# zombie system
## English
### Noun

zombie system (plural zombie systems)
* A system that continues to operate when it no longer serves a useful purpose.
** 1999, Timothy Kessler, Global Capital and National Politics, page 124:The system is being kept afloat by the black magic of perceived government guarantees. This is virtually a zombie system" ( Willoughby and Conger 1998 : 64 ) .
** 2009, Labour Research - Volume 98, page 27:Capitalism in the 21st Century "is a zombie system, seemingly dead when it comes to achieving human goals ... but capable of sudden spurts of activity that cause chaos all around" .
** 2010, Ted Rall, The Anti-American Manifesto, page 181:We can rise up . We can get rid of this zombie system of government, which is dead in every way that matters.
* (neurobiology) A neurological system that functions without conscious direction.
** 2004, Christof Koch, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach, page 318:If, however, you happen to be an organism with plenty of input sensors and output effectors, say, a mammal, devoting a zombie system to each and every possible input-output combination became too expensive .
** 2006, Antti Revonsuo, Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon, page 378:Second , it seems that information can flow from the phenomenal level to the non-conscious zombie systems, but not the other way round (Bridgeman, 2000). In some cases of visually guided actions, when a delayed response to the stimulus is required, the nonconscious system cannot store the relevant representations, but must rely on those delivered by the conscious system. This also shows clearly that the nonconscious system is a servant of the consciously selected goals . Interestingly , the information available through the phenomenal level is not as accurate for the purposes of motor programming as the normal direct online input of this zombie system is, for the representations filtered through the phenomenal level include distortions and illusions that the nonconscious system is not otherwise inclined to generate.
** 2008, D. Dubois, Computing Anticipatory Systems, page 4:The hard problem holds that if a certain activity is found in the mechanics which seems to influence consciousness, it is logically possible for exactly the same activity to occur without there being consciousness at all. This would be called a Zombie system .
** 2012, Tim Bayne, The Unity of Consciousness:The study of zombie systems may give us reason to reconfigure our intuitive conception of the relationship between consciousness and agency ( see e.g. Clark 2001 ) , but by no means does it show that 'in order to discover what someone is conscious of we need them to give us some form of report about their subjective experience' (Frith et al. 1999:107).
* (computing) Synonym of zombie computer
** 2003, Jason Albanese, Wes Sonnenreich, Network Security Illustrated, page 393:Once a trojan acquires control of a remote system, the malicious user can act through the "zombie" system and the source of his or her mischief will be identified as coming from the compromised system, as opposed to his or her own.
** 2007, Pranav Pareek, Hacking-- the Untold Story -, page 115:It is a free, open source tool that can tell a zombie system flooding packets to stop flooding.
** 2008, Richard Miniter, Leah Wilson, Jack Bauer for President: Terrorism and Politics in 24, page 63:Sure, the hacker will lose a useful resource (probably in the form of a remote bot or zombie system that he took over previously) , but he will be one step closer to his ultimate goal.
** 2021, Glen E. Clarke, Daniel Lachance, CompTIA Security+ Certification Bundle, page 766:Performance issues could be security incidents—for example, if you notice that a system is running very slowly, it could be infected by a virus, or a hacker could be using it as a zombie system to do other processing.