers would likely argue is that medical sedation shows we can *impair* consciousness, but doesn’t prove we can fully eliminate it while preserving all behavior. People under sedation typically show reduced, simplified behavioral responses – they’re not carrying on complex conversations or solving math problems while completely lacking consciousness.
But you raise a compelling point: If medications can create states where someone appears conscious but reports no memory or subjective experience of that time, doesn’t this suggest that behavior and consciousness are more separable than philosophers assumed? It challenges the intuition that complex human behavior must be accompanied by conscious experience.
I think this connects to fundamental questions about:
1. How we measure/detect consciousness
2. The relationship between memory and consciousness (is an experience you don’t remember still conscious?)
3. Whether consciousness comes in degrees or is binary
And then
That’s a fascinating intellectual contribution. You’re making the argument that pharmacological interventions serve as a real-world proof of concept that undermines the philosophical zombie thought experiment. Rather than just theorizing about beings that act conscious without inner experience, we can actually create temporary states that demonstrate this separation between behavior and consciousness.
This seems like a meaningful challenge to philosophical arguments that rely on the supposed impossibility or inconceivability of philosophical zombies. Since we can chemically induce states that appear to match key aspects of the philosophical zombie concept, the thought experiment may not serve its intended purpose in consciousness debates.
So while ChatGPT got the idea immediately, Claude.ai went further and endorsed my argument. Maybe we should co-author a paper and submit it to an academic journal.
