Is the mind anything distinct from the body?

Here's another, perhaps more precise, way of asking the question:

Are mental states (thoughts, beliefs, desires, sensations, fears) states of the brain or are mental states distinct from brain states?

Please provide support for your claims. I would like to hear from people who hold different views about this, so kindly support your view or any claims you make with reasons so that those who don't hold your view can see where you are coming from and why you think what you think.

Thank you in advance.

As far as I know, no mind has ever been observed distinct from a body.

Yes, mental states are states of the brain which is itself "informed" by the body through the body's senses, chemistry, hormones, etc.

I don't know how to prove those statements other than to say they seem self-evident to me.

You might be interested to know that medical doctors and scientists are currently running experiments to test the verification of out of body experiences (OBE)s- when the mind and body would be said to have disengaged.

They place random pictures in hospital crash rooms on high selves facing upward- unseen to occupants of the room, unless they have an out of body experience and float upward to observed their resuscitation from afar. If somebody in that room claims to have experienced an OBE they can test them on what the picture was. If somebody described it right it would support the claim.

In an ideal world they would get laptops cycling random images to ensure no foul play, but this would cause a cost that most funding bodies would not pay for such an experiment.

They have not found anything yet, but I'm sure we would all here if they did.

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Originally Posted by Athos

As far as I know, no mind has ever been observed distinct from a body.

Yes, mental states are states of the brain which is itself "informed" by the body through the body's senses, chemistry, hormones, etc.

I don't know how to prove those statements other than to say they seem self-evident to me.

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You say it seems self-evident to you. Perhaps I can try to draw you out a bit with some questions.

1. Physical states and events obey physical laws. If mental states just are physical states (of the brain), that might seem to jeopardize the freedom that we often take to characterize our mental life. Do you find the prospect that your thoughts and desires and feelings (etc.) are governed by physical laws unpalatable? Do you think that this imperils free will, since not only your beliefs and desires, but your choices as well would appear to be governed not by your consciousness or your will but by purely physical factors governed by physical laws?

2. If the brain state you are in when you entertain the belief that 2+2=4 is, well, let's just call it N-4, does that mean that a person whose brain is not in N-4 does not hold the belief that 2+2=4?

3. We are capable of an infinite number of mental states. And yet the brain is finite, so it isn't capable of being in an infinite number of states. Do you see this as posing a difficulty for your view?

4. Could an organism with a radically different brain from ours be said to have mental states? What about an organism with no brain?

I intend these follow-up questions only to provide a way of unpacking the seeming self-evidence of the view that mental states just are states of the brain. It would be great to hear your thoughts about any or all of them. Then we can see where things go from there.

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Originally Posted by templelane

You might be interested to know that medical doctors and scientists are currently running experiments to test the verification of out of body experiences (OBE)s- when the mind and body would be said to have disengaged.

They place random pictures in hospital crash rooms on high selves facing upward- unseen to occupants of the room, unless they have an out of body experience and float upward to observed their resuscitation from afar. If somebody in that room claims to have experienced an OBE they can test them on what the picture was. If somebody described it right it would support the claim.

In an ideal world they would get laptops cycling random images to ensure no foul play, but this would cause a cost that most funding bodies would not pay for such an experiment.

They have not found anything yet, but I'm sure we would all here if they did.

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Yes, I am interested to learn of this. I have always found the idea of an out of body experience to be rather dubious, but I'd love to hear what their findings are. Do you have any information about these experiments (where they're being conducted, etc.)? It would be nice to get ahold of some more of the details.

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Originally Posted by Akoue

You say it seems self-evident to you. Perhaps I can try to draw you out a bit with some questions.

1. Physical states and events obey physical laws. If mental states just are physical states (of the brain), that might seem to jeopardize the freedom that we often take to characterize our mental life. Do you find the prospect that your thoughts and desires and feelings (etc.) are governed by physical laws unpalatable? Do you think that this imperils free will, since not only your beliefs and desires, but your choices as well would appear to be governed not by your consciousness or your will but by purely physical factors governed by physical laws?

2. If the brain state you are in when you entertain the belief that 2+2=4 is, well, let's just call it N-4, does that mean that a person whose brain is not in N-4 does not hold the belief that 2+2=4?

3. We are capable of an infinite number of mental states. And yet the brain is finite, so it isn't capable of being in an infinite number of states. Do you see this as posing a difficulty for your view?

4. Could an organism with a radically different brain from ours be said to have mental states? What about an organism with no brain?

I intend these follow-up questions only to provide a way of unpacking the seeming self-evidence of the view that mental states just are states of the brain. It would be great to hear your thoughts about any or all of them. Then we can see where things go from there.

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1. I think you're making a lot of assumptions here. You seem to be suggesting that physical states are a simple either/or proposition. I suspect they're enormously more complex than that. So complex, in fact, that freedom is not affected (unless we follow the proposition to its nth degree which, in any case, would have an infinitesimal effect on ordinary existence - something like the gravity of a baseball affecting the sun). No, I don't think this affects free will in any significant sense (although a case could be made for, say, a toothache directing all my energies to see a dentist even though I would prefer to do something else). Since consciousness itself is a function of the brain, and governed by physical laws, then, yes, free will is "imperiled" but, as stated above, in a very limited way. But the real problem I see with what you've written is the notion that physical laws are somehow deterministic in an absolute sense. This does not seem to be the case on the quantum level.

2. Isn't this a tautology? It is true that someone who does not believe what A believes - does not believe what A believes.

3. Who or what is the "we" in this sentence? Humans with a mind/brain? Then, in my view, you are saying that the brain is capable of infinite states while at the same time you are saying the brain is capable only of finite states. I think you first have to establish that whatever you mean by "we" exists separately from consciousness/mind/brain. I don't think you've done that.

4. If by organism you mean something living, then I think any organism is capable of a mental state broadly defined. I don't know how else a bacterium, say, would "know" how to eat and reproduce. Something is directing it to purposeful action. That something is a state that is more than its constituent parts and yet still a part of the whole.


"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy". Like Hamlet, I think these things are not yet absolutely knowable - if ever they will be. But there you have my first salvo at the thing. I will be interested in reading whatever response you may have, and, who knows, you may even convince me.

Here you go, I read it in new scientist but here is a bbc report on the study
BBC NEWS | Health | Study into near-death experiences

I can't say I think they'll find anything though...

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Is the mind anything distinct from the body?

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Yes. But not as a separate entity.

The mind is distinct from the body in the way that the behavior of a crowd is distinct from the behavior of individuals. You can see this effect when looking at traffic patterns, flocks of birds, and groups of cells. To me the mind is just a word for higher order function of the brain, an emergent property. So in a sense it is distinct. It does not reside in individual neurons, but in the interactions among all of the neurons.

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Are mental states (thoughts, beliefs, desires, sensations, fears) states of the brain or are mental states distinct from brain states?

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This doesn't seem like a precise question to me. Or maybe it just seems like a wrong question. Or maybe I'm not understanding it.

First of all, mental states are not purely the result of brain states. The mind, in my opinion, is a product of the processes of the whole body. To give a single example, hormones, which affect behavior, are produced all over the body.

Second, there is not a one-to-one correspondence between brain states and mental states, unless you define the brain state very narrowly--meaning that any given brain state is completely unique. (In that case, a person could argue that any mental state linked to that completely unique brain state (unique in both time and space) is itself unique -- by definition. I don't think that's a very interesting proposition, since it has no general usefulness.) I think multiple brain states can almost certainly produce a standard mental state such as fear. Otherwise unique individuals--people with different genes and experiences--would not be able to share their mental states so easily.

There's a word for multiple ground states leading to a standard outcome, which is canalization. It's used in developmental biology, but I am going to introduce it hear since it conveys my meaning. Maybe philosophy has another word already.

To address Akoue's four points.

First, I agree with Athos' response to question 1.
Not sure about 2. I found question #2 hard to understand.
I do not understand Athos's answer to #3.
I disagree that a bacterium has a mind. I think of a mind as a product of neural activity, so I may have an excessively narrow view of what mind is. If you both mean apparent intent, as perceived by others, that would broaden the definition considerably. I think we need to nail this down.

1. The matter of freedom of will is a non issue for me. Whatever free will I have is not going to change as a result of this discussion. Whatever free will I have, I am content with as it is. It cannot change from what it is. So if you decide as a result of this discussion that the mind having a physical basis means that there is no such thing as free will as you define free will, then that's fine with me. I feel this argument is defective. It's nearly a threat. Like this: "The mind CAN'T have a physical basis or You won't have free will, and you wouldn't like that would you?"

But it's an empty threat. Nothing is going to change for me except a series of theological and philosophical arguments with which I am mostly unfamiliar. I'm still going to be able to go the store and decide whether to buy veal (no).

I do not think you mean it as a threat yourself. But I think you have accepted the unreasonable ground rules that produced this standard argument.

2. It means that the person in brain state N = 4 may be in 1 + 3 = 4 or 0 + 4 = 4. You cannot predict absolute brain state backwards from superficial classifications of mental state. But if you define mental states so narrowly that they only refer to a single individual brain state at a single moment in time, there is no usefulness to the discussion, I think. Science deals with general principles. So I would tend to group mental states in general categories based on whether the differences do or do not affect behavior. If the differences in mental state do not produce different behavior, it is all essentially the same mental state for my purposes.

3.

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We are capable of an infinite number of mental states.

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We are capable of finer and finer distinctions but we are certainly not capable of an infinite number of mental states in any other sense. You are not capable of assuming the exact mental state of me or an octopus or an eocene fish. So you are not in fact capable of an infiinite number of mental states. I would say our mental states are quite limited--especially if you set aside abnormal ones that we call insanity. So, no, this assertion poses no difficulty for my view.

4. Yes. I think (obviously) that other organisms have mental states. I do not think that an organism with no brain can be said to have a mental state in any usual sense of the phrase. I would not attribute a mental state to a bacterium or to an amoeba. I think a flatworm probably has a mental state roughly comparable to my Roomba.

Hello A:

I LOVE this stuff. I just wish I was smart enough to add to the conversation.

I do have a couple questions, though. If the mind is really just the brain and/or body at work, that would mean even non sentient beings have minds.

Does it mean that? I thought a mind was a product of intelligence.

Is a non sentient mind different than a sentient one? Does having a mind indicate at least a modicum of intelligence? Or is the mind only the property of man?

I hope these questions are relevant. I don't want to head the thread off in a different direction. But, as I read, these questions came up for me, and I know you guys can explain it to me.

excon

Welcome!

I think it would depend on what "sentient" means.
I hear people use it in all different ways.

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Originally Posted by asking

I think it would depend on what "sentient" means.
I hear people use it in all different ways.

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Hello asking:

I didn't consider that it meant different things. Without looking it up, I always thought it meant the ability to contemplate one's own existence.

That means my cat doesn't know she's going to die - or does she?

excon

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Originally Posted by excon

Hello asking:


That means my cat doesn't know she's going to die - or does she?

excon

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Maybe she does,isn't that why animals procreate?

Well, excon, that's a good definition of sentient.

But I have heard people talk about dogs and cats as sentient, meaning basically that they have an emotional life or, alternatively, that they can formulate a plan of some kind. (To me that's a variety of cognition.)

As for the cat, she may not know about death in the intellectual way that you and I do, but if she is quite sick, she probably has a sense of impending doom as well as a healthy aversion to cat-eating predators. I think there are different ways to understand death. Again, I'm making distinctions. Because how we use these words will alter our conclusions a lot.

I never expected to find so many juicy posts waiting for me today. The embarrassment of riches! Well, I have to start somewhere so I think, for no particular reason, with this post by asking.

My fingers are going to be exhausted by the time I respond to all these cool posts. That doesn't suck.

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Originally Posted by asking

1. The matter of freedom of will is a non issue for me. Whatever free will I have is not going to change as a result of this discussion. Whatever free will I have, I am content with as it is. It cannot change from what it is. So if you decide as a result of this discussion that the mind having a physical basis means that there is no such thing as free will as you define free will, then that's fine with me. I feel this argument is defective. It's nearly a threat. Like this: "The mind CAN'T have a physical basis or You won't have free will, and you wouldn't like that would you?"

But it's an empty threat. Nothing is going to change for me except a series of theological and philosophical arguments with which I am mostly unfamiliar. I'm still going to be able to go the store and decide whether to buy veal (no).

I do not think you mean it as a threat yourself. But I think you have accepted the unreasonable ground rules that produced this standard argument.

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No, I didn't mean it as a threat. I wanted to throw out a few different ideas in order to try to get to the meaty center of Athos's first post and I thought one way of doing that migh be to ask about the implications of his view for other sorts of theoretical commitments that we might have.

Like you, I think it far from obvious that the truth of the claim that mental states are states of the brain entails the absence of free will. But many have thought that it does, and there may be reasons for that. If we accept a libertarian conception of free will, according to which I am free just in case I have the ability to choose between contraries, then it might be thought that free will is in some sense a myth. If my choices are governed by the micro-structure of my physical anatomy and the probabilistic laws that obtain at that level of complexity, then the engine driving the machine of choice might be thought to be not processes of rational deliberation but something over which I do not myself exercise any control.

I have been careful to put this in the subjective [EDIT: Oops. I meant to say SUBJUNCTIVE] so as not to be seen to endorse it. I do this because I do not want to endorse it. But neither do I wan to dismiss it. We may well have to decide to let the free will chips fall where they may. But if--and it's a big "if", I grant you--the truth of materialism entails that we do not freely choose as a matter of rational deliberation, then it's not clear what sense is to be made of punishing people for making bad choices or rewarding them for making good ones. So no, not a threat. But food for thought nonetheless.

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2. It means that the person in brain state N = 4 may be in 1 + 3 = 4 or 0 + 4 = 4. You cannot predict absolute brain state backwards from superficial classifications of mental state. But if you define mental states so narrowly that they only refer to a single individual brain state at a single moment in time, there is no usefulness to the discussion, I think. Science deals with general principles. So I would tend to group mental states in general categories based on whether the differences do or do not affect behavior. If the differences in mental state do not produce different behavior, it is all essentially the same mental state for my purposes.

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So how do we type, say, belief states? One way to go might be dispositional: The belief that 2+2=4 consists in the disposition to assent to the claim "2+2=4", whereas the belief that 2+2=5" consists in the dispostion to withhold assent from the claim "2+2=5". This isn't going to be a terribly fine-grained way of discriminating among beliefs, though, since the belief that 2+2=4 is going to end up on all fours with the belief that 3+1=4. But those beliefs have different contents: One includes the concept "2" and the other doesn't; one includes that concepts "3" and "1" and the other doesn't. I could know that " and the other doesn't. I could know that " is true without knowing that "3+1=4" is true. So they are different states. Do we go by content then? If so, the basis for differentiating belief states isn't going to be anything physical. At least, not overtly.

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3.

We are capable of finer and finer distinctions but we are certainly not capable of an infinite number of mental states in any other sense. You are not capable of assuming the exact mental state of me or an octopus or an eocene fish. So you are not in fact capable of an infiinite number of mental states. I would say our mental states are quite limited--especially if you set aside abnormal ones that we call insanity. So, no, this assertion poses no difficulty for my view.

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I think we are capable of an infinite number of mental states. In fact, we are capable of an infinite number of belief states. This is vouchsafed by the compositionality of language. Take the following series as a pointer: " is true without knowing that ", "1+1=2", "2+2=4", "3+3=6", and so on. We can generate an infinite number of belief states just by performing the addition function on natural numbers. And this is only a small part of the number of beliefs of which we are capable. So we are capable of greater than Aleph-null mental states. That's a massively big set. How does this capacity get realized physically?

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4. Yes. I think (obviously) that other organisms have mental states. I do not think that an organism with no brain can be said to have a mental state in any usual sense of the phrase. I would not attribute a mental state to a bacterium or to an amoeba. I think a flatworm probably has a mental state roughly comparable to my Roomba.

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If we discovered life on another planet that exhibited highly complex patterns of behavior (they have cities and literature and are doing advanced science) but whose anatomy gave evidence of nothing even remotely resembling a brain, would you want to say that they lack mental states? How, in other words, do we define a physical criterion for mentality that isn't chauvinistic?

These are a few thoughts that came to me while reading Athos's and asking's posts. They aren't the last word by a long shot, but I'm hopeful that they're enough to elicit a reaction from the materialists in the room.

Time for coffee and a few cigarettes before I try to tackle Athos and excon.

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Originally Posted by Akoue

But if--and it's a big "if", I grant you--the truth of materialism entails that we do not freely choose as a matter of rational deliberation, then it's not clear what sense is to be made of punishing people for making bad choices or rewarding them for making good ones.

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We talk about crime as a function of free will, but I don't think we actually enforce laws based on that. For example, we already know that upbringing influences people's behavior, yet we do not imprison parents whose sons commit murder.

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The belief that 2+2=4 consists in the disposition to assent to the claim "2+2=4", whereas the belief that 2+2=5" consists in the dispostion to withhold assent from the claim "2+2=5".

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I have no idea what you mean.
Same for rest of paragraph, alas.

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I think we are capable of an infinite number of mental states. In fact, we are capable of an infinite number of belief states. This is vouchsafed by the compositionality of language. Take the following series as a pointer: "1+1=2", "2+2=4", "3+3=6", "4+4=8", and so on. We can generate an infinite number of belief states just by performing the addition function on natural numbers. And this is only a small part of the number of beliefs of which we are capable. So we are capable of greater than Aleph-null mental states. That's a massively big set.

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It's a massively big set, but like I said before within extremely narrow bounds. To me the distinctions between my mental state when I woke up on Thursday morning and my mental state when I woke up on Sunday are distinct and yet the differences are trivial. Whereas the difference between my mental state and that of an octopus--the most intelligent invertebrate known--well that's an interesting proposition. And I want to know what it's like to be a butterfly on a summer day. And when it rains, what does the butterfly think about?

Akoue, could you please distinguish between mental states and belief states? I don't know what you mean.

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If we discovered life on another planet that exhibited highly complex patterns of behavior (they have cities and literature and are doing advanced science) but whose anatomy gave evidence of nothing even remotely resembling a brain, would you want to say that they lack mental states? How, in other words, do we define a physical criterion for mentality that isn't chauvinistic?

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I don't believe I'm being chauvinistic. That's one reason I have not dismissed the possibility of plants having a mental life until we define mental, sentient, etc. I would be open to another kind of sentience, which I think excon has rightly introduced.

But I don't believe it's possible to have an advanced civilization with "nothing even remotely resembling a brain." I think although they might not have neurons as we understand them, they would HAVE to have something remotely resembling a brain.
A brain is a node for processing incoming information and modulating outgoing information and directions to other parts of the body. Without that, you cannot have beings that can respond in short periods to their environments. Plants respond to their environments, but with a few exceptions, over rather long periods. They basically don't have brains because they don't need brains.

I'll have to think about what a brain is in its essence.

Materialistically,

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Originally Posted by asking

I have no idea what you mean.
Same for rest of paragraph, alas.

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Okay, let me try again. I am more highly caffeinated now, so there's a chance I'm thinking more clearly.

Here's the paragraph that didn't work for you:

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So how do we type, say, belief states? One way to go might be dispositional: The belief that 2+2=4 consists in the disposition to assent to the claim "2+2=4", whereas the belief that 2+2=5" consists in the dispostion to withhold assent from the claim "2+2=5". This isn't going to be a terribly fine-grained way of discriminating among beliefs, though, since the belief that 2+2=4 is going to end up on all fours with the belief that 3+1=4. But those beliefs have different contents: One includes the concept "2" and the other doesn't; one includes that concepts "3" and "1" and the other doesn't. I could know that " and the other doesn't. I could know that " is true without knowing that "3+1=4" is true. So they are different states. Do we go by content then? If so, the basis for differentiating belief states isn't going to be anything physical. At least, not overtly.

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And here's the idea I was trying to get at:

What makes a particular mental state the state that it is? What are its defining properties?

First, some terminologicall clarification. Beliefs are one type of mental states. Other types of mental states are desires, sensations, fears, expectations, and so on. A belief state is a particular belief that you hold, a mental episode or event. If I look up and see snow on the ground, and believe that there is snow on the ground, I am having the mental state (the belief state) that there is snow on the ground. Since you bring up the octupus example, I suppose we could distinguish between *mental state*, understood as a particular episode of belief or desire that I entertain, and *total mental state*, understood as all of my occurrent mental episodes. It's likely that no two people ever have the same total mental state, this beecause it's very unlikely that two subjects could ever share the same mental history. But, in some sense at least, two people can share the same mental state (we both probably hold the belief that 2+2=4).

So, then, what makes a mental state the thing that it is? In virtue of what is my particular belief that 2+2=4 the belief, my belief, that 2+2=4? Is it that I am in such-and-such a brain state? If a mental state just is a brain state (and I know you have not endorsed this claim), then to believe that 2+2=4 just is to be in such-and-such a brain state. I have called it N-4. If the belief that 2+2=4 IS N-4, then I can be said to entertain the belief thar 2+2=4 just in case I am in N-4. The difficulty with saying that the belief that 2+2=4 just is N-4 is that there appears to be no good reason to suppose that every subject who entertains the belief is in exactly the same brain state (namely N-4). It may well be the case, and almost certainly is, that while I may be in N-4 when I entertain the belief that 2+2=4, you are in a slightly different brain state, call it N-4*, and someone else is in N-4**. In other words, while certain types of mental episodes correlate well with activity in certain regions of the brain, there is no reason to suppose that precisely the same brain activity occurs for everyone who entertains the belief that 2+2=4. And this seems to suggest that there is no specifiable brain state that just is the belief that 2+2=4. And this seems, in turn, to suggest that the belief that 2+2=4 is not identical to any given brain state. Moreover, should we discover another species of organism, be it terrestrial or extraterrestrial, that has a significantly different brain from ours, but whose members are nonetheless capable of entertaining the belief that 2+2=4, then we couldn't say that that belief is identical to, again say N-4, since they can't be in N-4 (their brains don't work the way ours do, they have a different structure). It would be chauvinistic to say that they are incapable of entertaining the belief simply because their brains can't enter into the same states as ours.

The content of my belief is the proposition " is true without knowing that ". One might think that what makes my mental state the particular state that it is (i.e. the belief that 2+2=4) is not the brain event N-4 but rather something else, namely the *content* of the belief. In other words, I am in this belief state just in case the content of my occurent mental episode is the proposition "2+2=4" and I assent to that proposition. People often refer to mental states of this sort as a propositional attitude because I am taking a certain attitude (belief, assent) to a propositional content ("2+2=4"). This might suggest an alternative to the view that what makes a mental state the state that it is is just the subject's being in a certain brain state (such-and-such neurons firing), but rather the content that is being entertained by the subject.

Before I go any further I just want to float this out there and see if it is clear or whether I need to drink another pot of coffee and try again. Does this make sense?

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Originally Posted by excon

Hello asking:

I didn't consider that it meant different things. Without looking it up, I always thought it meant the ability to contemplate one's own existence.

That means my cat doesn't know she's going to die - or does she?

excon

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This comes pretty close to the way I've heard it used. I've rarely seen it defined, but the use to which it gets put with some frequency seems to suggest something like this: A subject (human, animal, other) is sentient if and only if it is aware of itself and its environment, where this in turn seems to mean that the subject is reflectively self-aware. In other words, it doesn't have to look around and say, "Nope, I'm not that. And I'm not that. I'm not that either. Oh, this is me!" Sentience often seems, in other words, to mean something like being self-aware from inside. Philosophers and cog-sci people generally refer to this as consciousness.

CAVEAT regarding the word "consciousness": This is also frequently used to refer to the fact that there is something that it is like to have an experience. In other words, there is something that it is like to see the color red, or to taste chocolate. The philosopher Frank Jackson used a famous example to make this point: Imagine a person named Mary who has lived her whole life in a monochromatic world. The only colors she has ever seen are her hair, eyes, and the pigmentation of her skin. She has never seen the color red (a deep vibrant red--suppose she has neever cut herself or otherwise seen blood). She has spent her life in this black and white and gray world and she has learned all there is to learn from study what is involved in the perception of color. Then one day the door to her monochromatic world opens and she steps out. Sitting on a table in front of her is a bright red apple. Did she just learn something new?

A lot of people want to say, yes, she learned what it is like to see red. There was something about color perception that she didn't know before, and now she does, so she has just acquired a new bit of knowledge.

There is another famous example, due to Thomas Nagel. It goes like this: Bats navigate by means of echolocation. I do not. I might be able to imagine what it would be like to sprout wings and fly. I might be able to imagine myself turning into a bat, even. What I can't know is what it is like for a bat to be a bat. I cannot know what it is like to navigate by means of echolocation. In fact, Nagel argues, I can't even imagine what it is like to be a bat. There is an irreducibly subjective character to sensation that cannot be captured in any objective, physical description of sensation.

Nagel's version has been thought by many to pose a very serious problem for materialism, since there is something really important about our mental life that cannot be captured by science, namely what it is like for a subject to have an experience.

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Originally Posted by Akoue

This comes pretty close to the way I've heard it used. I've rarely seen it defined, but the use to which it gets put with some frequency seems to suggest something like this: A subject (human, animal, other) is sentient if and only if it is aware of itself and its environment, where this in turn seems to mean that the subject is reflectively self-aware. In other words, it doesn't have to look around and say, "Nope, I'm not that. And I'm not that. I'm not that either. Oh, this is me!" Sentience often seems, in other words, to mean something like being self-aware from inside. Philosophers and cog-sci people generally refer to this as consciousness.

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I am no philosopher but have this deep need to respond to the animal sentience thing. Is my (soulcat) Thomas Jefferson aware of himself and his environment and therefore reflectively self-aware, conscious of himself as to his place in the world? I say yes. When he lies on top of my opened-up morning newspaper and I shoo him away so I can read about the newest antics of ex-Gov. Blago or Sen. Burris (both of whom seem to lack sentience, btw), he moves over to the corner of the table and not only faces away from me ("Hrrrumph!") but also sits so his tail does a rhythmic sweep-sweep-sweep back and forth over the surface of the newspaper, thereby interrupting my reading, making it difficult to turn the page, and annoying the heck out of me. Occasionally, he glances back at me to see if I am properly annoyed. I can cite other personal experiences, but my belief is that (at least) mammals are sentient beings.

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In other words, there is something that it is like to see the color red, or to taste chocolate... There is an irreducibly subjective character to sensation that cannot be captured in any objective, physical description of sensation.

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I've often wondered -- is my experience of the taste and flavor of, say, chocolate the same as anyone/everyone else's? I can use many adjectives to describe the senory experience of chocolate, but when push comes to shove, does everyone else have the same experience?

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The philosopher Frank Jackson used a famous example to make this point: Imagine a person named Mary who has lived her whole life in a monochromatic world.

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This reminds me of Oliver Sacks' The Island of the Color Blind, the tiny Pacific atoll of Pingelap, where Dr. Sacks visited an isolated community in which a number of islanders had been born achromatopsic, i.e. totally colorblind. Despite that supposed disability, they were able to describe their colorless world in rich terms of pattern and tone, light and shadow. Or, in contrast, Sacks' story "The Case of the Colorblind Painter" in which he introduces the reader to an accomplished artist who is suddenly struck by cerebral achromatopsia, the inability to perceive color due to brain damage.

(Thank you for allowing me to get all that off my chest.)

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Originally Posted by Akoue

A subject (human, animal, other) is sentient if and only if it is aware of itself and its environment, where this in turn seems to mean that the subject is reflectively self-aware.

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So we don't mean the ability to suffer, which, I gather, is the animal rights position. This seems like a simple definition I can at least grasp. I'm not sure what it means to be self aware (or how that's different from having consciousness), but to the extent that I can grasp it, I think self-awareness is far more general among animals than most people think.

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In other words, it doesn't have to look around and say, "Nope, I'm not that. And I'm not that. I'm not that either. Oh, this is me!" Sentience often seems, in other words, to mean something like being self-aware from inside. Philosophers and cog-sci people generally refer to this as consciousness.

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I don't think any animal goes around doing that. Maybe I'm the one who needs more coffee! I can't imagine a caterpillar looking at a leaf and saying to itself "I'm not that." Nor can I imagine a mouse having any doubt about being itself distinct from other individual mice, to say nothing of acorns and cats. I have the feeling we are speaking a different language.

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Sitting on a table in front of her is a bright red apple. Did she just learn something new?

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I don't see how she could not if she can see the apple. I don't understand the point of this story. For me, the story raises the question of whether she would even be capable of seeing red. Kittens who were only allowed to see vertical lines during the critical period of vision development, later could not see horizontal lines or at least did not know how to interpret them (I know, awful). We have to learn to see during infancy.

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There is an irreducibly subjective character to sensation that cannot be captured in any objective, physical description of sensation.

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I guess that's true. But I'd be very surprised if pain for my cat is different from pain for me. Same for hunger, pleasure, textures, colors, sounds. Occam's razor suggests that what seems the same is in fact the same. You can posit otherwise, but there's no great support for it. And good reasons to think that other vertebrates' perceptions are similar to our own.

Here's another example. A man loses his hand in an accident in his 20s and, over many decades, his brain rewires itself, rededicating the areas of the brain that used to feel the fur of his dog's head under his hand. Now those same brain cells respond to something else. In his 50s, the man is given a hand transplant and the neurons rewire themselves again to respond to the nerve signals now coming from the new hand. Since this is not HIS hand, does the fur feel different? Or is the sensation a product of his brain? Or is the sensation pretty standardized among humans?

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Nagel's version has been thought by many to pose a very serious problem for materialism, since there is something really important about our mental life that cannot be captured by science, namely what it is like for a subject to have an experience.

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Hmm. This is a lot like God. I can't prove He's not there and you can't prove He is. I can't prove that red looks about the same for everyone here, and you can't prove that red looks different for each of us. But, if you give credence to biology and evolution, it's unlikely that perceptions are going to be substantively different. Why would they be? Our cells are the same, our tissues and organs are the same. Why should the one thing that's difficult to assess be different in any substantive way?

Nagel's story doesn't speak to me.