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If you were at a cocktail party and there were both “normal” humans and zombies, how would you tell the difference? Perhaps this sounds like a cocktail party you have attended. Many people answer this question by saying they would interrogate individuals they wished to assess about their emotional reactions to events and ideas. A zombie, they believe, would betray its lack of subjective experience through a deficiency in certain types of emotional responses. But an answer along these lines simply fails to appreciate the assumptions of the thought experiment. If we encountered an unemotional person (such as an individual with certain emotional deficits, as is common in certain types of autism) or an avatar or a robot that was not convincing as an emotional human being, then that entity is not a zombie. Remember: According to Chalmers’s assumption, a zombie is completely normal in his ability to respond, including the ability to react emotionally; he is just lacking subjective experience. The bottom line is that there is no way to identify a zombie, because by definition there is no apparent indication of his zombie nature in his behavior. So is this a distinction without a difference?
How to Create a Mind
Ray Kurzweil
After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy spoke to newspaper publishers and said: “This administration intends to be candid about its errors. For as a wise man once said, ‘An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.’ . . . Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed—and no republic can survive.” The final responsibility for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion was, he said, “mine, and mine alone.” Kennedy’s popularity soared.
Mistakes Were Made
Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
Looking back, a big reason we hit our goal early was that we decided to invest our time, money, and resources into three key areas: customer service (which would build our brand and drive word of mouth), culture (which would lead to the formation of our core values), and employee training and development (which would eventually lead to the creation of our Pipeline Team). Even today, our belief is that our Brand, our Culture, and our Pipeline (which we internally refer to as “BCP”) are the only competitive advantages that we will have in the long run. Everything else can and will eventually be copied.
Delivering Happiness
Tony Hsieh
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