Zombies and Consciousness

Zombies: Kill or Cure

This is just a short post to flag up a really fascinating, and I’m sure highly entertaining, event happening in the UK at the end of January and beginning of February. The London Science Museum is hosting a small festival about those intriguing, terrifying, yet strangely popular cultural icons, the zombies. But it being the Science Museum, they are boldly and inventively using zombies as a metaphor to explore consciousness science. For instance, are zombies conscious, and if so, by how much? How could we tell? And what ethics do you apply to zombies, based on this knowledge?

 

There are some talks in their evening “Lates” slot, on the 30th January, which colleagues of mine from the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science are participating in.

Then the museum is hosting a “ZombieLab” for the whole weekend of the 2nd/3rd Feb, where there will be loads of events, including about half a dozen zombie games. I’m giving a talk on each day, and generally helping out. It’s free to attend and looks like a fantastic festival. If you spot me there, please come and say hi, and feel free to ask me anything you like about the science behind the event.

 

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