A glitch in the matrix

 If it looks like a real person and acts like a real person and smells like a real person, does that make it a real person? 

Philosophical zombies are beings that appear to be real conscious people with emotions and thoughts like the rest of us, but are actually a different kind of organism that merely imitates sentience (albeit extremely convincingly, with no significant outward sign of being different).  In other words, it’s a hypothetical mindfuck invented by wikipedia to give me nightmares… or a term to describe what I sometimes think I’m talking to.  

If there were such things as p-zombies, is there some kind of Turing test to suss them out?  Or does that just downgrade them to regular zombie status, and by definition a p-zombie must be utterly indistinguishable from the outside?  What if you can get inside – are people’s minds just a black box that we can’t possibly see into to check?   

Would you want to know if the whole world was secretly full of p-zombies and you’re the only "real" person – that is the only person with an internal experience of being a person?  Would you take the red pill?   

No, I don’t think the whole world is full of p-zombies.  While I admit that evolution produces some very complex and seemingly sophisticated creatures, I don’t think that a convincing imitation of sentience could exist without being pre-emptively designed by a sentient conscious being (ie: not a p-zombie and not Mother Nature), and I haven’t done such a thing so even in the worst possible scenario there must be at least one other sentient "real" person out there.  If p-zombies existed, the existence of a god that created them would be slightly more probable than the existence of a universe where I’m the only real person, which doesn’t make either of them very likely.

Also, I think that it would be difficult to convincingly replicate real personhood without the real processes behind it.  In the Truman Show, it takes a lot of work to create a world around Truman that is convincing, and eventually cracks show.  It would take a lot less work and risk to provide Truman such a world if it was actually just a normal town with normal not-actors-in-a-reality-show people. I’m not saying this rules the possibility out but it does mean that it’s highly unlikely that it would be completely undistinguishable – there’s a much higher likelihood that there’s going to be some evidence, some glitch that gives it away.

P-zombies make me think of sociopaths.  They’re not the exact same thing – sociopaths still exist on the inside (well, I can’t actually prove that right now…  but whatever).  What few emotions they feel revolve solely around themselves.  The people around them, though being real people with real feelings, are like virtual p-zombies to them as they only exist as things that show outward signs of consciousness but for all they care they’re just animate objects.  Sociopaths spend their lives pretending to not be sociopaths for reasons of self-interest.  This includes pretending to care about other people, pretending to be sorry, pretending to think and feel things that they don’t really.  They usually have to learn this by listening to and observing non-sociopaths, and then imitating their expectations – which is how they remind me of p-zombies.  

I don’t think I can come up with a very good argument for my own existence other than cogito ergo sum, but more importantly I feel like I exist, and as irrational as that argument may be, in practical terms it means I couldn’t be arsed trying to convince myself otherwise.  And it is the same with most everyone else in the world.  Even strangers I encounter – I perceive or I "feel", whatever that means", that they’re real.  I have no proof, I could be wrong, but I have no instinctual reaction to make me feel like I should be considering them as anything else but real people.  

But let’s just say there was one person in the world that I had doubts about.  One person that seemed to only be following cues on how to fake it for their own benefit or self-preservation.  And the evidence in this hypothetical isn’t more than circumstantial – it’s definitely plausible that its just paranoia.  How would I ever know?

And if I did have the opportunity to know for sure, would I want to know?  Or would it be better to live in blissful ignorance?   How can I know which one I’d choose without first knowing what the truth is like?  I know that in the choice between uncertainty and knowing the ugly truth, I’d rather know the truth… or would I?