From Descartes and Leibniz to Dennet and Searle, philosophers of the mind have struggled to understand the relationship between the mind and body. How did purely material structures and processes (the body) lead to second-order phenomenon such as self-consciousness (the mind)? Such seemingly metaphysical questions acquired new significance in the era of the electronic digital computer, when the possibility of creating “artificial” intelligence suddenly became a real possibility. In this paper, I explore the history of thought experiments in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, from the industrial thought mills of Gottfried Leibniz to the Turing Test of Alan Turing through the “Swampman” of Donald Davidson to the gedankenexperiment du jour, the “Philosophical Zombie.” In many respects, this is a continuation of the research on chess as an experimental technology in AI that I published earlier recently in Social Studies of Science.

Update: Just in time for Halloween, here is the zombies talk that I delivered this past week in Copenhagen at the Society for the History of Technology conference. The slides are here.