All that Hollywood stuff is utter nonsense. The glazed expression, the fish eyes, the fixed stare—absolute tosh. It’s actually really hard to spot a zombie. They look just the same as you and me, walk the same, talk the same—never give a clue that there’s nothing going on inside. Give a zombie a good kick on the shin and he’ll wince and shriek every bit as loud as you or me. But unlike you and me, he doesn’t feel a thing: no pain, no sensation, no consciousness of any kind. Actually, I say “you and me,” but that should really be just “me.” I am not at all sure about you … any of you, come to that.
Zombies are frequent guests in the long-running philosophical debate known as the “problem of other minds.” I know that I have a mind, an inner life of conscious experience, but the content of your mind is private and hidden from me; all I can observe directly is your behavior. Is that sufficient evidence on which to base my belief that you have a mind like mine? To put it more colorfully, how do I know that you are not a zombie like the ones described above—exactly the same as me in terms of behavior and physiology and yet not conscious?
“Zombies in philosophy are more akin to the wives in Stepford Wives than to the brain-munching ghouls of Night of the Living Dead. Still, with Stepford wives there’s something discernibly, albeit subtly, amiss.”
Larry Hauser, 2006
It may seem absurd to question whether others have minds, but is there anything irrational in doing so? Indeed, given the extraordinary difficulty in explaining or accommodating consciousness in a physical world (see What is it like to be a bat?), is it not perhaps perfectly reasonable to suppose that the only mind I know—my own—is a great rarity, or even unique? Maybe the rest of you—the zombies—are normal and I am the freak?
Zombies are not the only guests at conferences on the philosophy of mind. You will also meet mutants. Like zombies, philosophical mutants are less scary than their Hollywood counterparts. Indeed, they are completely indistinguishable from ordinary people when it comes to behavior and physical makeup. And they even have minds! The catch with mutants is that their minds aren’t wired up in quite the same way as yours or mine (well, mine anyway).
There is no limit on how different mutants can be: they may get pleasure from something that would cause me pain, they may see red where I see blue; the only rule is that a mutant’s sensations and other mental events are different from mine. Mutants are particularly useful when it comes to looking at a different aspect of the other minds problem: not the question of whether other people have minds but whether their minds work in the same way as mine. Can I ever tell, even in principle, that you feel pain as I do? Or how intense your feeling of pain is? Or that your perception of red is the same as mine? With such questions a whole new area of debate opens up; and as with other aspects of the other minds problem, our answers help to elucidate our basic conceptions of what the mind is.
Given that we are so similar in other ways … The most common ways of tackling the problem of other minds, developed by Bertrand Russell amongst others, have been variants of the so-called argument from analogy. I know in my own case that treading on a drawing pin is typically followed by certain kinds of behavior (saying “ouch,” wincing, etc.) and accompanied by a particular sensation—pain. So I can infer, when other people behave in similar ways in response to similar stimuli, that they too feel pain. More generally, I observe innumerable similarities, both physiological and behavioral, between myself and other people, and I conclude from these similarities that other people are also similar in respect of their psychology.
There is an appealing aura of common sense about the argument from analogy. In the unlikely event of our being called upon to defend our belief in the minds of others, we would probably produce some form of justification along these lines. The argument is inductive, of course (see Forms of argument), so cannot (and is not intended to) provide conclusive proof, but that is also true of much else that we feel justified in believing.
On the face of it, the problem of other minds seems like a case (not unique, in popular estimation) of philosophers finding a problem where the rest of us never even thought of looking. It is true that all of us (even philosophers, for practical reasons at least) take it for granted that others do enjoy an inner life of thoughts and feelings very much like our own. But to reject the philosophical problem on that basis is to miss the point. Nobody is trying to persuade anybody that people are in fact zombies. It is rather that ways we may have of thinking about minds and their relation to bodies leave wide open the possibility of zombies. And that should cause us to look seriously at our conceptions of the mind.
Cartesian dualism (see The mind-body problem) drives a huge metaphysical wedge between mental and physical events, and it is in the resulting chasm that skepticism about other minds takes root. That is a good reason for looking critically at dualism, whether in Descartes or in its many religious manifestations. Conversely, one of the attractions of physicalist accounts of mind is that mental events can be fully explained, in principle at least, in terms of physical ones; and if the mental dissolves into the physical, zombies vanish at the same time. That doesn’t necessarily make such accounts right but it is evidence that they are going in the right direction. In this way, focusing on the problem of other minds can throw light on more general issues within the philosophy of mind.
The usual criticism of the argument is that it involves inference or extrapolation from a single instance (my own mind). Imagine, for instance, that you found an oyster with a pearl inside and inferred from this that all oysters have pearls. To reduce the risk of this kind of mistake, you need to inspect a number of oysters, but this is precisely the course of action that is shut off in the case of other minds. As Wittgenstein remarked, “How can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?”
“If the relationship between having a human body and a certain kind of mental life is as contingent as the Cartesian account of mind implies, it should be equally easy … to conceive of a table as being in pain as it is for me to conceive of another person as being in pain. The point, of course, is that this is not so.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1953
The irresponsibility of drawing conclusions on the basis of a single instance is mitigated if the inference is made in a context of relevant background information. For instance, if we recognize that a pearl serves no useful purpose in the functioning of an oyster or that the commercial value of pearls is inconsistent with their ready availability in every oyster, we will be less inclined to draw false inferences from our single specimen.
The problem with minds and consciousness is that they remain so mysterious, so unlike anything else that we are familiar with, that it is altogether unclear what might count as relevant background information. To this extent the problem of other minds can be seen as another symptom of the more general mind-body problem. If our theory of mind can demystify the relation between mental and physical phenomena, it may be hoped that our concerns over other minds will diminish or vanish altogether.
the condensed idea
Is there anybody there?
| Timeline | |
|---|---|
| c.250BC | Do animals feel pain? |
| c.350BC | Forms of argument |
| c.AD1300 | Occam’s razor |
| 1637 | The mind-body problem |
| 1912 | Other minds |
| 1950 | The Turing test |
| 1953 | The beetle in the box |
| 1974 | What is it like to be a bat? |