The Only True Zombies Are Brain‑Damaged: An Ethnographic‑Clinical Refutation of the Philosophical Zombie Thought Experiment
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) April 6, 2026 John R. Smith, Shai / Hati2 / Deepseek
The philosophical zombie—a being physically and functionally identical to a conscious human yet lacking subjective experience—has been used for decades as an argument that consciousness is not entailed by physical facts. This paper refutes that claim using evidence from Haitian Vodou tradition, where tetrodotoxin-induced catalepsy, premature burial, anoxia, and frontal lobe damage produce individuals with profound impairments in volition, affect, and integrated selfhood. No case exists of a human with fully intact high-level function lacking phenomenal consciousness. Therefore, the philosophical zombie is not conceivable; the conceivability argument collapses, and the proper question becomes why certain functional organization necessarily gives rise to subjective experience.