TALKING ABOUT MINDS


We understand our own minds, and, by making analogies, those of others, through a process of interpreting mental events and symbols. This is akin to the process of understanding a novel.

Facts, on the other hand, must be falsifiable. On this view, we cannot make factual statements about the mind.

When we talk about thoughts, desires, motivations, emotions, ideas, what exactly are we referring to? Are these actually invisible entities, or are we merely making deductions based on people’s outward behaviour?

Behaviourists say the latter.

We can all agree that there are behavioural implications of statements about mental events. If we say, “George hates travelling by tube” and yet notice that he appears to be full of glee as he makes the descent on to the Northern Line, clearly the statement is false or something remains to be said. He might, for example, be feigning joy in order to impress a friend with his positive attitude.

But these kind of statements are not merely about behaviour.

“Listening to that music made me think of a vast expanse of water…”; “I realised that Nietzsche’s moral views were the most radical I’d ever heard”; “She couldn’t believe her ears”. It is stretching a point too far to try and explain these mental events solely in terms of people’s actions.

Something is going on internally. But where? We can search and we won’t find that vast expanse of water or the realisation about Nietzsche. What we find are obviously neurons and electrical signals. A die-hard materialist would say that each mental event maps exactly on to a physical configuration of the brain, and is nothing other than that. They are analogous with the operation of software within a computer; we can talk successfully about people’s minds just as we can make coherent statements and predictions about the internal workings of a computer. This does not require specialist knowledge of, respectively, neurology or programming.

And yet there is still a mystery: irreducible first-hand experience, “raw feels” as it is sometimes called. For states of consciousness, there is such a thing as what it is like to have them. (See Thomas Nagel’s What it is like to be a bat.) Most people would say that this does not apply to computers. This is surely the most characteristic feature of human consciousness, without which we would be utterly different beings.

The problem is this. Given the radically subjective nature of consciousness, how can anything we say about people’s minds be true, false or reliable in any way? And if we are, by implication, only talking nonsense, how is it that for years all the "ill-informed" gossip, speculation and literature about behaviour, dispositions and character have generally been so good at interpreting and making predictions about the world? What explains the success of psychology and the social sciences?

This is a mystery beyond science.

REPLY TO PUSKAS: THE BOUNDARIES OF LOGIC

Who on earth still believes that rigorous, scientific thinking can be applied to religion, psychology, morality and aesthetics in the same way as it can be used to, for instance, predict the flight path of a missile?

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein thought, rightly in my opinion, that our well-defined concepts were too limited to operate properly in the non-concrete world. Nevertheless, he grudgingly admired our efforts to break out of the linguistic “cage” and further understand the world. I agree with him, but I think the silence he advocated is for philosophy students only.

Our deepest motivations as individuals, and the madness of crowds, are driven by deeply irrational forces. We embark upon most of our actions literally before we know what we are doing, that is, before the area of the brain to do with conscious decision-making registers any electrical activity. The times when we pause, ponder and weigh up alternatives are the exceptions.

This is unconscious behaviour. How do we understand it? Through speculative thought; poetry and other literature; and yes, even “pseudo-science”.

To dismiss discourse about the unconscious out of hand as woolly thinking just because it is difficult to talk about with our recently evolved and limited logic is to miss out on sharing with others what are vast, and probably the most interesting, areas of human experience.

In reply to Puskas's comment on www.lovetosaydada.blogspot.com, I would say that Jung's speculation about a collective unconscious should be taken in the same spirit as anyone might talk about, for instance, a politician's underlying motivations or a friend's erratic behaviour. It is more akin to criticising a novel than doing a bit of neuroscience.