Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy by Simon Blackburn Page B

any
rate, in the way that I am. For now I have raised the Zombie
possibility, I see that I can't really be sure about you or anyone else. Perhaps consciousness is an extremely rare correlate of a complex system of brain and body. Perhaps I am
the only example of it: perhaps the rest of you are all Zombies.
    Here is another way things might be:
    The Mutant Possibility. Mutants look like you and me, and
behave like you and me. Their physical natures are indistinguishable. If you opened a Mutant brain, you would find
that it functions exactly the same way as your brain or
mine. If you prick a Mutant, he or she will go `ouch, just like
you or me.
    Unlike Zombies, Mutants are conscious. There is a ghost
within. But the events in the Mutant ghost are not like those
we expect. A Mutant who is pricked, for instance, may experience a mental event like hearing middle Con a clarinet.
She still goes `ouch, for, since her brain functions like ours
and she behaves like us, being pricked with a pin starts
processes that cause changes that eventually end up with
her saying 'ouch', just like the rest of us. Perhaps when she does instead hear middle C on a clarinet, she feels awful
pain, but it only makes her smile beatifically. A Mutant who
sees British post-boxes may see them as yellow; one who
sees daffodils may see them as blue. Events in the Mutant's
consciousness bear no relation to the events in your mind
or mine. Or at any rate, no relation to the events in my
mind. For now I have raised the Mutant possibility, I see
that I can't really be sure about you or anyone else. Perhaps
the rest of you are all Mutants, compared with me.

    The point about these possibilities is that they seem to be wide
open, on the Cartesian dualist account of mind and body. They are
unnerving possibilities, and ones we do not normally consider (although I suspect that they cross our minds more often than the
outlandish possibilities of the first chapter).
    One way to react to them is to bite the bullet. You might say: all
right, let us suppose these are wide-open possibilities. Perhaps I
can never really know what the mind of another person is like,
what mental events occur within it, or even whether there is any
mental life going on at all. But can't I still suppose that other people's mental lives are much like mine? Can't I reasonably use myself
as a model for all the rest? It would be not so much a case of knowl-
edgeas of a hypothesis or conjecture, but it perhaps it is a reasonable
conjecture to make. This is called the argument from analogy to
the existence of other minds.
    The problem with this argument is that it seems incredibly
weak. As the great Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889-1951) dismissively asked: 'And how can I generalize the one
case so irresponsibly?' The mere fact that in one case-my own perhaps as luck has it, there is a mental life of a particular, definite
kind, associated with a brain and a body, seems to be very flimsy
ground for supposing that there is just the same association in all
the other cases. If I have a box and it has a beetle in it, that gives me
only very poor grounds for supposing that everyone else with a box
has a beetle in it as well.

    Perhaps worse, it gives me very poor grounds for denying that
there are beetles anywhere else than in boxes. Maybe then things
that are very different from you and me physically are conscious in
just the way that I am: rocks or flowers, for example.
    You might be inclined just to `shrug off' the Zombie and Mutant
possibilities. You might reflect that they are pieces of philosophical
fantasy, unreal or at any rate unverifiable. But that is not an intelligent reaction. The possibilities are indeed unverifiable. Neurophysiologists, for instance, cannot find conscious experience in the
way they can find neurones and synapses and patterns of brain activity-as we put it, they cannot display it on the screen to their
students in the