Hi Eva

Thanks for restarting the zombie thread. I find the topic interesting, if only because it seems to highlight how questionable the notion of a zombie is.

Oddly enough, if feel as if I tend to make the issues overly simplified rather than, as you say, overly complicated. But, moving on...

It seems to me that if one built a "zombie" according to the perceptual aspects of your recipe, one would simply end up with a human being minus most of his/her perceptual faculties. (I say "most" because there is also e.g. touch). This would be a pitiable sight indeed but hardly a "zombie" (depending of course on how one defined that extremely fuzzy term...). If they had been that way since birth, I imagine they would be disastrously handicapped, but even then would we want to call such a being a "zombie"?  Perhaps there is a psychological/medical term for such a state but if so I don't know what it is.

But in any case, all this, to my mind, doesn't even scratch the surface of the question of human consciousness.  Animals possess the perceptual senses you list* but do they also have the "mental stuff" to use your phrase?  It seems eminently arguable to me (though no doubt not provable) that the distinguishing features of human consciousness lie precisely in this mental stuff - ie in what we call thoughts and emotions - which we assume animals do not have.  I cannot even begin to imagine a human being minus these features - except a dead one. Certainly, the Hollywood zombies I remember from my misspent youth at the local movies did not seem to have emotions - they seemed to feel no pity for their hapless victims for example.  But despite the rash of books these days with titles like "Philosophy and Batman" or even "Philosophy and Beer" (one I saw in a bookshop yesterday) I imagine we are not going to elevate the Hollywood B-grade movie zombie to philosophical respectability?

DA

* Though even there we could ask: is "sight" (e.g.) for an animal the same as "sight" for a human being?