Something To Ruin Your Halloween

Math vs. vampires: vampires lose

World Science

If vam­pires—corpses that rise up to suck the blood of the liv­ing—sound bi­o­log­i­cal­ly im­plau­si­ble to you, you’re not alone. They ex­ist pure­ly in leg­end, as vir­tu­al­ly all sci­en­tists agree.

But for any vampire be­liev­ers un­dis­sua­d­ed by bi­o­log­i­cal facts, a pro­fes­sor has come up with a sec­ond proof of their un­re­al­i­ty, us­ing math.

If vam­pires ever ex­isted in the forms in which mo­v­ies and books por­tray them, they would have quick­ly wiped out hu­ma­n­ity long ago, ac­cord­ing to phys­ics pro­f­es­sor Cos­tas Ef­thi­mi­ou of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cen­tral Flor­i­da in Or­lan­do, Fla.

Well I don't think this actually ruins anyone's Halloween; but it may, if you believe in the infamous monsters associated with the holiday. Vampires, which inter alia, assuming they actually existed, would have wiped out humanity by now if they did. So there would be no need for Blade. The scientists in the article above have also explained what I have told friends for years about why the belief in vodou "curses" is mostly bunk. A schmuck who poisons a person with a neurotoxin from puffer fish, tetrodotoxin, can achieve the manifestation of a zombie-like state on some hapless victim. In addition, the belief in zombies is communally reinforced in Haitian and other similar cultures that practice vodou. (The view that all vodou practitioners can [and will] invoke a zombie curse onto someone is suggestively racist and xenophobic against Afro-Caribbean religious systems.)

Philosophers have their own "zombies" that they talk about. However, they’re of a different type than the concept of vodou zombies. In philosophy (particularly, philosophy of mind), “zombies” are beings postulated in gedanken (or thought) experiments that are utterly indistinguishable from human beings in behavior, looks, and speech, but lack any form of consciousness.

Of course, some philosophers think if it quacks like a duck and looks like a duck – it is a duck. But I’m unsure if that’s true. After all, duck decoys look like ducks and sound like ducks, but they definitely aren’t ducks! Or else, duck hunting would be cruel and absurd, not to mention a waste of time. (It still may be cruel and absurd; but that’s a different subject.) That doesn’t necessarily mean concept {zombie} is actually coherent or plausible. Nevertheless, it takes more than a simple behaviorist or superficialist account to refute this reoccurring notion in philosophy.

More relevantly, these zombie attacks are not the knockdown arguments they’re cracked up to be against physicalism – the view that everything that actually exists is physical. Indeed, some physicalists use these arguments to support their views. Additionally, these arguments are railed against functionalism – the view that mental states and processes are determined by the functions they play in the mind/brain – especially, because some people aren’t comfortable with the idea that, machines could, in principle, become conscious ceteris paribus.¹ But I digress, as usual.

In any case, irrational beliefs – in monsters or otherwise – are notoriously detail resistant; so "true" (self-deceived) believers will unlikely be daunted by disconfirming evidence and logical reasoning.
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¹This "ceteris paribus" would be the most difficult matter to overcome. However, if strong A.I. (i.e., artificial intelligence) is true, then it can be met.


~AP