The Zombie Within

You don't need to deliberate to be thoughtful, says commentator Alva Noë. In fact, it's better if you don't. We are at our most intelligent when we let the world guide us. And we can do this because we are expert at many things we take for granted.

by Alva Noë

Francois Guillot/AFP/Getty Images The inner, neural zombie exposed?

The zombie within: the idea that we don't know what we are doing, or where we are going, when we think we best know, is an old one. (The words I've just paraphrased are Emerson's.) James Atlas, in a recent New York Times article, is probably on to something when he notices that there has been an explosion recently of what he wittily calls Can't-Help-Yourself Books. These are books that take as their starting point something like the idea that science now teaches us the "choices we make in day-to-day life are prompted by impulses lodged deep within the nervous system" and that, therefore, in some sense, we are not really the authors of our own actions, responses, choices. ...