ThirstyFish

This is another photograph from the 2011, Philly Zombie Crawl.

These days Zombies seem to have captured everyone imagination. The fictional undead race appears throughout popular culture. The term zombie is adapted from Angolan North Mbundu (nzumbe) and Haitian Creole (zonbi) languages, and denotes an animated corpse brought back to life by mystical means such as voodoo.

Why do we like zombies so much? Figuratively, zombie has come to mean a hypnotized person deprived of consciousness and self-awareness, yet is able to respond to surrounding stimuli; an automaton. A British social scientist argues that "we like zombies... because we have become zombies". I have to agree.

A philosophical zombie, (p-zombie), is conceptually used in thought experiments to describe a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being, but lacks consciousness, or sentience. For example, even though the p-zombie does not actually feel pain, it reacts just as a human does to a painful stimuli. These thought experiments attempt to explain some problems of consciousness, such as the mind-body problem, or the hard problem of consciousness.

Someone suggested that I should stop obsessing about trivial bits of information and knowledge and just live. So, I asked him, what is "just living"? Maybe I should go watch a zombie flick.

Song of the Day: Zombie - The Cranberries (1994)