Movement is Life

"Although “World War Z” does not hold up to the criterion of originality, what makes it worth watching is that it avoids the ponderous, dilatory contrivances of 'The Walking Dead,' but also gives ruminative folks something to chew."

John Labella of the Philippine Daily Inquirer offers an intelligent look at the "Movement is Life" mantra that drives the plot of the new film "World War Z." Although I don't agree with every argument he makes, Labella's essay entitled "Zombie Mantra: Movement is Life," is worth reading.

The full article is online at:
http://lifestyle.inquirer.net/112713/zombie-mantra-movement-is-life

Math Supports WWZ

This essay from a mathematics professor supports the possibility of a viral plague going global so quickly.

Tipping the balance towards humanity in World War Z

By Judy-Anne Osborn, University of Newcastle

Could a dire new infection sweep the world in a matter of weeks? Might the disease be so strange that it alters the behaviour of people beyond recognition, making them predatory and fearless? Could a great city like Philadelphia be overrun in a matter of hours?

World War Z, the latest Brad Pitt action thriller, is premised on these disturbing possibilities, and there’s a seed of science in each of them. The film is loosely based on a book by Max Brooks, history major and son of film director Mel Brooks, who has said that although his book is called “World War Z: an oral history of the Zombie Wars”, it should really be called “World War Z: insert real plague here”.

The terror of a zombie plague is deftly realised in this film, with a lot of tense action and surprisingly little gore. And Pitt’s character is immensely likeable – believably a family man, surprisingly gentle under strain, practical and swiftly resourceful in the face of sudden threat.

The plot centres around seemingly inexorable logic: infection deletes personalities and creates zombies, infected individuals infect others faster than they can be killed, and the infected have lost all self-preservation intent, so can’t be awed or reasoned into stopping their destruction of humanity.

World War Z: Insert Real Plague here. Sergey Galyonkin


The chilling idea that a single bite can transform loved individuals into automata intent only on transmitting the infection, is reflected in some real illnesses, some of which we can’t always cure. Rabies may be transferred by a bite, and cause mania, violence, brain damage and death; and can be transferred from animals to humans.

The toxoplasma virus in mice causes them to become fearless, get in the vicinity of cats and get eaten, where the virus completes its life-cycle in the cat’s gut. Other diseases that attack human brain tissue and can change behaviour and apparent personality include neurosyphilis and CJD (Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease) – the human form of Mad Cow Disease.

Zombie-modelling literature?

Director Marc Forster has created a film that juxtaposes the personal scale with that of cataclysms of nature – lead character Gerry Lane (Pitt) reluctantly leaves his family, using all the skill and judgement that he learnt as a former UN operative, to combat a threat that is biological but mindless. And again in scenes of zombies running and flowing up and over a giant wall like a river of ants, indifferent to their personal survival, using each other’s fallen bodies as a self-growing ladder.

These two themes: critical personal choices by individuals, versus mass behaviour, are reflected in the existing mathematical literature modelling zombie attack – yes such literature does exist!

The paper, “When Zombies Attack!: mathematical modelling of an outbreak of zombie infection” by an Ottawa-based Australian mathematician and his students defined the genre when they applied standard mathematical disease-modelling techniques to a hypothetical zombie plague.

In that model, infected and non-infected persons contact and infect each other at random, at a rate which, in context, determines the demise or survival of the human race. A follow-up book, due to be published next year, includes articles by a range of academics including myself, and explores different scenarios via mathematical modelling techniques that take into account human agency, skill and choices, leading to different outcomes.

Researchers use mathematical disease-modelling techniques to analyse a hypothetical zombie plague. Image from shutterstock.com


Both mathematics and films allow us to explore possibility-space: the world of what might be. The power of the human imagination, supported by the insights provided by mathematics and computer simulation, allows us to plan and prepare for the future, including major threats.

Mathematical modelling is routinely used to estimate the effectiveness of different plans for vaccination, medication, education programs, in extreme cases quarantine, and other strategies used to try to control deadly diseases such as SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and TB (tuberculosis).

The latter matters more than one might expect in Australia, since the incidence of multi-drug resistant TB is high and rising in Papua New Guinea. This affects incidence a short canoe ride away in Australian territories in the Torres Strait.

When resources are limited and decisions need to be made about whom to treat and when, modelling helps decide what choices may profoundly affect the outcome. In regard to the Torres Strait, mathematics shows us that Australian treatment of PNG nationals helps keep TB-infection in Australia lower than it would be without that intervention.

The maths of zombies turns out to be not so different to that arising in the analysis of any infectious disease, with three main possible outcomes. There’s the chance that the disease infects every member of the population: in World War Z this is the zombies-win-and-humanity-is-destroyed outcome.

There’s the chance that the disease itself dies out due to death or cure of the hosts: in World War Z, this is the humans-win-and-zombies-are-destroyed outcome.  And the third possibility is that rates of transmission and death or cure balance in just such a way that the disease persists in the population without overwhelming it.

In reality, a single hero is unlikely to bring us the insight we need to survive.


The original Zombies Attack paper showed how the chances of the survival of humanity vary based on whether interventions such as quarantine, treatment or impulsive eradication are available.

In the film, we follow Pitt’s character through each heart-racing moment as he seeks the origin and cause of the outbreak, in the hope that he’ll find an insight that can be utilised to lead out of the scenario in which humanity is destroyed, and into one of survival.

In a real plague, could we rely on a hero emerging to bring us the insight we would need to survive? Understanding is seldom achieved quickly: it is more often built up slowly by many people working on the same problem from different points of view.

Might we be better placed to invest now in understanding all the vagaries of nature including our own human nature? World War Z is a rip-roaring good action film, with a strong enough premise behind it to give us pause to think.

Judy-Anne Osborn does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.
       

Is Being Undead an Objective Badness?

In his essay “The Badness of Undeath,” published in The Undead and Philosophy, Richard Greene argues against the notion that the Undead, meaning both Vampires and Zombies, are objectively bad. His philosophical examination of the question about whether or not the Undead or the state of Undeath is in and of itself bad ends with the conclusion that Undeath is not inherently bad, but comparatively bad. In other words, there is nothing wrong with Undeath, but in comparison to being Alive it is not a desirable state of existence.

To achieve his basic arguments in “The Badness of Undeath,” Greene must necessarily set limits to what we can define as “the Undead.” Though technically the term can apply to Frankenstein’s Monster, the Mummy, or any number of demon-possessed ghouls, Greene limits his discussion to vampires and zombies. He further eliminates the various “experiments” within the subgenre, such as the sparkling vampires of the Twilight saga or the politically motivated zombies of Zombies Anonymous. He sees these various “stages of the Undead” as changes that must be set aside when they’ve moved too far from the essential qualities of Stoker’s Dracula or Romero’s Bub from Day of the Dead. For the purpose of philosophical debate, his focus is only on vampires and zombies as either evil or behaving in ways that support notions of evil (6).

Having set these parameters, Greene then attacks the question of why being Undead is thought to be worse than being dead (3-4). This requires the question be asked: What’s so bad about death? Death “is not a state in which some part of us lives on after our physical bodies have died,” he says (6-7). If it were, then Undeath would be bad because it holds us back from Paradise, though it would be good if it held us back from the fire and brimstone. But in fact, we cannot qualitatively prove or disprove the existence of an afterlife, so “it is appropriate to address the question of death’s badness by assuming that death is an experiental blank” (7). If death is just the end of life, and a post-mortem experience is free of pain, then this is not why death is bad.

What if death is bad because it denies us the good things that life has to offer [see Thomas Nagel] or if it stops our engagement with the world as agents of progress and action [see Bernard Williams] (7). But these do not explain the badness of Undeath, though the deprivation view would better contribute to understanding the bad element of being a zombie. After all, zombies seem to derive so little pleasure from life. Still, we don’t know for sure if they suffer—the possible exception being the comment from the “backbone zombie” in The Return of the Living Dead who complains of the pain of death, and Ernie’s observation that “Apparently it hurts to be dead.”

Also, the Undead do seem to qualify for the desire-frustration argument. Their previous desires as living beings are obviously frustrated: loss of sunlight, loss of socialization, loss of intellect, and so on. But looking at the unfulfilled desires of the living leads to disregard of this argument for the Undead. After all, just because for the living person a desire goes unfulfilled, we cannot say this is “bad.” Life is full of unfulfilled desires. Indeed, we often change our desires. That’s good because we may often desire something that will eventually make us unhappy.

Dead is inarguably bad because it cancels out all unfulfilled desires. Undead, however, is not so bad: we merely substitute our desires as living beings with other desires. Thus, our craving for wine becomes a vampiric thirst for blood, while our appetite for a steak becomes the craving for flesh that drives the zombie in us. “Changed desire is not necessarily a bad thing,” Greene says.

Next up for consideration: Death is an “experiental blank.” So how does Undeath “feel?” Says Greene: “It is not obvious that being Undead feels bad, in itself” (10). We just don’t know for sure. (Though in many films the Undead zombie does not seem especially happy; and in many novels the zombie’s moan is a sign of discomfort.)

Some argue: “Better Alive than Undead.” For instance, it is better to have bad experiences as a human than have happy experiences as a pig. This is the argument made by John Stuart Mill (10). But this argument holds only for zombies, which Greene sees as “clearly ‘lower’ life forms” (11). The vampire, on the other hand, can be said to enjoy an enhanced experience of being.

Undeath is also only comparatively bad, not objectively bad. Objective badness means the state of being is qualitatively bad or forever lacking in good (11).  Most people assume Undeath is objectively bad, but this cannot withstand argument.

So why do most people prefer death to Undeath? It is logical that being Undead would be better than being dead. So why do we fear Undeath? (12)

To understand this, we need to consider the notion of evil. Vampires and zombies do unspeakable things. “The fact that people don’t like to imagine themselves doing such things serves to explain why Undeath is generally regarded as being worse than death” (12).

However, just because people see certain acts as evil doesn’t mean that these acts are either evil or bad. “So, the fact that people don’t like to see themselves doing things they regard as evil doesn’t mean that it is bad to be the sort of being that does these things” (12).

Still, vampires and zombies do behave badly. “…We need to consider the possibility that the objective badness of Undeath can be accounted for by the actions and nature of Undead beings” (12-13). Remember, a state is considered objectively bad when it either contains some qualitative badness or it lacks some good thing which one would not normally lack.”

So what good thing from Life is missing from Undeath?

Moral philosophers see “behaving in good ways” as a good thing, either because of the good consequences or because of some intrinsic value. So if being Undead “involves lacking goodness in general or lacking the ability to perform good acts, then it seems that being a vampire or a zombie is a bad thing, in virtue of lacking something of value that one would not normally lack” (13).  But vampires or zombies do not by nature have the ability to do good. “Thus, lacking goodness or the ability to perform good acts” is a feature that would be objectively bad “if and only if being good or being able to perform good acts is a feature that vampires or zombies usually have” (13).  The objection that good-behaving humans begin to lack the ability for goodness only upon becoming Undead is therefore a comparative badness, not an objective badness (13-14).

“It would appear then that we can’t account for the badness of being either a vampire or zombie by appealing to the fact that they are evil or do things that we generally consider to be evil” (14). “We have no alternative but to reject the claim that it is bad (in the objective sense) to be Undead.” Still, being Undead “may well be bad in comparison to being a human being” (14).