Donald J. Trump is not conscious. This is my ultimate thesis. That is to say, Trump is what the philosopher David Chalmers calls a “philosophical zombie”, Such beings “are exactly like us in all physical respects but without conscious experiences: by definition there is ‘nothing it is like’ to be a zombie. Yet zombies behave just like us, and some even spend a lot of time discussing consciousness.”
Chalmers is of course responding to a long line of philosophical questioning. Descartes claimed “I think, therefore I am”, bu he had difficulty extrapolating from his own certainty about himself to other people; He worried that this formulation was consistent with the idea that other people might simply be automata with no inner consciousness; and his effort to get around this problem was sort of lame and unconvincing (he relied upon God to make sure that other people were similar to himself). It makes more sense to accept other peoples’ claims to be conscious in the same way that I am by the principle of philosophical charity: I should not deny your claim to be conscious without a good reason; rather, my presumption should always be that you are conscious, as you claim, just as I claim to be; even though I do not have the direct experience of consciousness in your case, only in my own.
So when I claim that Trump is not conscious, I am relying upon extraordinary evidence rather than making the claim just on general principle. One way to understand consciousness is to see its existence in the form of having feelings or experiences; or more specifically (according to philosophical argument) in the form of the experience of qualia. One feels happy or sad; one has pleasure or pain; one has a sense of the color red that is different from a sense of the color blue.
Babies give evidence of having experiences and feelings; so do familiar animals like dogs and cats. Recent scientific experiments have extended the scope of this, suggesting that other animals like lobsters and insects have conscious or qualitative experiences as well. Several studies have suggested that bees have moods, more or less shared among all the individuals in a hive.
The question of what it would mean to determine empirically, from an entity’s outward behavior, whether it has inner experiences is obviously a difficult one. Still, Trump appears unique among human beings for the way that he never displays signs of pleasure or pain. It is evident to me that even mosquitoes have a certain sense of aesthetic satisfaction; but Trump doesn’t seem to. He entirely subsumes aesthetic categories into real estate sales (think of his use of the word “beautiful”). Trump clearly craves power and self-aggrandizement; but in his case, these seem to be autonomic imperatives, rather than being produced by inner drives (this is why Trump is so different from Nixon. Nixon’s complicated and twisted inner drives would have fascinated Freud, but Freud could not have had anything to say about Trump).
I will stop here, but I could go on indefinitely. The point is that nearly all living things, even bacteria, seem to have what philsophers sometimes call what-is-it-likeness (from Thomas Nagel’s famous article “what is it like to be a bat?”). But Trump just IS; it is not like anything to be him.