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developed by philosopher John Locke called the Inverted Spectrum argument. Suppose there was something a little stronger than creamer mixed in with your coffee. You black out and wake up on the café floor, only to find that the once mahogany colored tiling is now a startling sapphire blue. The wooden sign above the entryway proudly displaying the coffee shop’s namesake, a blue cat, now depicts a cat the color of sunset orange. The light from the sunrise streaming in through the windows is now an eerie azure color. Your friend has just arrived, and she helps you to your feet. Her skin is the color of a pitaya. “Are you okay,” she asks, “what happened?!” “I don’t know,” you answer dubiously. “I blacked out, and now I’m seeing things! Your skin is magenta, the camel-brown recliner I was sitting in a moment ago is green, and the sky outside is yellow!” “The sky outside is yellow?” she echoes sarcastically. “I think it’s a little early for this. Quit messing around, we have a project to work on.” “I’m serious!” you cry out adamantly. “The sky really is yellow.” Your friend looks at you, somewhat bewildered, and realizes that you are serious. She takes a deep breath. “The sky is blue. It always has been, and always will be.” Locke’s argument claims that because we can find the Inverted Spectrum plausible, meaning we can picture a scenario in our mind’s eye where the colors on earth have been inverted without contradictions, then we must admit that qualia exist and are indeed non-physical properties. Of course, our reality as we know it is shaped by both physicalism and consciousness. One idea that supports this dualistic perspective is the idea of zombies. No, not the pop culture interpretation of the undead inspired by George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, but a philosophical zombie. A philosophical zombie is a concept stating that it is possible for a “zombie” to express all the outward physical and emotional behaviors of a human, but to lack the phenomenological experiences we define as qualia. Descartes believed that all non-human living creatures are automata, and that their every behavior could be explained by physical mechanisms such as evolutionary traits. But the human consciousness was not so simple. He compared the mind of the human to the mind of the machine. With the now antiquated technology of his day, he concluded that there was something beyond the physical realm required to analyze the human consciousness. Our technology is considerably more advanced today than in the time of Descartes, and with considerable advances in artificial intelligence, it is conceivable that one day we will be able to create a real-life philosophical zombie. Page 25

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