Having tackled "pain" and "belief" it's time to move on to the big fish, the mind itself. As with the concepts of pain and belief, the concept of mind is a publicly communicable abstraction. It encompasses all the human capabilities that we observe in ourselves and others such as thinking, feeling, perceiving and desiring. Ludwig Wittgenstein captures the concept aptly when he says, "The human body is the best picture of the human soul". [1]But, you may ask, how about when we introspect? Aren't we also privately observing our pains and beliefs and therefore our own minds? In a word, no. We feel pain and we have beliefs. As such, we can observe them in our everyday behavior. Once we observe and identify our pains and beliefs, we can subsequently reflect on them and examine them. It is from these kinds of everyday observations that we know that we, and others, have minds.
(A possible objection: What if we hide our pains or beliefs? Even if we do, they are still manifested in behavior although of a different kind (e.g., stoic, reserved or deceptive behavior). While hiding your headache pain or political beliefs makes them more difficult to detect, they are still observable in principle. And, importantly, you can easily observe your own behavior here, since it takes conscious effort to conceal what you think and feel.)
So the important thing to note is that introspection is not a kind of observation. Instead, introspection is an examination of one's thoughts or feelings that are observed in one's own behavior. Unfortunately, the belief that introspection is a kind of observation leads to the idea that our mind is a private theater [2] where we observe on the stage the characters of our inner life, such as pains and beliefs, desires and purposes. On this unfounded view, our mind is a ghost in a machine. [3]
It can be a difficult ghost to exorcise. In my next post, I'll look at a scientific experiment that highlights some pertinent issues around consciousness and the mind.
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[1] Philosophical Investigations, Part II, iv, Ludwig Wittgenstein.
[2] "The Concept of Mind", p222, Gilbert Ryle. Similarly, Daniel Dennett calls it the "Cartesian Theater" in "Consciousness Explained", p17.
[3] Gilbert Ryle calls this view the "dogma of the Ghost in the Machine" in "The Concept of Mind", p15.
In the 'A thorny issue' post, you note that the actual sensation of pain is a private experience, whereas any discussion can only be about the observed behaviours associated with the pain sensation.
ReplyDeleteIn the 'Beyond belief' post you extend that idea to include beliefs as well as pain.
Here you want to separate two types of observations: those of the external world, and those of the internal world. Except of course, the second kind are not observations at all but reflection and examination of first-order (received sensations) and second-order (abstractions built out of these sensations) entities within our internal mind.
But, the mind never has direct access to the world, it only deals in sensations from sense organs. And these can err (as your following post 'The language of illusion' demonstrates with the color phi). But the mind doesn't even have direct access to the sensations, as they are processed by the organs and the brain as part of the reception of sensation (which is where the phi illusion emerges).
So when we (people in general) construct a "publicly communicable abstraction" of some internal state (ie pain) as an element of our language, it is not based on direct experience of the behaviours of others, but on our processed experience of the sensations of the behaviours of others.
Given that sometimes cultural beliefs exert a powerful force on this processing (mass hysteria, etc) it is possible for the consensus to be incorrect.
So (and this is really a comment for 'The language of illusion') how do we "know" the bent pencil is the mistake with the perceptual process and thus the illusion?
"...it is not based on direct experience..."
DeleteThe details of the physical process underlying observation exist at a different level of abstraction to the act of observation itself (i.e., it drops out of consideration as irrelevant in normal conversation). I can directly observe that someone else is in pain by their physical symptoms (or indirectly via a 1-to-10-scale patient report). If we discover that we were wrong in a specific instance, we can convey this at the same level of abstraction (e.g., he appeared to be in pain, but he was fooling us).
As an analogy, I can fly directly to New York even if I don't walk directly to my seat.
"...how do we "know" the bent pencil is the mistake with the perceptual process and thus the illusion?"
There is no mistake-proof method for knowing. If we find the straight-pencil conclusion to be a better fit with our other observations than the bent-pencil conclusion, then we will conclude accordingly. However our language concepts will support either conclusion. What they won't coherently support is the idea that observation is based on illusion or that everything is an illusion. It was by observing behavior and phenomena in the world that we learned the concepts of observation and illusion and world in the first place.