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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780786723621 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Basic Books |
| Publication date: | 08/04/2008 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Lexile: | 1360L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 908 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Knowing Your Own Mind
Can we ever really know what is going on in someone else's mind? Can a woman ever know what it is like to be a man? What experiences does a baby have during childbirth? What experiences, if any, does a fetus have in its mother's womb? And what of nonhuman minds? What do horses think about? Why aren't vultures nauseated by the rotting carcasses they eat? When a fish has a hook sticking through its lip, does it hurt the fish as much as it would hurt you, if you had a hook sticking through your lip? Can spiders think, or are they just tiny robots, mindlessly making their elegant webs? For that matter, why couldn't a robot—if it was fancy enough—be conscious? There are robots that can move around and manipulate things almost as adeptly as spiders; could a more complicated robot feel pain, and worry about its future, the way a person can? Or is there some unbridgeable chasm separating the robots (and maybe the spiders and insects and other "clever" but mindless creatures) from those animals that have minds? Could it be that all animals except human beings are really mindless robots? Ren‚ Descartes notoriously maintained this in the seventeenth century. Might he have been dead wrong? Could it be that all animals, and even plants—and even bacteria—have minds?
Or, to swing to the other extreme, are we so sure that all human beings have minds? Maybe (to take the most extreme case of all) you're the only mind in the universe; maybe everything else, including the apparent author of this book, is a mere mindless machine. This strange idea first occurred to me when I was a young child, andperhaps it did to you as well. Roughly a third of my students claim that they, too, invented it on their own and mulled it over when they were children. They are often amused to learn that it's such a common philosophical hypothesis that it has a name—solipsism (from Latin for "myself alone"). Nobody ever takes solipsism seriously for long, as far as we know, but it does raise an important challenge: if we know that solipsism is silly—if we know that there are other minds—how do we know?
What kinds of minds are there? And how do we know? The first question is about what exists—about ontology, in philosophical parlance; the second question is about our knowledge—about epistemology. The goal of this book is not to answer these two questions once and for all, but rather to show why these questions have to be answered together. Philosophers often warn against confusing ontological questions with epistemological questions. What exists is one thing, they say, and what we can know about it is something else. There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limits of what there is. I agree that this is good general advice, but I will argue that we already know enough about minds to know that one of the things that makes them different from everything else in the universe is the way we know about them. For instance, you know you have a mind and you know you have a brain, but these are different kinds of knowledge. You know you have a brain the way you know you have a spleen: by hearsay. You've never seen your spleen or your brain (I would bet), but since the textbooks tell you that all normal human beings have one of each, you conclude that you almost certainly have one of each as well. You are more intimately acquainted with your mind—so intimately that you might even say that you are your mind. (That's what Descartes said: he said he was a mind, a res cogitans, or thinking thing.) A book or a teacher might tell you what a mind is, but you wouldn't have to take anybody's word for the claim that you had one. If it occurred to you to wonder whether you were normal and had a mind as other people do, you would immediately realize, as Descartes pointed out, that your very wondering this wonder demonstrated beyond all doubt that you did indeed have a mind.
This suggests that each of us knows exactly one mind from the inside, and no two of us know the same mind from the inside. No other kind of thing is known about in that way. And yet this whole discussion so far has been conducted in terms of how we know—you and I. It presupposes that solipsism is false. The more we—we—reflect on this presupposition, the more unavoidable it appears. There couldn't be just one mind—or at least not just one mind like our minds.
If we want to consider the question of whether nonhuman animals have minds, we have to start by asking whether they have minds in some regards like ours, since these are the only minds we know anything about—at this point. (Try asking yourself whether nonhuman animals have flurbs. You can't even know what the question is, if you don't know what a flurb is supposed to be. Whatever else a mind is, it is supposed to be something like our minds; otherwise we wouldn't call it a mind.) So our minds, the only minds we know from the outset, are the standard with which we must begin. Without this agreement, we'll just be fooling ourselves, talking rubbish without knowing it.
When I address you, I include us both in the class of mind-havers. This unavoidable starting point creates, or acknowledges, an in-group, a class of privileged characters, set off against everything else in the universe. This is almost too obvious to notice, so deeply enshrined is it in our thinking and talking, but I must dwell on it. When there's a we, you are not alone; solipsism is false; there's company present. This comes out particularly clearly if we consider some curious variations:
"We left Houston at dawn, headin' down the road—just me and my truck."
Strange. If this fellow thinks his truck is such a worthy companion that it deserves shelter under the umbrella of "we," he must be very lonely. Either that, or his truck must have been customized in ways that would be the envy of roboticists everywhere. In contrast, "we—just me and my dog" doesn't startle us at all, but "we—just me and my oyster" is hard to take seriously. In other words, we're pretty sure that dogs have minds, and we're dubious that oysters do.
Membership in the class of things that have minds provides an all-important guarantee: the guarantee of a certain sort of moral standing. Only mind-havers can care; only mind-havers can mind what happens. If I do something to you that you don't want me to do, this has moral significance. It matters, because it matters to you. It may not matter much, or your interests may be overridden for all sorts of reasons, or (if I'm punishing you justly for a misdeed of yours) the fact that you care may actually count in favor of my deed. In any event, your caring automatically counts for something in the moral equation. If flowers have minds, then what we do to flowers can matter to them, and not just to those who care about what happens to flowers. If nobody cares, then it doesn't matter what happens to flowers.
There are some who would disagree; they would insist that the flowers had some moral standing even if nothing with a mind knew of or cared about their existence. Their beauty, for instance, no matter how unappreciated, is a good thing in itself, and hence should not be destroyed, other things being equal. This is not the view that the beauty of these flowers matters to God, for instance, or that it might matter to some being whose presence is undetectable by us. It is the view that the beauty matters, even though it matters to no one—not to the flowers themselves and not to God or anybody else. I remain unpersuaded, but rather than dismiss this view outright I will note that it is controversial and not widely shared. In contrast, it takes no special pleading at all to get most people to agree that something with a mind has interests that matter. That's why people are so concerned, morally, about the question of what has a mind: any proposed adjustment in the boundary of the class of mind-havers has major ethical significance.
We might make mistakes. We might endow mindless things with minds, or we might ignore a mindful thing in our midst. These mistakes would not be equal. To overattribute minds—to "make friends with" your houseplants or lie awake at night worrying about the welfare of the computer asleep on your desk—is, at worst, a silly error of credulity. To underattribute minds—to disregard or discount or deny the experience, the suffering and joy, the thwarted ambitions and frustrated desires of a mind-having person or animal—would be a terrible sin. After all, how would you feel if you were treated as an inanimate object? (Notice how this rhetorical question appeals to our shared status as mind-havers.)
What People are Saying About This
"Dennett's ability to entertain while making the reader think about uncomfortable questions makes him one of the greatest educators. Highly recommended. General, undergraduates through faculty."