What should we count as part of the mind?

[This is an essay I put together for a philosophy of mind class. It’s probably not a good philosophy essay, but it’s still a philosophy essay - you’ve been warned. It’s sort of esoteric, but I kind of like it. This was written at the end of our first (of three) units, which was about identifying what exactly the mind is, what it would mean to have one, and so on. We were given a specific structure to follow: first section describe the author’s views, second section give your criticisms, and third section try to modify the author’s idea to be immune to your criticism. I’ve kept the same format because the transition between the seconds is just impossible to smooth out.

The topic I was responding to was “the mark of the mental” - trying to identify what belongs in the mind, and what doesn’t. Descartian dualists like this question because they want to know what’s part of the mind, and what’s just part of the physical body. But it’s also something that would allow us to identify when a creature has a mind. If we decide that expressing sadness is only possible with real cognition, and a computer program expresses something we’d call sadness - we have to say that computer is conscious.

Katalin Farkas proposed that the only things that are part of the mind are those we can introspect on (and that no one else can introspect on). So your belief that this essay is going to be boring is a mental phenomenon, because no one else can introspect on that. But can you introspect without verbal thought? Can bees introspect? You’ll see what I have to say about that in section two.]

Part 1 - Katalin Farkas and the Mark of the Mental

        In The Subject’s Point of View, Katalin Farkas sets out to propose a solution to the problem of the mark of the mental – one unifying feature for all mental phenomena. Her answer relies on the special access introspection grants us to our mental phenomena. In short, the things that we can know through introspection (and that no one else can know about us through introspection) comprise the contents of our minds. Farkas extends this to include whole categories, rather than individual instances of them – for example, all beliefs are mental. This includes beliefs we may not consciously be able to reflect on, or beliefs held by beings unable to introspect (such as animals). Following this train of thought, Farkas proposes that anything identified as a mental feature of human minds can be used to identify non-human minds – even those with no powers of introspection.

        Farkas explicitly distances herself from claims that introspection is infallible (Farkas, 24), and accepts so-called standing states as part of the mind because they are accessible to introspection (Farkas, 43-44). The fact that someone might receive incorrect or incomplete knowledge of their mind, in theory, has no effect on her proposal. It’s intended as a tool for identifying things that are mental, special and separate in some way from things that are “merely bodily” (Farkas, 35). Its role as an epistemic tool for acquiring knowledge is an entirely separate issue, so the difficulties present for introspective knowledge are largely irrelevant to the mark of the mental.

        Farkas also acknowledges a necessarily human perspective on our philosophy of the mind. However, her view is that once we have identified which sorts of things are mental in humans, we can look for them in other creatures to determine whether they have a mind (Farkas, 44). This mind may be lesser in some way than our own minds, but provided it exhibits some of the things we discover through introspection, it qualifies as a mind. How we might investigate these mental processes in creatures incapable of introspection, or at least incapable of communicating with human language, is up for debate.

        The mark of the mental is intended to capture a “common sense” conception of the mind (Crane, 2), which would generally extend to family pets and other animals. We’re likely to say that our pets desire certain things, or have basic sorts of beliefs; and so Farkas provides a mark of the mental that accommodates these intuitive judgements on what has a mind, and what does not. This extends the possession of a mind to creatures with weaker abilities than those Farkas possesses herself. However, one thing that Farkas fails to consider is minds that have greater abilities than her own – some of the things that are a part of their minds may be entirely outside what we can introspect. This is the objection I intend to develop in the next section.

Part 2 - Criticisms of Farkas

        One doesn’t have to look far for examples of minds with abilities outside those considered by Farkas. Animals may have mental capabilities completely foreign to the human mind – one example is spatial memory in honeybees, an ability which allows them to solve the infamously difficult “travelling salesman problem” (Lihoreau, Chittka, & Raine, 2010). Even closer to home, autism advocate Temple Grandin frequently speaks about the ways in which the autistic mind differs from the “neurotypical” mind, such as their ability to think visually rather than verbally (Grandin, 2010). Bees, given the complexity of their behaviour, surely have some sort of mind. And autistic people, unquestionably, have minds. Yet the character of these minds, the nature of their thoughts and desires, even the nature of their introspection, is likely so different as to require a wholly separate vocabulary. The systems developed in philosophy of mind are, by and large, developed by what Grandin calls “verbal minds.” Farkas proposes that introspection should serve as the mark of the mental for all minds, without considering different types of minds – all she considers is weaker minds of the same sort the “average” human has.

        Farkas requires that for something to be a mental feature, it must be “available to conscious acts of reflection” (Farkas, 44). The way that Farkas characterizes reflection, however, has more bias than just the anthropocentric one she admits. Introspection in a verbal human mind could be entirely different from the introspection of an imagistic mind. An imagistic mind may not even be capable of introspecting things that have no visual component, which comprises a large portion of what Farkas considers as part of the “mental realm”, such as beliefs and attitudes (Farkas, 22). Considering non-verbal variants of “the mental realm” raises the criteria for a single, unifying mark of the mental. Not only could some mental features unique to imagistic minds be “unconscious”, as Farkas considers in sections 2.2 and 2.3, but fundamentally inaccessible by introspection. The default definition of introspection relies on linguistic terms. Non-verbal mental features would escape a classification of “mental” which relies on this definition.

Part 3 - Saving Farkas?

        A reply to this objection that preserves introspection as the mark of the mental is difficult, as it deals directly with the limits of the term “introspection.” If introspection can’t be used to access the entire possible scope of the mental realm, then it couldn’t serve as the mark of the mental. If the term “introspection” can be extended to include the thought processes of non-verbal minds, then it would still serve as an appropriate mark of the mental. The number of ways in which it would have to be extended appears limitless, however – there are likely more possible sorts of minds than we can even imagine.

        Not only that, but as someone with a distinctly verbal mind, I’m likely unqualified to speculate on the nature of imagistic minds. Not to mention minds that think in terms of space-time, or scents and hormones, or subtle interactions of taste and touch, or any number of things I can’t even begin to conceive. However, the general principle of extending the term “introspection” remains the same: Consider what is meant by verbal introspection, and then look for a way to define it in a new modality. The challenge of this defence is not only conceptualizing a different sort of mind, but how to properly explain and illustrate it for others. We may find, in the end, that we’ve come so far from the original meaning of “introspect” that a whole new word is required, which could then safely serve as the mark of the mental in the system Farkas proposes.

Works cited

Crane, Tim. (2010). Elements of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Farkas, Katalin. (2008). Subject’s Point of View, The. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 24 October 2011, from http://lib.myilibrary.com.proxy.library.carleton.ca?ID=182555

Grandin, T. (2010, February). Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds [Video file]. Retrieved from: http://www.ted.com/talks/temple_grandin_the_world_needs_all_kinds_of_minds.html

Lihoreau, M., Chittka, L., & Raine, N. E. (2010). Travel Optimization by Foraging Bumblebees through Readjustments of Traplines after Discovery of New Feeding Locations. The American Naturalist , 176 (6), 744-757.