Knowing other
minds
This is an old issue in philosophy and the issue is very
simple: how do we know that other minds exist since we only have access to our
own mind? I won’t use the technical term for this issue, Solipsism” but this
form of scepticism is, as I shall argue, a victim of the state of knowledge of
past eras. As in many issues in philosophy and dare I say it, science, a lot
depends on the language and vocabulary we use. The issue of other minds goes
back to the dualism of the mind-body question; some might describe it as mind
and materialism question and so on.
From a historical perspective, the “mind” part is the problem;
no one disputes the existence of a body/materialism but the body thing is
fraught with determinism and causality. Hence, the idea of free will and free
actions is that we want people, including ourselves, to be accountable for their
actions which might not be all that free after all. But how can we be held
accountable and therefore responsible for our actions if we are determined?
The mind was supposed to solve this problem by giving it
some sort of “non material” properties that somehow are not shackled by determinism
but still preserves moral accountability. There are no “non material”
properties of the mind because there is no such thing as a mind; what we have
is a brain and how the brain functions. We can classify the mind-body problem
with the “morning star vs evening star” question. Today we know that the
evening star and the morning star are not stars but the same planet we call
Venus. Just because we believe we are experiencing different events it does not
follow that those events cannot be the same single event.
A more modern attempt to explain the problem at hand is the
Turing test (Intelligence test). You will remember the Turing test is an
experiment, even a thought experiment, when a human being has a conversation
with a hidden machine by text only using natural language. If the person cannot
distinguish whether the replies were from a machine or human being the test
would have succeeded and the counter part is intelligent.
In a way the Turing test pitches our own mind (brain) against
a possible machine. But off course this does not deal with the issue of the existence
of a mind or other minds or something else. The problem with the Turing test is
that machines are man-made hence we are not comparing like with like. At best a
Turing test can demonstrate the ingenuity and cleverness of people to make
machines.
Hence, the “other minds” problem ought to be the “other
brains” problem; or at the very least the “other persons” problem. The advantage
of this new question is that we are in no doubt that other brains exist, I mean
really exist, and other people exist too. We know this because many tend to
annoy us and drive us mad.
It is equally absurd to think that just because other
brains, including our brain, can be investigated it is possible for someone to
know what we are thinking and equally more important we can be open to total
manipulated. But we do know what others are thinking and we do manipulate other
people’s brains. The problem is that we cannot all know all the things people
are thinking and we cannot manipulate all the people all the time.
The first fallacy is that just because in principle we can know
something it does not follow that we can know everything there is to know.
Moreover, not only we cannot know what, why and how someone thought in their
past, we certainly cannot know how future thoughts will turn out. And all this
without taking into account such things as quantum mechanics, multi variable
non linear models, unknown variables and errors due to physical malfunctions. In
effect we are more limited by our inability to access information than by
anything else. The fact that we do acquire knowledge and information suggests
that at best determinism has a minimal effect on our brain.
The second fallacy is that our brains are not sealed black
boxes without any flow of information; our brains are process central of our
perceptions and they are even the central junction signal box of our body. In
reality we do not know what sort of information enters our mind and how we, i.e.
our brain, reacts to that. When it comes to understanding the brain,
information is king.
Even today when companies have all sorts of information
about us, which even we are not conscious off, they have problems predicting
what we want: take the new idea from Amazon of delivering unsolicited products,
the best that can be said about this experiment is that they have a long way to
go. (see for example: ‘Amazon, why am I deluged by unwanted parcels?’ https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/apr/21/amazon-why-am-i-deluged-by-unwanted-parcels
).
Today the best we can do with knowing other people and how
they will act are the various probabilistic models some of which even consider real
time information. So up to a point these models do not conflict with our idea
of moral accountability since such models do not identify individuals and they include
a margin of error any way. If today even Google or Amazon cannot get their targeting
right at the individual level when they seem to have 100% information about
most of us, what chances do other institutions have at identifying the impossible?
So, what about the question that if we can know and
understand the brain we can manipulate people? As I have mentioned we do
manipulate people today and done so since forever. But once again there are
limits: all things being equal no matter how long they manipulate my brain I’m
not going to run a 3 minute mile. Advertising and marketing are disciplines
with the sole purpose of changing our mind (brain) and manipulate us to buy the
relevant products. Even then companies have a hard time maintaining market
share. In reality there are limits to what can be done by materialism.
Of course, we generally manipulate other people’s minds
through language: an offer of “free Pizza” can manipulate a lot of brains. But
even the most recent political manipulation programme in democracy, the 2016
Referendum in the UK, that involved serious manipulation of information and
misinformation by the extreme right wing factions had to compete with: people voting
leave as a protest vote against the establishment, misplaced racial bias
against immigrants, people who voted leave just for a change and the effect of
education or lack of it. But these voters at the time thought they were doing
the right thing; luckily we can still apply the principles of moral accountable
and identify who is responsible for this democracy fail, and why.
A. J. Ayer, (1936: Language, Truth and Logic) proposed a “consciousness
test” to distinguish from a conscious man and an unconscious machine: the
answer was to distinguish from perceptible behaviour. But have a look at this article, as an
example, on why consciousness is not a good test of man-machine and even more
the inadequacy of behaviourism: “Coma patients might feel pleasure and pain
like the rest of us” in Medical Xpress https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-05-coma-patients-pleasure-pain-rest.html.
Today through Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) we can see the brain in action
and some have used the technology to communicate with comatose patients by
establishing a signalling language.
In conclusion, by removing the fancy “mind” factor from the discussion
and stick to the reality of the brain we can see that the principle of moral accountability
is not really threatened even though we can know a lot about the brain, body
and people. However, because nature is what it is, our ability to know
everything and our ability to manipulate everyone is just a flawed arrogance from
believing in our infallibility based on a false context that we are immune from
the physical world.
Best Lawrence
No comments:
Post a Comment