There are those in one corner or another of the godless biome who would compare our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ with a mere run of the mill, B-movie grade zombie. Below are just a few reasons why they’re dreadfully wrong.
Zombies usually animate seconds to minutes after succumbing to the bite of a fellow zombie. Jesus took a full three days to rise.
Jesus is obsessed with the living eating his flesh and blood. Zombies are obsessed with eating the flesh and blood of the living.
Jesus was immortalized beyond all bodily harm by reanimation, whereas experts all agree a single center shot to the head puts zombies down for good.
Jesus hikes easily in the rough hill country of the Valley of Death surrounded by evil. Zombies can barely stagger and shuffle down an empty six-lane boulevard — except for 28 Days Later zombies which can haul ass faster than Jesus.
Zombies hunt for human brains. Jesus fishes for human souls — rimshot!
Zombie movies usually have happy endings, Jesus movies usually end in torture, death, and destruction.
And the biggest difference between Jesus and zombies: I have to work on Easter even though Jesus rose. If zombies were rising and running around outside, odds are good I could call in zombied.
You make some good points, but I have to disagree with you on this one:
AFAIK, nobody has actually tried a shotgun-to-the-head against Jesus. Just might work, y’know!
Jesus is metaphorically still eating the brains of his followers.
Zing!
Well, in all fairness you are trying to compare a very old zombie tale to modern zombie tales. Could it be that in the intervening centuries that attributes have changed a bit?
Speaking of which, it would be good to watch Shawn of the Dead again…
I don’t know if we can classify Shawn as an expert zombie source. In my academic opinion, at best Shawn belongs more in the splitter group known as Reanimator clade, at worst it’s a untested rogue challenge to the widely held zombie consensus among experts. Now, Night of the Living Dead and all following movies, Night of the Comet, these and others are the more traditional and scholarly works I was weighting.
http://i.imgur.com/aV7V5.png
Litch. Jesus is a litch.
That explains Wrath of the Lich King. Never did get that til just now.
“…experts all agree a single center shot to the head puts zombies down for good.”
PZ says double-tap and he’s enough of an expert for me.
Yeah, but that’s just to be sure. PZ is meticulous, he has a family to protect from zombies, and he’s a gentle soul so he may not be packing heat or putting in time at the range often enough. I’m a single man with no kids and a concealed carry license who likes popping off a crate of ammo every few weeks. As a comparative expert zombie killer, like all good Texans, I need just one, good clear headshot; range depending on the weapon and ambient conditions.
Well, despite the apparent bumbling of Shawn, he did come out a winner in the end…and even got the girl. Not sure we can easily discount his efforts or knowledge.
In terms of evolution of the zombies, are you satisfied that we’ve established a clear path of when and where various changes may have occurred over the centuries.
Although I agree that the comet aspect of Night of the Comet is compelling considering the legend of the star with Jebus birth…
On a semi serious note, there is a kind of zombie hypothetical that’s interesting. The pure automaton, sort of like sociopathy pushed to an asburd level. The nonconscious person or machine that can mimic detailed human behavior, like holding an extended in depth ocnversation.
Has anyone ever read of the Chinese room scenario popular among A/I circles? Wouldn’t such a contraption be a zombie of sorts? It doesn’t know it’s alive, in fact it doesn’t realize anything because it’s not conscious at all. In Chinese room form, it’s a drill down program to a vocal response using an audio input cue. But it behaves as if it were conscious because it uses human words or other human input to select appropriate human words or other output so as to interact with other people as if it were a real person.
That’s why the Rapture was delayed – Jesus is waiting for my tasty, brandy-soaked giant brain to be ready. I’m very, very afraid. Also, I was the lead singer for Zombie Jesus back in college.
The problem with your AI Chinese room scenario is that for a computer to be able to choose a meaningful and believable set of answers in conversation it will have to understand:
Context: relative to the conversation (ask it “Why”).
Time: must have a memory of past events of a human ubringing.
Emotion: must be able to mimic human emotional responses: social behaviour, essentially that requires transposing the emotions of others to yourself.
Awareness of individual beings: must be able to converse about named entities (Peter, John) as if they were separate autonomous minds.
Essentially the reason you can’t call an AI that solves the Chinese room problem a zombie is that you’re giving it everything a human has that gives US the illusion of consciousness.
I dunno DX. Of course it’s not my scenario, it’s a classic problem in A/I and one I’ve just read a bit on at that. But I can see why context might not be relevant; if you had a person in there with huge file record by text executing the program manually, s/he wouldn’t understand a lick of the context. They’d just be using chinese text input to match up one line of chiniese text output and send it back as a response. But in that back and forth they wouldn’t have a clue what they were talking about. The Chinese conversation could be on birth control or Justin Beiber, even an intelligent entity executing a big part of the program wouldn’t know, so it’s hard to see how an automated drill and match exec would know any more.
A double tap is required (source: Zombieland). It’s not a matter of your shooting skills, it’s just that one shot is no enough to do the job.
Oh, he’s much more than a zombie, actually. I thought Tim Minchin described it really well in the Xmas song–but it works great for this holiday too: http://youtu.be/_SFdUJLebzU
And all of this brings to mind a fine song…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83j3FreaPlM
And yes – a double tap – you gotta be sure.
Has anyone ever read of the Chinese room scenario popular among A/I circles? – Stephen
Yes. It’s not popular “among AI circles”, where it’s rightly considered complete crap (and as aformer member of such circles, I assure you it’s definitely “AI” not “A/I”). It comes from John Searle, who claims there must be some special woo about neural tissue that exudes consciousness, therefore AI is impossible. The idea of the thought experiment is to show that behavioural criteria cannot tell you whether your interlocutor is conscious. Searle’s claim was that you could put all the rules for conversation in Chinese into a gigantic but nonetheless finite look-up table. You couldn’t: in a real conversation, there can be references to past events in the conversation (“Let’s go back to what you said just after I told you the story about that guy I knew”) or to arbitrary real-world or fictional events (“Do you get on well with your parents?”; “Hey, just like Gandalf, huh?”), so no finite look-up table could possibly cope.