Giulio Ongaro’s essay shortlisted for the Berggruen Prize Essay Competition

Giulio Ongaro’s essay ‘Conscious Life and Voodoo Death’ was shortlisted for the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition. The competition focused on consciousness, intelligence, and the nature of mind in an age of advancing artificial systems, inviting original essays that offer fresh perspectives from all traditions and disciplines.

Summary:

Philosophical zombies—entities identical to humans but lacking conscious experience—have long served as the go-to thought experiment for illustrating the ‘hard problem of consciousness’: why subjective experience should arise at all from physical processes. This essay introduces another Haitian concept to counter the intuition that mind can be separated from life processes: ‘voodoo death.’ Voodoo death refers to the death of a person caused by the expectation of dying rather than organic causes. Drawing on studies of this phenomenon and interpreting it through two contemporary biogenic theories of the mind—enactivism and the free-energy principle—this essay argues that ‘voodoo death’ is an extreme manifestation of a broader phenomenon wherein consciousness plays an active role in the dying process. Consciousness, the argument suggests, is intrinsic to biology—not only because it is intrinsic to life but also because it is inextricably tied to death.

Read the full essay here: https://loc.closertotruth.com/essay/conscious-life-and-voodoo-death