Immanuel Kant famously chose to stay in. David Chalmers, on the other hand, prefers to go out, apparently as far as possible. The philosopher most closely associated with zombies presides by tradition over a Bacchic uproar called the Zombie Blues and Poetry Slam, marking the close of the University of Arizona’s biennial conference, Toward a Science of Consciousness.
The weird creatures celebrated here in music and verse won’t eat your brains. They’re not the walking dead mysteriously enslaved by Voodoo priests. These 
zombies are philosophical thought experiments: they’re our unconscious doubles, physically identical to us in every way, but with no subjective experience. There’s nothing that it’s like to be them. The philosophical significance of these imaginary automata, and how they became the unofficial mascot of a scholarly conference on consciousness, seemed worthy of further inquiry, and what better place than the traditional End of Consciousness Party, where Professor Jonathan Schooler tried to make it all clear.
