A completely new idea in the field of consciousness doesn’t come
along all that often, but I think Professor Joel Marks of the
University of New Haven may just have come up with one. In the
latest issue of Philosophy Now he asks whether consciousness
might not actually be a disadvantage, just as (in his eyes)
having colour in the comic strips every day instead of black and
white represents a backward step. He’s talking about phenomenal
consciousness, of course; qualia, the real redness of red or
blueness of blue. We often do things best, he points out, when
we do them automatically: when we stop to become really
conscious of how things look or sound, we make mistakes. Perhaps
when Mary finally emerged from her black-and-white room, seeing
colour for the first time would merely make her trip over the
carpet. But if that’s true, then zombies (hypothetical people
who function normally but have no conscious experience, just
colourless registration of data) would have a consistent edge
over the rest of us. They wo