Zombies One creature of interest to students of consciousness is fictional: zombies. Zombies look like people (well, ones who have decayed a bit) and walk around, detect objects, and respond to them, as people do. Yet, according to the standard scholarly definition of “zombie” (Kirk, 2009), they lack conscious experience; there is nothing it “is like” to be a zombie. Interestingly, zombies seem as if they could exist; it is easy to imagine human-like beings that lack conscious feelings yet could survive and reproduce. This fact, in turn, raises a critical question: Why do we have consciousness? As two leading scholars put it, “Why aren’t we just big bundles of unconscious zombie agents?” (Koch & Crick, 2001, p. 893).