[Wittrs] Re: Minds, Brains and What There Is

  • From: Nasha Waights Hickman <baghira24@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:36:18 +0100

Hehe, yes I feared I was getting all your messages mixed up!

yes, I think we can and so refer to consciousness, and talk about it all the
time, and as I was saying before, one will only complain that it is beyond
our reach as an intangible (unanalysable, perhaps!) something, because we
had in mind the illegitimate demand that it should be a tangible something.
Once we just see that the grammar works differently here, and that it is a
nonsense to talk of minds being located, extended etc the worry disappears.

I don't however think there is a private realm and anything to be found
there, and I suspect you don't either, in the sense that I don't think we
have an inner world that we look into, poke around in with a torch-light,
and find our sensations etc. I am not aware of my sensations, thoughts etc,
don't identify them, don't know of them , as I could not fail to be aware of
them, misidentify them, fail to know of them etc. I just have them.

I agree that we are mislead by the grammar of talk of external objects (how
we refer to them etc) when thinking about private experience. But talk of
public/private environments seems to me dangerously close to adopting the
dualist's language. Sorry, just being pedantic I guess.
I also try to remember that when I say "the book on the table is green" or
some such, I am expressing a thought, and thoughts are no more and no less
private than sensations (not that I am forgetting the "misleading parallel"
(§ 317 PI)). So if there is no worry about how a sentence in use is capable
of  expressing one's thought, there should be no worry about how a sentence
in use can express one's sensation, and on that level sensation language is
no different to any other kind of language. There is no special strain, no
leap of imagination, no special uncertainty or mystery in the case of
private experience.

I also agree about the behaviour business, and that in our own case we do
not learn of our sensations from our behaviour (nor by any other means, we
just have them). There are no criteria for me truthfully saying I am in pain
-- there are behavioural criteria for others to judge whether I am being
truthful, or am in pain. So quite right, 'I am in pain' does not describe a
sample of behaviour -- which would only be a behaviourist ersatz of the
inner item. when we talk about pain we are talking about *pain* and not
about pain-behaviour. So I think we can agree about that too!

And yes in the case of others, we talk about them having minds in so far as
their behaviour manifests their having a mind ( though do we really talk
about this?)...in the first person case " I have a mind!" just seems rather
ridiculous to me. And yet Descartes was clearly no ridiculous philosopher!

N.

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