We interrupt your regularly scheduled spam to bring you this message that likely no one will read, resurrecting an ancient topic... pun intended.
I am a philosopher. I've always been, but in the past few years I've actually taken that as my chosen academic path, and so have been reading about lots of other people's philosophies. And in one of those classes, namely Philosophy of Mind, two thought experiments were presented intended to prove the thesis of substance dualism - that minds or souls are some immaterial things apart from physical bodies - and these two thought experiments got me thinking about the old question we had here once about "What is Unlife, and how is it different from Undeath?". I started thinking about this because of the term "philosophical zombie".
The two big thought experiments intended to show that substance dualism is true are both meant to show that mind (or souls) and bodies can exist separately from one another and thus that there ARE minds or souls separate from bodies, i.e. anti-materialism. The most famous of these is Renee Descartes "argument from doubt", which argues that he can conceive of the possibility of there being no physical universe at all (i.e. he can doubt the physical universe) and yet he cannot doubt his own existence (the famous "I think therefore I am" is actually dubito ergo sum, "I doubt, therefore I exist"). Therefore, disembodied minds are possible.
The notion of a "philosophical zombie" is exactly the opposite of that: it's a "disenminded body" so to speak. Not particularly different from a real zombie, except it doesn't have to have to be a reanimated corpse; it's just a normal human body that looks and behaves like a normal person except that it has no soul (whatever that means - I don't buy into dualist theory myself).
This got me thinking. Myth obviously operates in a dualist mythology. Both kinds of these dualist thought experiment seem to be similar to a kind of undeath. So what if unlife is something likewise similar to a normal, unified mind-body experience?
So, how's this for a theory...
Life is the unification of a soul (some immaterial, immortal subject of experience, with consciousness and willpower) with a body (some object, a hunk of matter and energy, that occupies space and time).
Death is the separation of soul from body; the two cease to interact, the soul "drifts off" (so to speak), its consciousness and willpower no longer restrained by the mortal world; and the body becomes just another hunk of mass-energy in the spacetime continuum.
But then orthogonal to those states of being...
Undeath is where a separate (dead) body or a soul continues to behave as though it were alive, even though it's not; a zombie (dead body exhibiting soul-like properties of animated movement) or a ghost (dead soul exhibiting body-like properties of physical interaction). Both of these seem to be somewhat artificial: giving unnatural form to a dead soul, or unnatural motion to a dead body. Undead beings are thus not subject to the rules of life and death; they cannot be killed because they are not alive, and yet, they are still not dead.
Unlife on the other hand is where a living thing, body and soul together, is made to behave as though it were dead; soul and body continuing to influence each other but no longer really entirely alive, and thus likewise immune to the laws of mortality. Soul and body are still together but no longer dependent of each other, and thus doing something to one (mortally wounding the body) won't break the connection and kill the being in question. It's a different kind of soul-body union than regular life. The Myrmidons could be an example of this (living beings granted eternal life, but their bodies still subject to age and damage), as could lichen (undead necromancers, their bodies reanimated by their own souls' magic). The Watcher is often thought to be something like a lich, so it would make sense that he found the Dream of Unlife.
So. Satisfactory theory?
