Zombie Dawn: Slavery and the Self in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

This chapter attempts to explain the emergence of the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness in the late twentieth century. Hawkes connects this theoretical development to the spread of wage labor. He points out that wage labor meets the classical definition of slavery, and he notes that slavery has traditionally been conceived as producing a materialist cast of mind among the enslaved, as well as eliminating their capacity for autonomous, subjective reflection. David Chalmers’s famous concept of the ‘philosophical zombie’ is located in its historical context, and connected to the rise of zombie myths in societies newly introduced to an economic system based on the systematic sale of human life.