GoKawiilis a reporter who writes about tech, money, and human behavior. She joined The Verge in 2014 as science editor. Previously, she was a reporter at Bloomberg.
I admit, this is an innovation I did not see coming: Silicon Valley has invented the philosophical zombie from the classic thought experiment “lol how crazy would it be if there were a philosophical zombie.”
Until recently, the philosophical zombie was a concept closely associated with Australian philosopher David Chalmers, who defines it as “someone or something physically identical to me (or to any other conscious being), but lacking conscious experiences altogether.” Chalmers’ zombie twin is identical to him functionally and psychologically — except that he feels nothing. This is different from a Hollywood zombie, which has “little capacity for introspection and lack[s] a refined ability to voluntarily control behavior.”
So okay, Marc Andreessen is even shallower than our standard philosophical zombie — but still, I think there is a strong case he should be hunted and captured by the Stanford philosophy department so they can try their thought experiments out on him in real life. (Humanely, of course.) But I think for all of us who are interested in consciousness, Andreessen is certainly a specimen.
For those of you who are not as internet-poisoned as I am, let me recap: A video of Andreessen on David Senra’s podcast — podcasts being Andreessen’s favored form of self-disclosure — has been making the rounds. In the video, Andreessen cheerfully says he has “zero” levels of introspection — “as little as possible.” This is a positive for entrepreneurs, we are told. “And you know, if you go back 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective,” Andreessen says, thus setting himself up for thunderous dunking.
I could point to the many ancient traditions of introspection (set out variously in the Bhagavad Gita, Plato, or Psalm 119) or note that his comments about a “guilt-based whammy” that showed up from Vienna in the 1910s and 1920s due to the work of Sigmund Freud suggests Andreessen has never met a Catholic (and is unfamiliar with major Catholic thought, to boot, as introspection is famously important to St. Augustine). I could post a portrait of René “I think therefore I am” Descartes. I could note that this is such a significant misunderstanding of Freud as to suggest Andreessen is totally unfamiliar with him. I am not going to do any of those things, as I believe they have already been done by internet commenters.
I am instead going to try to set out what happened, which is that I believe Andreessen read a book.
Chater proposes that the idea of an “inner self” is an illusion
The reference Andreessen gives is The Mind Is Flat by Nick Chater, a professor of behavioral science at the Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick in the UK. Now personally I am somewhat skeptical of how serious a book is when its title references Thomas Friedman, especially when it is being written by some business school guy. Still, the basic thrust of the book — as far as I can tell — is a polemic against the notion of an unconscious mind.
I have not read the book, so I am relying on a lecture Chater gave at Google and reviews by his peers in order to summarize it; if this seems unfair to Andreessen, I am happy at his request to actually read the book and do this again in much more irritating detail. In Chater’s Google lecture, he begins by providing a series of optical illusions, demonstrating that our vision cannot work the way we believe it works. This is pretty convincing stuff! It turns out perception is very weird. (That noise you just heard was everyone who’s ever taken a philosophy 101 class yell “qualia” in unison. That’s the philosophy word for the “red-ness” of the color red, or the sensation of the smell of napalm in the morning.)
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