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

From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:57:41 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Nasha Waights Hickman <wittrs@...> wrote:
>
> 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.
>


Yes, I agree with that, i.e., that it is misleading in just the way you state 
to speak of a "private world". But there is a problem here because we can and 
do refer to the aspect of experience that is only accessible to ourselves and 
thus to what is private. Is it a different world? No, of course not. But it is, 
in Wittgenstein's immortal words, not a nothing either.

So we do have to find ways to talk about it. I submit that we do this with 
ordinary language all the time but that this is precisely the point in language 
deployment where we have to depart from the publicly observable paradigm and 
recognize we are doing something other than referring to public observables 
(and that when we fail to keep this distinction in mind, we stumble into 
confusions).

We do focus our attention and usages on public observables such as behavior 
much of the time. But that isn't always enough which is how and why we get into 
trouble. When I had a heart attack and the doctor asked me "Do you have pain?" 
my response to her was to refer to something that only I could be experiencing, 
nor did she expect something different when she asked the question, nor did I 
take it as though it were intended to speak of some special kind of object. It 
was about a sensation and a sensation is not an observable object in the 
publicly accessible world.

Wittgenstein's point, I think, in referring to our exclamations of pain, or our 
referencing of same, was to show us how words about our private phenomena work 
in ordinary language, not to suggest it is unintelligible to reference such 
phenomena linguistically (obviously it's not) nor to suppose that a private 
domain (where access limited to one and only one subject) did not exist. That's 
why I point out that Wittgenstein distinguished his thinking from Behaviorism, 
i.e., he recognized a private domain, though he didn't call it that. He just 
thought that we fumble the ball when we try to speak about it according to the 
standard public paradigm.


> 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.


It can be if we're not careful because it does kick up pictures in the minds of 
some of our interlocutors (and, if we're not even more careful, in ourselves). 
But it needn't. Nor can such talk be avoided at times. For instance, to those 
who want to say that it's "unintelligible" to speak of minds or to speak of 
brains being the seat or source or cause of minds, I think we have to say, what 
is the alternative? While "mind" may not (and does not) refer to some rarified 
etheral platonic object co-existing with brains, there is a reason we speak of 
minds in ordinary language, there is a reason we need a term for the 
combination of autonomous, intentional behaviors observed in others and the 
many aspects of experience we associate with having a mind in ourselves. The 
tendency is to think that "mind" is to mind as "rock" is to rock. But why 
should that be? As you correctly note, we can refer to lots of things that are 
nothing like rocks, e.g., speed or, as I have elsewhere suggested, turning.

This only becomes dualistic if we think the paradigm that obtains when we speak 
of things found in the publicly observable realm of our experience (the 
so-called external world) must prevail in every case. But as your own example 
demonstrates, even the reference to speed departs from that standard paradigm 
to some degree. Wittgenstein's point was that language is far more robust and 
multidimensional (Kirby likes to invoke Wittgenstein's toolbox metaphor and 
he's not wrong), than we are often led to think.


> 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.

Yes, we could not be in more agreement on this! But this is pretty obvious I 
suppose, except that sometimes we have to be reminded to look at how language 
actually works!


> 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!


Up to a point! I must say that when I was being wheeled into the emergency room 
and the doctor asked me that question I would not have described what I was 
having as pain at all. In fact, she threw me for a loop since I didn't know how 
to answer her or the other doctors hovering behind her. I tried lamely to 
explain what I was feeling (it was more like a pressure but not really that 
either) and finally, after observing the looks of perplexity on their faces 
(they were obviously looking for certain kinds of report as a way of 
classifying my condition), I just said yes, pain, and pointed to the place on 
my chest where I was feeling the unusual sensation.

By the way, based on that experience I have enlarged my definition of pain and 
now would routinely describe the sensation as "pain" if asked, i.e., it now 
does feel like a kind of pain to me (I have since had similar symptoms over the 
years). Now I "know" that that is pain, too, or what most of us mean by "pain" 
though maybe it's only because there is no better word for it or, because, in 
some cases it does become pain of a more recognizable sort at some point.

Years ago when my grandfather had a heart attack (that ultimately killed him) I 
wrote a short story about what he was feeling and imagined a dreadful, 
blinding, excruciating, crushing pain in the chest. But my own personal 
experience was nothing like that. But now, if asked to call it something, I 
would say "pain" without question.

I guess my point is that sometimes pain is unquestionably pain and sometimes it 
isn't and that we build our vocabulary about such things as we do with 
everything else, through intersubjective feedback, learning to put lables on 
things in a way that is mutually understandable within our language using 
community.


>
> 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.


Suppose we encounter an alien life form. We would want to know if it were 
conscious and intelligent, no? And isn't that what it means to ask if it has a 
mind? Even in our more earthbound experience it is not unusual to ask if 
certain animals have minds to varying degrees. Is a chimp aware of its world as 
we are? A dog? A mouse? A chicken? A lobster? A housefly? While we don't 
typically ask this of other humans we certainly might. Was Terry Schiavo really 
brain dead? Was there no consciousness flickering there at all? Some time back 
I took my family to a display with a very lifelike Abraham Lincoln. It was just 
a mechanical model that was clearly that if you took a close enough look but on 
first superficial glance it was quite convincing. Might we not also have to 
consider such options more and more as our technological prowess increases in 
the future? These need not be idle questions at all and, I think, they are 
rapidly ceasing to be unimaginable ones.

SWM


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References:
- [Wittrs] Re: Minds, Brains and What There Is
  - From: Nasha Waights Hickman
[Wittrs] Re: Minds, Brains and What There Is

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