Zombies And Other Minds Shaun Of The Dead - 1035 Words

Name Student number TA Date Zombies and Other Minds Shaun of the Dead is a humorous take on the zombie movie genre, which presents an interesting thought experiment that challenges our understanding of the mind. In the movie, a character who is a friend of the protagonist, Ed, is bitten by a zombie and subsequently turns into a zombie himself. At the end of the movie, it is revealed that Ed, or â€Å"Zombie Ed† as he is now a zombie and therefore not necessarily the same person, if a person at all, is living in the backyard of the protagonist. If Zombie Ed has no significant amount of mind, is this rational or misplaced sentimentalism on the part of the protagonist? Could Zombie Ed be a different mind, or does he simply not have a mind at†¦show more content†¦In the case of Zombie Ed, substance dualism could maintain that he doesn t have a mind because the zombification process causes too much damage to the brain for it to work. On the other hand, it could make a plausible case that Zombie Ed is now a different mind; substance dualism must accept that brain states can have a causal influence on the mind (otherwise how do they coordinate to cause behavior?), and a different brain implies at most different brain states entailing a different causal influence on the mind. Identity theory maintains that mental states just are brain states (Lecture notes). There is a correlation between what we perceive mentally and what we can observe neurologically because we are observing mental states when we observe the brain. In the case of Zombie Ed, this theory faces extraordinary difficulty resolving the question either way with satisfaction. Zombie Ed does have a brain, albeit one greatly damaged since Ed underwent zombification; if it accepts that Zombie Ed must have a mind because he has a brain, then how does it discern brains? Our association of mental states with brain states is only because we have mental states, not because we already knew there was something about the brain tha t had an immediate causal influence on the mind somehow (for example, the ancient Egyptians thought the heart was the source of mind). By identity theory we ought to be able to know that