The Problem of Other Minds

[@KaneB]

Behaviourism: kzbin.info/www/bejne/oqjEpWyQe9V7hLc Challenges to folk psychology: kzbin.info/www/bejne/maKyloGcm8qeack On inference to the best explanation: kzbin.info/www/bejne/Z5CrnpesqJyXo7c kzbin.info/www/bejne/d3K3d5eCg8ikqLs kzbin.info/www/bejne/eoqTXqeIqpWgqZI

[@Altitudes]

I have enough problems with my own mind before I start worrying about anyone else's.

[@EthanNoble]

Big facts

[@WorldviewDesignChannel]

Good work. It takes intellectual strength to present this problem w/o trying to patch it with an easy solution.

[@gleon1602]

This is my favorite problem in philosophy

[@whycantiremainanonymous8091]

10:44: You can, however, infer the normative statement that all people *should* be fans of Frank Zappa. I'm not sure the inference is valid, but the conclusion is obviously true 😃

[@zackpumpkinhead8882]

I am indeed a fan of Frank Zappa

[@attackdog6824]

Philosophy a level mock tomorrow, thanks for the upload

[@KaneB]

good luck dawg

[@AntonioV42]

The problem of other minds is what convinced me to embrace epistemic voluntarism. I want to view other people as having conscious experiences (because if they didn't life would feel utterly miserable), so in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary, I am licensed to hold that belief.

[@dreamer1870]

I have an argument for other minds. The critical step is that besides myself, I can know that there has been at least one more conscious human being: otherwise the concept of phenomenal consciousness would not have been conceived and expressed. AIs may produce discourse about phenomenal consciousness but they have picked it from other discussions. Human organisms evolved naturally in a milieu where there was no prior discourse, and therefore no human organism without phenomenal consciousness could have conceived of phenomenal consciousness and have expressed the idea. Consequently, the very existence of the concept proves that sometime in the past there has been at least one human organism with phenomenal consciousness. With that given, supposing that all or at least most humans are phenomenally conscious is a simpler hypothesis than the alternative hypothesis that only two humans have been phenomenally conscious.

[@rv706]

They could've been philosophical zombies all along.

[@Danicker]

But how do you know the word they use to describe consciousness is the same as the feeling you internally have? Maybe there is some profound difference between your understanding of consciousness and others that is lost because our language cannot adequately describe it

[@gugugugugu4514]

Very nice video! Great job!

[@ttominable]

Me, someone who doesn’t know what the problem with other mind is: “The problem is they are dumb”

[@maxmax9050]

Will you ever do or have you done a video on the *conceptual* problem of other Minds? Whereas the epistemic problem of other Minds questions whether or not we can have knowledge of other Minds, the conceptual problem of other Minds asks whether or not the idea of other Minds itself even makes sense.

[@ishtaraletheia9804]

I feel like any examples used should take into account the existence of fMRI, since that - at least in theory - removes the behavioural ambiguity: you can distinguish the signs love and misery empirically, even if the outward signs are suppressed. That said, I know that the mind and the brain are their own can of worms.

[@marwatahssin2288]

I love philosophy very much, but my English is weak. I am trying to learn it. One of the philosophers I love is the Russian philosopher fiodor dostoïevski

[@zackpumpkinhead8882]

It is 3:09 a.m. and there is no conceivable evidence that I am not the sole consciousness and completely alone in the universe.

[@quippits3201]

Nuh uh, *I'm* the sole consciousness in the universe. *You're* the philosophical zombie.

[@zackpumpkinhead8882]

@@quippits3201 loooooser

[@Ffkslawlnkn]

Questions like 'do others really feel pain/think/have emotions' only make sense if you presuppose that those words refer to inner objects that only oneself really has access to. But that's not how those words work. The entire concept of eg the inner object 'pain' is incoherent. Which sense organ do I feel it with? How can it be that being wrong about being in pain is logically impossible?

[@Opposite271]

You can not be wrong about being in pain because a experience is pain if you categorize it as pain. It is just a arbitrary category depending only on your arbitrary judgment. But to be fair other people may also be just sensory patterns that you categorize as „other people“. At least if you want to get ride of the external world this would be a option. When it comes to the sense organ question I will just quote something I just found: „First, there are specific pain receptors. These are nerve endings, present in most body tissues, that only respond to damaging or potentially damaging stimuli.“

[@Ffkslawlnkn]

@@Opposite271 If the word pain was just whatever I arbitrarily called pain, then the word pain wouldn't have any meaning. That's of course not the case. The word pain has meaning, which means that there are correct and incorrect applications. If I thought that pain was some sort of inner object that I discover by introspection, it would seem very weird to me that being mistaken is logically impossible. The answer to this riddle is that pain doesn't refer to an inner object and saying that I am in pain is no description. Pain-receptors allow you to feel the knife that cuts you. It doesn't allow you to feel the inner object 'pain', just as your eyes allow you to see your garden, but not the inner picture in your mind (if you believe that there is such a thing). I can be wrong in thinking that I cut myself with a knife (I might be on drugs), but I cannot be wrong about feeling a cutting pain.

[@Everywhere4]

@@Ffkslawlnkn Since I am for some reason not anymore able to comment with my original account I will just use this one. Thanks youtube. -I am sorry but it is not obvious to me that pain is meaningless if it is whatever I arbitrarily called pain. -I may have some regularities in my mind which automatically categorize an experience as pain depending on the quality of the experience. But it would still be judgment dependent. -I can see the garden and not the inner picture in my mind because the inner picture is a experience itself and not a external thing that I experience. It is not the cause of my experience. -Otherwise I would need to claim that there is some kind of homunculus inside my mind with a sense experience of my sense experience. -But this begs the question. Is any of my experience a experience of something? Or is my mind causally closed?

[@whycantiremainanonymous8091]

The claim made by Wittgenstein (I don't think he'd welcome the label of "behaviourism", frankly) is immune to the objection you are raising. The claim is not that I know about my own pain from observing my behaviours. The claim is that we apply the word "pain" based on people's behaviours. I feel *something* when I experience pain, but I wouldn't be referring to it as "pain" if my first-person experiences were all I have to go by. I learned to call this "pain" using publically available information. It's indeed perfectly common for people to have feelings and sensations they don't have a clear name for. For instance, I sometimes have sensations that I'm not sure if I should refer to as headache or as nausea or both. That is, by the way, also why behaviourism in this sense doesn't quite solve the problem of other minds, if you restate it as the problem of other people's first-person experiences.

[@KaneB]

I hate that aristocrat prick so I don't care what he would welcome. Though I suppose I should have made it more clear that I wasn't interested in interpreting Wittgenstein, but rather just presenting some of the arguments that have traditionally been taken to support behaviourism. >> The claim is not that I know about my own pain from observing my behaviours That's not the explicit claim; the worry is that this is what the claim is going to entail. I'm not seeing how, per Wittgenstein's argument, or at least how the argument has often been interpreted, you are avoiding this. Yes, it's perfectly natural to say that I feel something when I experience pain, but the "something" is not the pain, indeed, it need not literally be a thing at all. If your point is that, on Wittgenstein's view, pain actually is a private, first-person experience, then that would be immune to the objection but it's also not the view I was talking about (and as you note, it isn't a solution to the problem of other minds).

[@Ffkslawlnkn]

This is not what wittgenstein is getting at. He doesn't say that we ascribe pain to others BASED ON their behaviour, but that saying 'x is in pain' really only means that x behaves in a certain way, or would behave in a certain way if this or that happened. So the answer to 'do others feel pain' is: yes, obviously. People scream out in pain, take painkillers, go to their gp if their pain doesn't go away etc.

[@whycantiremainanonymous8091]

@@KaneB What I wrote was that the challenge in the beetle in the box argument was about language, not experience. I don't need other people and their behaviours to sense something when being pinched. I do need them to learn to call that something "pain". So, yes, I can be pretty sure other people have pains. I have no idea how, if at all, those pains subjectively feel to them. That's something that goes beyond the reach of language. This argument may be overly rigid (I often find experiencing situations myself helps me better understand how other people react in similar situations, or at least helps me be more charitable in my judgement of them. So, at least on that level, reasoning by analogy to myself, as unscientific as it is, ends up being a useful exercise.

[@KaneB]

​@@whycantiremainanonymous8091 >> So, yes, I can be pretty sure other people have pains How does this step work though? What's the reason for thinking that other people have the "something" that you call "pain", or have anything at all beyond the behaviours? Wittgenstein's point, as I understand it and as it has been interpreted by many people with behaviourist inclinations, is that this question doesn't even make sense. "Pain" doesn't (can't) refer to some private thing that I feel, that lies behind my behaviour. Maybe this is a misunderstanding of Wittgenstein, though I'm not sure how this is different to your interpretation. You say: I can know that other people have pains, but I have no idea how, if at all, those pains subjectively feel to them. With that in mind, I can think of two natural ways to interpret how the term "pain" is being used: (1) It refers directly to patterns of behaviour. (2) It refers to whatever subjective feelings are associated with that behaviour, where these could be anything at all. The first option is clearly just behaviourism; on the second option, mental terms are correctly applied on the basis of behaviour and it doesn't make any difference what's going on inside. Either way, the question of what reason there is for thinking that other people have pains doesn't make sense -- and it doesn't make sense because, provided the right patterns of behaviour are occurring, it will be true that those people have pains.

[@Ffkslawlnkn]

​@@whycantiremainanonymous8091 This is not what wittgenstein meant. You don't need other people to come up with meaningful words for sensations. It's just that you cannot give meaning to a word by focusing on your sensations, naming it, and then comparing sensations in the future with your memory of the original sensation. That wouldn't constitute a rule for this name, because you wouldn't have a criterion. The point of wittgensteins arguments is not that you can know that others have those inner objects called pain, but rather that it is obvious that people have pains - because pain is a behaviour that can often be observed, not an inner objects.

[@Opposite271]

We could go a step further. Other people do not process any information, instead they are just sensory patterns that I interpret as other people.

[@italogiardina8183]

A social verification as causal inference of a individual mind relative to collectivist theory of mind as social construct via linguistic symbolism probabilistic reasoning obviously misses individual qualitative conscious experience, though not from a statistical collectivist theory of mind that would include AI as a repository of the extended silicon based socially constructed mind. The problem of silicon minds which is a contemporary issue is the AI construct vaguely correlates to organic or a primosidalist theory of mind of early modernist thought. There is both food in my cupboard and not food in my cupboard according to my belief there is finance correlated to my card to buy food that could be put in my cupboard. Shall donate.

[@InventiveHarvest]

In order to claim that mental states is not the best explanation, one must have another explanation. What other mechanism is used? How does it work? With AI we can look at the programming. With mental states we can see a clear correlation between reported mental states, brain activity, and behavior. We can see that brain activity changes over time, thus it must be experiencing input data.

[@Oskar1000]

Depends on what you mean by experiencing

[@InventiveHarvest]

@@Oskar1000 the act or process of directly perceiving events or reality

[@Oskar1000]

@@InventiveHarvest It must be directly percieving reality? I think it does follow that data must flow into the system in such a way as to make the reactions intelligble. I don't see how it follows that there be directness.

[@InventiveHarvest]

@@Oskar1000 yes, you have eyes and other sensory organs that the data must go through. Quit being obstinate.

[@Oskar1000]

@@InventiveHarvest I agree with that of course. The thing about directness. Ig you use that term as it is being used in the consiousness literature I disagree with that.

[@tylerhulsey982]

So I guess everyone else *has* a mind after all!

[@helveticaneptune537]

Would you mind if i had a mind?

[@DingaLingu]

I want to be inside their minds,

[@raythink]

So, does animal have mind？Does plants have minds？To what point a living organism does not have a mind？Does a person in comma have mind？ The word "mind" is so loosely used in philosophy.

[@pecfexfextus]

other people have minds and i find that problematic

[@ludovico7668]

first comment

[@KaneB]

congrats lol