No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Non-Personal Minds
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Abstract
Persons are creatures with a range of personal capacities. Most known to us are also people, though nothing in observation or biological theory demands that all and only people are persons, nor even that persons, any more than people, constitute a natural kind. My aim is to consider what non-personal minds are like. Darwin's Earthworms are sensitive, passionate and, in their degree, intelligent. They may even construct maps, embedded in the world they perceive around them, so as to be able to construct their tunnels. Other creatures may be able to perceive that world as also accessible to other minds, and structure it by locality and temporal relation, without having many personal qualities. Non-personal mind, on both modern materialist and Plotinian grounds, may be the more usual, and the less deluded, sort of mind.
- Type
- Papers
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2003
References
1 See ‘Is Humanity a Natural Kind?’ in T., Ingold, (ed.), What is an Animal? (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), pp. 17–34Google Scholar; reprinted in The Political Animal (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 40–58.
2 Wilson, E. O., On human nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 22f, after Murdock, G. P.Google ScholarPubMed.
3 Hull, D., Philosophy of biological science (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 79Google Scholar.
4 Eldridge, Niles, Reinventing Darwin: the Great Evolutionary Debate (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995), p. 11Google Scholar.
5 There is every reason in ethical principle: the welfare of such a hybrid would be poor, even if it could talk. It would indeed be hailed, in some quarters, as an ideal experimental subject or convenient slave, and treated with the contempt that we always feel for those we injure unforgivably. See Singer, P. & Cavalieri, P., (eds), The Great Ape Project: Equality beyond humanity (London: Fourth Estate, 1993)Google Scholar.
6 See Fairbairn, Gavin, ‘Complexity and the Value of Life’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 8, 1991, pp. 211–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Peter Carruthers has suggested that although creatures without language could imaginably be conscious, they don't need to be because ‘blindsighted’ people could—imaginably—function almost as well as sighted ones, and because drivers sometimes don't remember driving along a familiar route that—apparently—they navigated with their minds elsewhere (Language, Thought and Consciousness (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996), pp. 135ff)Google Scholar. His only argument that they are actually unconscious is that they have, he says, no way of thinking about their own experience (ibid., pp. 220ff). He neglects to mention that the distinction between sight and blindsight holds for monkeys too (some of the original research was conducted on a brain-damaged monkey), that drivers can manage familiar routes because they have driven them attentively before, that we don't need to be conscious that we are angry to be conscious of the things that anger us, and there are other ways of thinking about experience than the verbal. Oddly, he arbitrarily allows that human infants might be subjects of experience because they can discriminate between experiences, ‘and this would be enough for those experiences to be conscious ones, and to have a subjective feel’ (ibid., p. 222). Non-humans who perform identical discriminations he counts, conveniently, as zombies.
8 SeeNagel, Thomas, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)Google Scholar.
9 Thoreau, H. D., ‘Spring’, in Walden (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1995), pp. 206fGoogle Scholar: my thanks to Nancy Marple of Pittsburgh for this reference, located for a discussion on the email list sophia@liverpool.ac.uk.
10 Plotinus, Ennead I.8.15
11 I should add in passing that I do not myself believe that unity is an illusion or the self a fiction. The very recognition of intelligent order is only possible because it is unified in the perceiving mind, which is not built up out of pre-existent modules, but rather, often enough, broken down into them. But the story may still be an occasionally helpful one. See ‘Reason as Daimon’: C., Gill, (ed.), The Person and the Human Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 187–206Google Scholar; ‘How many Selves make me?’: D., Cockburn, (ed.), Human Beings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 213–33Google Scholar; ‘Minds, Memes and Rhetoric’, Inquiry 36, 1993, pp. 3–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Minds, Memes and Multiples’, Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 3, 1996, pp. 21–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Plotinus: Body and Mind’, Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, L., Gerson (ed.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 275–91Google Scholar.
12 Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time (London: Space Time Publications, 1988), p. 175Google Scholar. Hawking appears to assume that a knowledge of this ‘mind’ would explain why everything is as it is, though he also acknowledges that something might be needed to ‘breathe fire into the equations’ (ibid, p. 174). Plotinus was wiser: even the most accurate and elegant account of what there is cannot serve to explain the fact that it is. But that is another story.
13 Aristotle. Historia Animalium 570a16ff; see Beavis, Ian C.Insects and Other Invertebrates in Classical Antiquity (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1988), pp. 1–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 The only invertebrate animal to be protected is the common octopus, though there seems no very good reason why other octopuses and squids should not be protected too.
15 Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, 645a15ff.
16 Darwin, Charles, On Humus and the Earthworm (London: Faber & Faber, 1945; 1st published 1881), p. 33Google Scholar; see Crist, Eileen, ‘The inner life of earthworms: Darwin's argument and its implications’, Marc, Bekoff and Colin, Allen, (eds), The Cognitive Animal (MIT Press: Cambridge, forthcoming)Google Scholar. It was ‘common knowledge’ in Darwin's day that earthworms were simply pests. The truth is that the upper soil, almost everywhere, is ‘composed almost entirely of casts left behind by earthworm feeding’, Wolfe, David W.Tales from the Underground: a natural history of subterranean life (Cambridge Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 2001), p. 10Google Scholar.
17 Darwin op. cit., pp. 45–58.
18 ibid., p. 58.
19 ibid., p. 45 (though Darwin may momentarily have forgotten that ‘English’ worms had ancestors elsewhere).
20 ibid., p. 47.
21 ibid., p. 49.
22 See Rollin, Bernard, The Unheeded Cry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989Google Scholar).
23 Darwin op. cit., p. 28.
24 Cited in Graff, O., ‘Darwin on Earthworms—the Contemporary Background and What Critics Thought’: Satchell, J. E., (ed.), Earthworm Ecology: From Darwin to Vermiculture (London: Chapman & Hall, 1983), p. 11Google Scholar.
25 Smith, Jane A., ‘A Question of Pain in Invertebrates’: ILAR News Vol 33 (1–2), 1991, pp. 25–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, citing Alumets, J., Hakanson, R., Sundler, F., and Thorell, J.. 1979. Neural localisation of immunoreactive enkephalin and βendorphin in the earthworm. Nature 279, 805–806CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Gesser, B. P. and Larsson, L. I., 1986. Enkephalins may act as sensory transmitters in earthworms. Cell Tissue Res. 246, 33–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar. My thanks to Jane Smith for these references.
26 See Turner, J. Scott, The Extended Organism: the physiology of animalbuilt structures (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), especially pp. 99–119Google Scholar.
27 Uexkuell, Jacob von, Theoretical Biology, tr. Mackinnon, D. L. (London: Kegan Paul, 1926)Google Scholar; see also von Uexkuell, , ‘A stroll through the worlds of animals and men’ in Schiller, C. H., (ed.), Instinctive Behaviour (New York: International University Press, 1957), 5–80.Google Scholar
28 Schutz, M., Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, M., Natanson (ed.), (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1971), pp. 205–59Google Scholar.
29 Washburn, A. L., The Animal Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1917, 2nd edition), pp. 3ff.Google Scholar
30 Whitman, W., ‘Song of Myself’ §32: The Portable Walt Whitman, Mark, van Doren (ed.), (New York: Viking Press, 1945), pp. 98fGoogle Scholar.
31 Jaynes, J., The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the BiCameral Mind (Boston: Houghton-Miffin, 1976), p. 6Google Scholar. Compare Rorty's assertion that to say that a pig is in pain is only to include it, for political purposes, within our moral universe: Rorty, R.Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 190Google Scholar.
32 Montaigne, M., Collected Essays, tr. Florio, J. (London 1892; 1st published 1603), II.12, p. 144fGoogle Scholar. See also my ‘Understanding Animals’, in Michael, Tobias & Mattelon, Kate Solisti, (eds.) Kinship with the Animals (Hillsborough, Oregon:, Beyond Words Publishing, 1998), pp. 99–111.Google Scholar
33 Chesterton, G. K. ‘A defence of humility’, in The Defendant (London: Dent, 1922), pp. 134Google Scholar; I owe the reference to Simon Conway Morris.
34 http://www.earthfoot.org.backyard/earthwrm.html/: annelids are at the median point of ‘complexity’, though ‘earthworms themselves are very special because they are super-streamlined, stripped-down, no-nonsense, fairly highly evolved critters’.
35 Whatever is meant by ‘complex’: the apparent growth of complexity during evolutionary time suggests, to some, that evolution has a ‘direction’, and that—as the catholic Darwinist Denys Cochin remarked—Darwin may offer us monkeys for ancestors, but at least promises that we will not have them for children, L'Evolution et la vie (Paris 1886), pp. 269f, cited by Paul, Harry W.The Edge of Contingency: French Catholic Reaction to scientific change from Darwin to Duhem (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1979), p. 67Google Scholar. Darwin really promised nothing of the sort, and any observed increase in complexity over time may be no more than an effect of random variation when there is a minimum possible level of complexity: see Gould, Stephen JayLife's Grandeur (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), pp. 167–216Google Scholar.
36 Hebb, D. O., Textbook of Psychology (Philadelphia: W B Saunders, 1972; 3rd edition), p. 202Google Scholar.
37 Plutchik, R., Emotion: A Psychoevolutionary Synthesis (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 107Google Scholar.
38 Lorenz, K. Z., The Foundations of Ethology (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1981), p. 90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39 I refer to the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen ‘entanglements’ whereby particles once connected remain weirdly responsive to each other when widely separated.
40 Plutchik op. cit., p. 105.
41 First announced by Rebecca Quiring et al., ‘Homology of the Eyeless Gene of Drosophila to the Small Eye in Mice and the Aniridia in Humans’: Science 265.1994, pp. 785–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar: the point is that genomes often contain unrealised potentials which can, somehow or other, be turned on. My thanks to Simon Conway Morris for information about Pax-6.
42 Yeats, W. B.Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 411CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
43 http://www.earthfoot.org/backyard/earthworm.html/ op. cit. This may rest on the sort of confusion that leads to suggestions that we really see things upside down, or that insects see multiple copies of things through faceted eyes. The pattern of light on light-sensitive tissue is not the same as the experienced image.
44 Speigelberg, H., Phenomenology in Psychology and Psychiatry (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern Universities Press, 1972), p. 290Google Scholar.
45 James, William, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Macmillan, 1890), vol. l, pp. 288f.Google Scholar
46 Canovan, M., Hannah Arendt: a reconsideration of her political thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 106CrossRefGoogle Scholar after Arendt, H., The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 134Google Scholar.
47 Arendt, ibid, p. 137; cited by Canovan, op. cit., p. 107.
48 Naturism, in its origins, is more than a mere preference for social nakedness: it is the attempt, precisely, to strip off cultural distinctions, to be an animal amongst animals.
49 Chesterton, G. K., The Everlasting Man (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1925), p. 59Google Scholar. I here acknowledge my debt to R. J. Gill of Keele University, whose doctoral thesis on Chesterton and Arendt drew my attention to the correspondences between these two.
50 Arendt, H., ‘Philosophy and Politics’ J., Kohn (ed.), Social Research 57/1, 1990, pp. 80, 87Google Scholar: cited by Canovan, op. cit., p. 113.
51 Plotinus, Ennead VI.7.15, 26ff. Compare Hopkins: ‘there is an infinity of possible strains of action and choice for each possible self in [the infinity of possible] worlds and the sum of these strains would be also like a pomegranate in the round, which God sees whole but of which we see at best only one cleave [or exposed face]. Rather we see the world as one cleave and the life of each person as one vein or strain of colour in it’: Hopkins, G. M., Sermons and Other Devotional Writings, C., Devlin (ed.), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 151Google Scholar.
52 Lamberton, R., Homer the Theologian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 94Google Scholar.
53 Clarke, Michael, ‘Gods and Mountains in Greek Myth and Poetry’ in Lloyd, Alan B., (ed.), What is a God?: studies in the nature of Greek Divinity (London/Swansea: Duckworth/Classical Press of Wales, 1997), pp. 65–80Google Scholar.
54 Canovan, op. cit., p. 111, after Arendt, Human Condition op. cit., p. 7. I doubt if sheep-farmers agree.
55 von Wittgenstein, L., Notebooks: 1914–1916 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961): 20 10 1916Google Scholar.
57 Strictly, ‘invertebrates’ is a term as useless as ‘non-molluscs’: vertebrates constitute one phylum out of many, and are special to us only because we are vertebrates. In other possible histories, some other phylum grew the kind of minds we have; or at any rate, we have no good reason to doubt it (pace Gould, Stephen Jay, Wonderful Life (New York: Norton, 1990)Google Scholar; cf. ‘Does the Burgess Shale have Moral Implications?’ Inquiry 36 1993, 357–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Morris, Simon Conway, The Crucible of Creation: the Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals (Oxford: OUP, 1998))Google Scholar.
58 Lucretius, , De Rerum Natura 5. 1040ff, in Long, A. & Sedley, D.The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 19B: I, pp. 97fGoogle Scholar; see ‘The Evolution of Language: Truth and Lies’: Philosophy 70 2000, pp. 401–21.Google Scholar
59 Searle, J. R., Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p.5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
60 de Waal, F., Good Natured: the origins of right and wrong in humans and other animals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 215Google Scholar.
61 This is not to say that they aren't personal: similar experiments catch out human infants and people classed as autistic.
62 See Allen, Colin & Bekoff, Marc, Species of Mind: The Philosophy and Biology of Cognitive Ethology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 148–51Google Scholar.
63 Weil, Simone, Notebooks, tr. A., Wills (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), vol. 1, p. 241Google Scholar.