 Hello, good afternoon. OK, so today we're looking at Ryle's article, Daycart Smith. And the topic that I want to get to in the end is analytical behaviorism. To say what behaviorism is, it's a quite different take on the mind to Daycart's. But we'll get there by a slow and leisurely route. On Tuesday, we'll look at Putnam's article, Brains and Behavior, this in the Chalmers reader. As you'll see, that's again a short article. It's only nine pages. But again, most of these articles need to be read many times to get what's going on. On Tuesday also, we'll give out the topics for the first essay. The first essay is due on October the 3rd. So that's for about four weeks, something like that from now. And the second essay will be due the Tuesday, November the 12th. And then the other piece of evaluation will be the exam on December the 17th. Any questions about that? OK. Let me just check for how many of you is philosophy, this your first philosophy class? Wow, practically everybody. Writing a philosophy essay is not quite like writing an essay in any other subject. So it would be good to start thinking about the essay in a general kind of way as soon as you can. And I'll talk a little bit about what you should be doing in the essay on Tuesday. We'll have many opportunities to discuss this further in between now and October. OK. What we're really concerned with in this class is the mind-body problem, the question what the mind is. But a lot of times, we have to look at a slightly different topic, namely how you know about the mind. Because it seems like we know about our minds and we know about other people's minds in a way that's quite unlike the way that we know about physical objects. There is something weird about the way we know about our minds. And that seems to have implications for what kind of thing the mind can be. Maybe the simplest argument along these lines is Descartes' argument that you're more certain about your knowledge of the mind's existence than you are about the knowledge of any physical thing. But as you will see, there are lots of peculiarities about your knowledge of your own mind. And this is something that, in a way, is familiar to everybody. But it's just a matter of spelling out and trying to get right what those weirdnesses are about the way we have knowledge of our own minds. OK, I want to start out with this remark from where is the temple at Delphi? Know thyself. It's such a powerful remark, know thyself. And I think not much is known about why that was written in the first place or what exactly was meant by it. But it really seems important, know thyself. And the thing about self-knowledge is it seems to be valuable. You must have known people who, people go through some great disaster. They go through some very hard time. And then at the end of it, someone says sympathetically, but of course, you understand yourself better as a result of all that. I was just listening to a lecture in King Lear where the king loses all his possessions. He loses his kingship. He loses his family. He spends the night naked in a storm. He goes mad for a while. And at the end of it, people say sympathetically, well, but now you know your own mind. And you think, well, whatever exactly that is, knowing your own mind, it must be pretty good if it's worth going through all that to get to. I mean, we do, I think, actually think it's pretty valuable. But it's puzzling why it should be valuable. I mean, what is so important about that? I mean, nobody says knowledge of automobiles is very, very important. I mean, unless, of course, you're a mechanic or something. But not everybody thinks, well, knowing yourself, that's really key. So that's what life's all about, is it? It's pretty important, but why should that be? Well, what is it about the self that makes knowledge of it so important? And one connected question here is, is it easy to know yourself or is it hard? And actually, can we just take a vote on this? I'd quite like to know what your first impulse is. It's knowing your own mind easy. Yes, put up your hand if it's easy. Is knowing your own mind hard? Okay, that's about a two-to-one split in favor of hard, something like that. I think what Descartes thinks is pretty easy. I mean, the mind is, I don't know how to put this, the self is like a vanishing point at the center of all these sensations and feelings and so on. And everything that's inside the circle is kind of easy to know. Right, it might all be a dream, it might all be hallucinations, but you've got your perspective on things and you know what's going on in here. Once you step outside the mind to knowledge of the physical world, well, that's a bit harder. Now, that's Descartes' picture and that fits very well with you guys that say it's easy to know your own mind. But it is difficult to see why in that picture, knowing your own mind should be valuable. I mean, in a way, if it's so easy, how could it be worth anything? Here's a quote from Charles Taylor. Consider someone who's been ashamed of his background. Let's suppose it's you. Let's suppose that you're ashamed of your back, you have been ashamed of your background. At the time, this is not at all clear to you. You feel unease, a lack of confidence, a vague sense of unworthiness. Then you're brought to reflect in this. You come to feel that being ashamed of what you are, apologizing for your existence, is senseless. On the contrary, there's something demeaning about feeling that kind of shame, something degrading, something supine, something craven about it. You start to feel ashamed that you were ashamed. You start to rejoice in your background. You start to say, what the hell? I'm from Glasgow. There you are. Take it. Most of us, if you haven't had that sensation yourself, most people are familiar with that. And the thing is that that knowledge of your own shame in your background, that can be something that's really hard won. That's something difficult to get to. You don't just look inside yourself and say, yeah, I'm pretty proud of my background or I'm pretty ashamed of my background and that's easy. That can be difficult. All that goes on is that you notice, I feel unease in some social situations. I feel a certain lack of confidence. I feel a vague sense of unworthiness. You would never admit to yourself that I'm embarrassed about my background. Or a similarly negative example is if you've been humiliated, if you've been badly humiliated, it might be very difficult for you to say, I am feeling humiliated. I mean, in a way, if you can say I'm feeling humiliated, it can't have been all that bad. If you see what I mean, if someone says, well, I feel quite humiliated, that's really a sign that they're on the fight back. If they really have been badly humiliated, the last thing they're gonna do is say, I am feeling humiliated, that just adds more humiliation to the thing. You see what I mean? Or if you take someone who's, this is, I think it's an 18th century picture of someone in the throes of jealousy. You say to yourself, am I feeling jealous? No, it's absurd to say I'm feeling jealous about what Sally does. Sally could do what she likes. I just do not care. And there you sit in your study, surrounded by your demons, saying jealous, I'm not jealous. Later that same night, there you are, sitting in a parked car outside an apartment block, saying jealous, I'm not jealous. I don't care what she does. It can be, I mean, this is not autobiographical, I hasten to say. It can be hard to admit, it can be hard to know of your own jealousy. It's not as if jealousy is something that, well, you just take a quick glance inside the circle of the mind, and you say, oh, there it is, my old friend jealousy. Or, you know, it's not there. You don't have, in general, that kind of authoritative knowledge as to whether you're jealous or not, or whether you're ashamed of your background or not. And at the same time, these kinds of self-knowledge seem to be the ones that are most important. It really seems valuable to have that kind of knowledge of yourself. And here's Benjamin Franklin on this topic. Franklin said, there are three things extremely hard, steal a diamond and to know oneself. God bless him. Now, this comes, I think this connects to a topic that came up in discussion last time. Someone was comparing knowledge of yourself as a physical object to knowledge of your own mental states. So, it's one thing to have day cards, kind of knowledge that you could have, whether or not it was all a dream, whether or not you were having hallucinations. That kind of knowledge of what kind of sensations I'm having in there, with the knowledge of yourself as a physical object that you have of how much you weigh, what height you are, whether you're male or female, that kind of thing. There are lots of basic kinds of knowledge of yourself as a physical object. Well, in Descartes' picture, you start out with your own inner life. You start out with your knowledge of your sensations. That's like the beginning of knowledge. And then you say, but is all this a dream? Or are all these people really there? Are all these chairs and so on really there? And then you work out to the chairs and so on. But when you think of how, in fact, you have knowledge of yourself as a physical object, it doesn't really seem to depend on knowledge of your own mental states. I mean, knowing where you are, if you look right now, where are you in the classroom? Are there people around you? Are you in the middle of a bunch of people? I promise you you are. But vision tells you that stuff. Vision tells you what's going on around you, but it also tells you where you are with respect to all that stuff. And it tells you about how you're moving. There are experiments they do with toddlers who've just barely learned to walk. Where they put these unfortunate children in a moving room. So a moving room has four walls, but three sides of it are false. Three sides of it are mounted on rollers. So you can put the child in the middle of the false room. And so you get this little kid that's barely able to stand. Put them surrounded by these walls and then you pull the walls away from them or pull the walls towards them. The child is using vision to figure out whether it's moving forwards or moving backwards. When the walls move, as vision is telling it, you're moving forwards. So it leans back a bit to compensate and it goes over like a skittle. I, it's hard to believe that people are paid to do this kind of work, but I once saw a sequence of about 50 of these shots of children just the move, the walls move, then shut this. Extremely satisfying. But that makes it very clear. It's harder to do it with adults, adults have learned tricks, but you use vision all the time to figure out how you're moving. So you get knowledge of yourself as a physical object. Another way is intelligent use of mirrors. Here is an elephant with an X marked on it in chalk. You put the elephant in front of the mirror. This is only done a few years ago. You put the elephant in front of the mirror where it can see the chalk and God bless it. Can you guess what the elephant does? With his trunk. It touches the X with its trunk. Okay, so if you can do that, you've got some knowledge of yourself as a physical object. That doesn't show, there were some other example last time of intelligent use of mirrors that I can't remember, can you remember? Yeah, there was some. Yeah. But one was visible through a mirror. You can see one directly and one was visible through a mirror. Could you see it? Uh-huh. Look in the mirror and you can see one of the blobs in the mirror, but you can't see the other. Exactly. I see. I see, okay. So what does that tell you? I see, okay. Sort of getting it, that's me in the mirror. So it's the same bottom line as here. Yeah. Okay, so there is that intelligent use of mirrors. Now, the thing is that seems like kind of a special case because after all, we don't all have mirrors, we don't all have access to mirrors. It doesn't really seem essential for your knowledge of yourself. I mean, nobody said to Descartes, if only you had a mirror you could have sorted all this out much earlier. But there is something much more basic going on which is social mirroring. There's, in ordinary life, we all the time use other people to mirror, to understand how we are ourselves. Here is the psychologist Andy Meltzoff who has spent, I don't know, maybe 40 years or so looking at this phenomenon. This is Meltzoff in the early days, sticking his tongue out at a very young baby. And so Meltzoff sticks his tongue out at the baby and a couple of seconds later, the baby sticks its tongue out. So you stick your tongue to the left, you stick your tongue to the right, the baby sticks its tongue to the left, the baby sticks its tongue to the right. You do it with mouth opening. Oh, you do it with that kind of pulsing of the mouth and the baby will imitate. This happens very, very young. It's been extensively tested with babies that are two or three days old. The earliest tested, the baby was 40 minutes old. I don't know if you can guess whose baby it was. That was Meltzoff's junior's introduction to the world. But children do this very, very young and it takes a little while longer but children as young as 14 months will recognize that they are being imitated. If when the child makes a move, you make a move, when the child, then children will recognize that that's what's going on, yeah? That's really basic to ordinary social life. You have to get it how other people's movements and behavior are synchronized with yours. And this becomes part of understanding of the mind once you get it that after all, it doesn't really matter about tongue sticking out in itself. What really matters is that you recognize if you smile, does the other person smile? If you look serious, does the other person look serious? How are your emotional expressions connected up to the other persons? So our way of getting onto the mind in this kind of context is basically social. It's nothing to do with sitting in an armchair looking inside the circle of your head and seeing what is going on in there. It is getting synchronized with other people and understanding how you do in relation to them. Do you have a good sense of humor? How can you tell? Can you tell that by just looking inside your mind and saying, ah, there it is, a sense of humor, a good, big, strong one, yeah? That's right, I mean, you want to try being a lecturer? You tell a joke, everybody says, what did he say? And a kind of ripple goes round the room and you can see that people are trying to write it down. So yeah, it's that kind of thing, right? You only know, I mean, a sense of humor is a psychological characteristic that people have or not, but you can't tell whether you have one just by looking inside the circle of your mind. You have to be engaged in social interactions to find that out about yourself. So in general, couldn't that be the way you find out about your mind? Isn't that, in fact, the way you find out about your mind? It's not by saying, well, maybe it's all a dream and all these people don't exist, but I know what's going on in here, all right. Rather, you know about your own psychological characteristics because you understand how other people are responding to you psychologically, and particularly for things like character traits or aspects of personality that matter socially. I mean, for things like, am I an extrovert or an introvert? Well, if you think it might as well all be a dream, I can tell you what the answer is. I mean, things like whether you're extroverted or introverted can't actually be found just by looking reflectively inside your mind. You have to know what's going on in your social engagements. Now, when you think of it like that, your knowledge of your own mind depends on your knowledge of other people's minds. Your knowledge of other people's minds could be just as basic as knowledge of your own mind. So in this kind of picture, Descartes' kind of picture where you just look inside your own circle and you see what's there, and it's a struggle to get out to the physical world. On this kind of picture, what's going on inside someone else's circle is not something that you necessarily have any knowledge of at all. Other people might not have any knowledge of what's going on inside you. But this kind of social picture suggests a quite different taking things that you only know what's going on inside your own mind because you know what's going on with other people's minds. Fair enough? Yes, please. Yeah, your mind is shaped by the context you're in, by the social context you're in, that's what you're saying. Yeah, and one of the interesting and elusive things about self-knowledge is that it doesn't leave the mind unchanged. Now, just take this case, take... What's it going on? Sorry. Take Taylor's case of knowing that you're ashamed of your background. Once you know that that's what's happening with you, once you know that you're embarrassed about where you came from, the cultural context, that actually changes what's happening in your mind. If you are interacting with other people and finding out about how you are from the interactions with other people, that is going to change your mind. That is going to make a difference to how you are. So, one of the things about knowledge of your own mind that is always intriguing is that... I mean, it never goes away, this puzzle, that on the one hand you're trying to find out about a bit of reality. Your own mind is a bit of reality. But when you find out about it, you're trying to just track how things are with that bit of reality. But you're finding out about it, whether it's through social interaction or this kind of verbalisation, that changes what's going on in the mind. Is that getting at the question? Yeah. Yeah? There could be a deceiver, yes. No, I'm saying if you assume a deceiver, I would put it round the other way. If you assume a deceiver, then you would actually lose knowledge of your own mind. So much of your knowledge of your own mind comes from social interaction. If you assume that this is all a dream, this is all just hallucinations, then you have no way of knowing how you are in social interactions. I mean, let me take, for example, suppose I'm wondering, am I brave? Do I have a lot of physical courage? Yeah? I'm really not sure. I've never really been put to the test, yeah? But if I assume I'm having a dream in which I display great physical courage, every night I have dreams of the death-defying feats I carry out, does that show that I'm physically brave? It does not show that I'm more as the pity, right? If I spend the whole day daydreaming about my military activities or whatever it is, then saving people from burning buildings and so on, then that doesn't a tall show that I'm brave. If I'm really a brain and a vat, or if I'm really being deceived by a great deceiver, then I have no idea whether I'm brave or not, yeah? So that would, assuming a deceiver would take away knowledge of my own psychological characteristics. Am I generous? You know, similarly, am I generous and kind-hearted dreaming about doing a whole bunch of generous and kind-hearted things, is not at all the same thing as actually being generous or kind-hearted, yeah? Yes, yes? That's where I'm opposing to Descartes. I wish it was my own original idea, but frankly, it's not. I mean, there's a great deal of work in social and developmental psychology about, I mean, Meltzoff's work there really is the tip of an iceberg of a lot of stuff about how that capacity to understand other people as mirroring your own mental states illuminates your knowledge of your own mind, yeah? So I'm challenging Descartes with his picture, yeah? Yes? Yeah, it need not be as crude as that. It might not be, well, I'm sorry. I don't mean to be abusive. Abusive, what I mean is it need not be, certainly asking the other people around you is one thing to do, but of course you've got, if you're asking, am I popular, yeah? Well, you can ask your friends, am I popular? But unless your friends are a pretty tough lot, you know what they're going to say. They're all going to say, yes, yes, sure, yeah? But that's not to say that you can find out whether you're popular by just looking inside your own mind, yeah? It's that you find out by reflecting on your interactions with other people, but it's less direct than just asking them. Exactly, observing them. Doing a count at your, I'm sorry, I don't want to depress anybody. Doing a count at your birthday party, for example, yeah? Right, I mean, there are all kinds of, you know, a million indirect ways of finding out, but they all involve the actual other people. You couldn't do it if it was all a dream. Does that make sense? Yeah, okay. Okay, so, yes, sure. You can misread other people. You can misread other people. I strongly agree, you really can misread other people. That's right. One and other, well, there are two different things here. Can't you misread other people? Can't you think you understand other people psychologically and be getting it wrong? I think that's just correct. And if you habitually get it wrong in that way, I think you're also likely to be getting it wrong about your own mental states. The case of Asperger's is quite, well, it's complicated what is going on in Asperger's, but one analysis of what's going on is that an element in the disorder is that the subject doesn't have very good understanding of other people's mental states at all. That they may not even have the idea of other people as having mental states. But, relatively with that, people with Asperger's typically also have trouble with their own mental states. That kind of deep analysis of their own mental states of whether you're ashamed of your background is something that's going to be very, it's going to be impossible really for an Asperger's patient. Can you say that again? That's right. That is exactly what I'm suggesting, that you wouldn't know yourself if you misread other people the whole time. Exactly, that's right. Yeah, they have to exist for you to get it right. I mean, you only have any chance of getting your knowledge of yourself onto the tracks as you can get it right about the other people. Yes? Yes, sorry. I thought you had your hand up. That's what Descartes says, okay? So, here I'm not trying to just refute Descartes and wave goodbye. I'm trying to suggest that here is another picture of how you have knowledge of yourself, not by just looking inside your own mind, but by using other people as a mirror. Yeah? So, just as you can have knowledge of yourself physically by using a regular mirror, you use other people to mirror how you are. And I think that's just recognizable in everyday life, that is how you find out about many of your own psychological characteristics. Am I dependable in a crisis? You know, unless you have some knowledge of what's going on with other people, you can't find out about that kind of characteristic of your own. Although your characteristics will be affected by your environment show. Okay, one, two, and then we should move on, yeah. Yes? I agree it can go like that, actually. But if you just take that example, you say, I mean, I don't mean you, but one says, I don't like that kind of trashy pop. I can't bear it. Your friend says, yeah, but whenever it's on the radio, you smile, you tap, you hum along. You choose it. You have it in your iPod. Your friend might be able to tell better than you that what music you like. Yeah? You say, I can't bear that trash. They say, no, you actually like that trash, fine. They might be right and you might be wrong. Yeah, I don't mean you if you see what I mean. When I say you, okay, yeah. Right, that's an analogy, right? But I think that's quite a good analogy, yeah, that your mind might be your own work, but other people might be able to see it better than you can yourself, yeah. So that runs completely against Descartes' picture. So just think a minute about how it goes for knowledge of your own emotions. I mean, knowledge of your own fear or happiness or depression. Is Descartes' picture right there? You just look inside your mind and you can tell whether you're afraid or happy or depressed. And it seems to me that I can say something like, Bill, I'm not afraid of Bill. Don't make me laugh. I'm not afraid of Bill. Bill, I'm not afraid of Bill. And you can point out that when Bill goes in the room, I tremble, I shake. I can hardly wait to get out. I mean, that can happen. Well, I mean, this is not autobiographical, you understand. Or I remember someone in a novel saying, we were happy then, but we didn't know that we were. And it seems to me that makes perfect sense. I mean, when you're happy, you don't typically go along all day thinking, well, by God, there it is again. You know, you're looking inside and there is that blob of happiness. You can just be living in a fulfilled way and be perfectly happy and not realize that you are until it all comes to a stop. Or I remember someone in Bulgaria talking about life under the Soviets. And she said, we were depressed then, but we didn't know that we were. Now that we're not under the Soviets, we're depressed, but the great thing is that we know we're depressed. But it's not a merry tale, but it seems to me that's perfectly comprehensible. Or actually, a friend of mine was, had been going through a rough period for about 10 years and was finally diagnosed with clinical depression. And it had never occurred to him or to me that he was depressed. But the minute we got the diagnosis, it immediately made sense. I mean, it seems to me that can just happen. You can't tell just by looking inside your mind or are you depressed or not. You need assistance to find that out. You need diagnosis to find that out. You might say, well, that's all very well for emotions, but what about sensations like pens or itches or whatever? Surely I can tell just by looking inside my mind. I mean, it seems a lot more powerful there, but there are cases, you know, there are these footballers who are engaged in a big game, who break an arm and carry on. And or guys in a battlefield who have a limb blown off and just carry on. And it's only later that they attend to the injury and say, by God, this is agonising. I can't, I don't understand how I did all that. Yeah? And that's super... Well, what I'm saying, with these cases, you're talking about people who have a lot of pain, but don't show it, but they know they're in pain. Yeah? My kind of case is like, suppose you have a real bad headache and then you start watching TV and something comes on that grabs your attention and you forget all about your headache. Yeah? You're not thinking, hey, I've got a headache the whole time. But the minute the thing you're watching stops, the headache's there. Now, presumably it was there the whole time, but you didn't notice. And presumably something like that is what's happening with the footballers or the soldiers in the battlefield. It was there the whole time, but they didn't notice. So what I'm describing is something like a super spartan where nobody else notices that they have the pain, but they don't even notice themselves. Couldn't that happen? I mean, there's no reason your own mind should be completely open to you. Yeah? Yeah? Well, there's adrenaline going through you, but the question is, is that, the pain's still there, but you're just not noticing it because of the adrenaline? Yeah? Yes? Sure, no question that the physical stuff affects the mental state. But the question is, doesn't the adrenaline just affect the direction of your attention? You see what I mean? So the pain's sitting there the whole time. Your attention is just deflected away from it by this adrenaline rush. I mean, there are lots of cases. I mean, take the belief that someone once said about a friend of mine, she doesn't think that you can trust doctors. If you ask my friend directly, she says, of course, I think you can trust doctors, but actually you look at what she does. She doesn't believe in doctors for a second. You know, she will go to the doctor as a last resort. She won't believe what the doctor says. Half the time she will not take the medication and wants a second opinion. She just does not trust doctors. Someone else can know what you believe about doctors better than you do yourself. Yep? Yes, Rahad? That's right, the adrenaline distracts you. That's what I'm suggesting, yeah. Well, you wouldn't know you could feel it. Well, you could be in the pain, but you wouldn't know you were. If you spent your life on a big football game, who knows how many arms you could have broken and just carry on playing so long as you were really focused on the game? I'm not suggesting you try this at home or something, yeah? Once you're reflecting on it and attending to it, yeah. Yeah, that's different. Then you know you have the sensation. Wow, okay, let's go quickly. You haven't asked the question yet, one. Yes, right. Yeah, well, exactly, that's exactly the situation. That's great, actually, because my examples are a little bit exotic. I mean, not the footballs are that exotic, but it's a little bit exotic, yeah, but, yeah, what's the difference? Yeah, absolutely they can happen then. Yeah, the same thing, yep, yep. Why are children so susceptible to distractions? I'm not sure they are. It depends what you mean, children. I mean, there's one hypothesis. I'm not sure if it's true that young children, very young children, can't actually control the direction of their attention at all so that if something unpleasant as they've looked onto something unpleasant, they can't tear themselves away, so they will keep focusing on the thing that is making them cry. And what a caregiver will do then is try and yank them away, maybe physically yank them away from that thing. You see what I mean? But the child itself does not have that kind of control of attention. I think this is open to empirical argument, but that's one view that's been put forward by Roth and Rothbart. Yeah, yeah, okay, one, okay, you didn't have a question yet, yeah, yeah. Non-permanent, yeah. That's right, yeah. The things you've done so far are not permanent, yeah. They're not the core of the self. Well, I don't know, suppose you go to one of the bottom things in the list there. I have a friend who was, in one of these late night discussions, was telling me the other day that he's crippled by shyness. It really spoils his professional life. This is a guy who, a couple of months ago, I saw at a conference being asked to take a microphone unexpectedly, and who practically fainted with pleasure. I mean, he was visibly going as he took the mic and stood in front of the people at the meeting. Now, I think he was perfectly sincere when he was telling me how his life was crippled by shyness, but I just don't believe it for a second. What a lot of whooey. This is a guy who loves being the center of social attention. I would put it even more strongly. His life is for being the center of social attention, yeah. So I think that's an abiding characteristic of people. That's something that could last with you for many years. I think you're not authoritative about that either, yeah. Yeah, I think that's right, but what you're saying makes perfect sense, but reacting to things would include, yes. That's exactly right. I think that's right, but bear in mind that when you say the patterns that you learn by seeing what you're reacting to, the things that you're reacting to, they will centrally include other people and their psychological states. Not just, you know, blades of grass or something. The important thing for your knowledge of your own mind will be your knowledge of how you interact with other people. I don't mean to shut off this. I wanna put the anti-Decart case as strongly as I can here, but it's not at all what I want to just close off Decart. It's in the both important positions, it seems to me. We should really move on. There were a number of other questions. Anyone have something quick, I guess? A quick comment, a biting remark? Okay, yes, that's good. Yeah, well, if you're born without the ability to feel pain, then you're in a lot of trouble. Actually, you're not going to know what's safe or not. No, I don't think you're invincible for very long. I mean, once you've broken an arm or something, it's not just pain, as you see what I mean, there's too much stuff you can't do. So I think it really is a handicap that not having a sense of ability to feel pain. But look, the key thing I want to get onto here is, this is, if you think about how you know about your own mind, and now think about how you know about someone else's mind, don't you know about your own mind in exactly the same way that you know about someone else's mind? When you think about how you know about someone else's emotions and sensations and thoughts and beliefs and virtues and so on, then you just do exactly the same thing with them as you do with yourself. If you're thinking about whether someone else is a friend of yours, ashamed of their background, you find out about that in exactly the same way you find out about whether you are ashamed of your background. If you're going to find out about whether you really trust doctors, you find out about that in exactly the same way that you find out about whether someone else is trust doctors. All these things you find out about whether you are shy in the same way that you find out whether someone else is shy, you basically observe yourself or you observe the other in social situations. The way you have knowledge of yourself is not fundamentally different to the way you have knowledge of other people. It seems different because you seem so fast and easy in your own case and relatively difficult in the case of other people. But I don't know, suppose you think about people who are interested in politics are usually particularly interested in the politics of some one country or maybe a couple of countries. So they may have a good general knowledge of political systems, but usually they will focus on present day Russia or France in the 19th century. They will focus in some particular state and get a good knowledge of that state's political functioning. So you can be an expert on one country. And similarly with people, you can have a good understanding of how human psychology works, but most of us specialize, right? We specialize in the mental lives of our friends or the mental lives of our family. And you can really be finely tuned to someone else. It can be that when you're sitting having breakfast and someone else comes down the stairs, you can tell how they're feeling just from the way the stairs creak. You just sit there and you think, oh my God, now I know what kind of morning I'm gonna have just as you listen to the creaking of the stairs. This is not sort of biographical. I take it that's recognizable, right? When you know someone well, the slightest thing can tip you off to what's going on with them. But now think about yourself. You might have known a member of your family for 20 years, but you know yourself much more intimately than that. There have been no gaps in your observation of yourself. The great thing about yourself is you're always around, right? So you always know exactly what's going on with yourself, what you're doing. So you are an expert on your own mental states. So you know about your own mental states in just the same way that you know about the mental states of other people, but you are just much faster and slicker at it. The slightest thing tips you off as to what your mental states are. Okay, yeah, that can happen, I agree. People can mask their own mental states. I do, I completely agree. That can happen, you have a poker face as we say, yeah. You hide what you're thinking from the other people, you hide your reactions from the other people. We can do that. But the thing is that what you're hiding then is you have some cues available to you that the other people don't have available to them, but they could have them available to them. I mean, you're just hiding some cues, but not others, and they're not getting the cues that you didn't manage to hide. I would also say, one of the things about life that I find terrifying personally is you think about how sensitive and perceptive you can be about the mental states of other people, right? You're sitting in a group and a lightning expression crosses someone's face. Their eyes just turn for a moment and you say, my God, I can't believe it, he's jealous. Yeah, you can catch in a flash what's going on with someone else's mental life. And when you think about how perceptive you are about other people's mental lives, just think other people are that perceptive about you. And that is a, well, I find that an unnerving thought, right? That other people can be doing to me what I do so easily to other people. And I think the truth is that, although we can mask from other people, we're at least as good as masking from ourselves as we are at masking from other people. One more. Yeah, I agree, it's never 100%. Well, that's the thing I don't believe the last thing. You and your own mind, you would know if you were jealous. Maybe in that case that you do. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. Yeah, that is just... It's never for sure, it's never... That's right. I agree with that in both cases. Yep. Yes. Yes. That's exactly the interpretation. I don't know if you guys have come across as mirror neurons. The idea is that there are neurons in my head that when I see someone else smile, they are also the same neurons that are implicated in my smiling. So that's why it's so easy to imitate people is the idea. I mean, it's amazing how easy it is to imitate someone else. And these neurons are supposed to be firing in the same way, the same neurons are supposed to be firing for your observation of other people performing an action as are for your own performance of that action. That's the idea. So that's our speculation about the kind of physiology that's underlying this kind of social ability. Yeah, so I agree that's absolutely dead on point, yeah. Okay. That's the idea, yeah, yeah. That's about all that is extremely speculative, but that is the speculation. I agree, yeah. Okay, so here's Royle. This is Royle on Descartes' view of what's going on when you look inside your own mind. This is what Royle calls the classic. Is it called the classical view? The received view, the official view? The official view, thank you. Not only can you view and scrutinize a flower through your sense of sight and listen to and discriminate the notes of a bell through your sense of hearing. So this is Royle stating the kind of picture of the mind that he opposes and that I've been opposing. You can also reflectively or introspectively watch without any bodily organ of sense the current episodes of your inner life. This self-observation, looking inside the circle, is commonly supposed to be immune from illusion or confusion or doubt, unlike your perception of other people or the world around you. That's what Royle's calling the official view of how your knowledge of your own mind is different to your knowledge of other people's mind. On the other side, the person has no direct access of any sort to the events of the inner life of another. Absolute solitude is, on Descartes' picture, the ineluctable destiny of the soul. Only our bodies can meet. A poignant thought. Okay, can you put your hand up if you think that your knowledge of your own mental life is quite different to your knowledge of someone else's mental life? Can you put your hand up if I persuaded you that your knowledge of someone else's mental life is not like your knowledge of, is like your, sorry, that your knowledge of someone else's mental life is the same kind of thing as your knowledge of your own mental life. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Okay, let me carry on. Undunted. So you guys are, by a majority, accepting the official view. Yes, Descartes' view. That's clear? Yeah, I mean, Descartes' saying you look inside your own mind. That's quite different when you're trying to get onto someone else's mind. I mean, trying to argue that your access to your own mind is just like your access to someone else's mind. Is that clear what's going on here? Yeah. Yeah, anyone want to, yeah, what? Yeah. Can I? Oh, yeah. That's what I'm suggesting is if you're very close to another person, people talk about, well, you're telepathic, you know. Yeah. Right. Very good. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, so just as you are your twin, everybody is with themselves. Yeah. Okay, yeah. Yeah, no, we're going to come onto, we're going to spend quite a lot of time on that example actually in just a couple of weeks. Okay, let me postpone discussing that too much right now. Okay. Let me carry on harboring away and trying to persuade you that the way you're not knowing how your own mind is working is pretty much like knowing how other people's mind works. I mean, suppose you think about mental arithmetic. Sometimes we got a sum to do, like you can do it in your head, right? What's eight and 11? Eight and 11 class? Very good. You just did that in your head just like that, right? Okay, but sometimes you can get a sum that is just too hard to do in your head. So you have to do it on paper. I mean, let me try doing a long division. Can someone give me a big number? 453,000, is that it? And 63,000, right? Yeah, wait a minute. Oh, yes, right. I know how to write numbers. And could I have a number to divide into it? I could add three more. Oh, go ahead, add three more zeros. Boy, okay, you guys are hard, okay? So can I have a number to divide into it? 6.2, no decimals. 62, okay, what about 62? All right, so look, okay. Is that right? Is that right? Yes? It's a vertical line. Okay. Oh, not this. Oh, keep the tall line, okay. For the purposes of the demonstration, I'm a better example than you are. I mean, that's really impressive. And I wish I could do it, but, look, let's see, let me try and, since I can't do that, right? The whole point is I can't do that in my head. So how am I gonna do it on paper? So it's 62 into 45. So that doesn't go, right? So it's 62 into 453. Okay, so that's four, five, five, six, seven, seven. Yeah, okay, let's try seven. Seven twos are 14, and another one is 13. No, no, wait a minute, 43. I knew it was 43, right? And yeah, right. And then I subtract, and that goes four from three is nine, and four from five is one, and then there's a zero. Is that right? Yeah. Okay, so it's 62 into 190, which is over three, three? Three, yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay, I'm not sure I have the mental, I'm not sure I have the mental endurance to carry on much longer. Well, let me just do this, so that's 186, right? And then there's a four, and then there's a zero. Uh-oh. Is that right? That can't be right. That's a zero. Is that all right? That's a zero. Oh, I see, right, okay. Thank you. Okay, and then there's another zero. Okay. And so the long day wells on. Okay, we can leave the rest of that as homework. But look, the thing is, suppose you think of thinking as manipulating with symbols, right? You did that in your head. Yeah? You can work with the symbols in your head, and then you say, that's what Roland's thinker was doing, right? They were working with the symbols in their head. But what I was doing right there, I was working with the symbols out loud. I promise you is not, I wish I could say that I've got that far in my head, and then I just wrote it all out on paper, but I couldn't have got that far without writing it out on paper. I was working with the symbols in public. I sympathise if you say you wouldn't call that thinking, but in its humble way, it is the kind of thinking, right? So the act of thinking there was taking place on the board. All the manipulation of symbols was taking place on the board. You could see the thinking going on just as well as I could. It wasn't as if I cast my inner gaze into my head. Well, what I'd get if I cast my inner gaze into my head as damn all, except a series of cries of dismay or something. If I want to see the thinking, I've got to look at the board the same way you do. And actually, this is not really a special case. For lots of ordinary life, if you're having a conversation with someone, it can happen that you've got an agenda. This is really going to be a controlled conversation. And before you speak, before you say anything, you think through just which words you're going to use and how you're going to target that. But that is not the usual case. As we talk right now, as you guys raise challenges or objections or whatever, I promise you that what I say back, what you hear is all there is. All the things that you hear, all the thinking that's going on is going on out loud. It's not as if typically there's a whole bunch of calculation going on backstage, and then you're just seeing the outer reflection. What's going on in the mind is just as visible to you as it is to me. And ordinary social life, ordinary conversation is all like that. You observe the other person's thinking just by hearing them talk. So I think it's true that just as one student did that, you can do that same calculation in your head. And if you just clutch your head and do the calculation, maybe no one else can tell what you're thinking. But when you do it out loud, other people can observe the thinking just as well as you can yourself. And all the mental activity is being carried out in public. And when you think about it, that's the way it goes for lots of mental states. Suppose you're really angry with someone. Well, if you're well-bred and controlled, it can happen that the other person couldn't tell. Nobody could tell. They were just the merest quiver of your nostrils that might give it away that you were furiously angry with this person. But it can also happen that you do it out loud. It can also happen that you bang the table, that you shout, that you yell, that you grasp their arm. Anyway, that you do the whole thing. And when you do that, it's like thinking out loud. There may be nothing of the anger backstage. It's not as if the true anger is backstage and what's going on out loud is just some mere external accompaniment. Anymore than what's going on there is that the true calculation is going on in my head and the stuff in the board is just some mere external accompaniment. That's still for lots of cases. If you think about trying to find your watch, suppose you lost your watch and you're trying to find it, then one way you can do that is just by sitting there clutching your head and thinking, well, where did I see it last? But the other way you can do it is by looking under the table, looking in the fridge, looking on the shelf. You could hunt. Other people can see what you're doing just as well as you can in that case, even though you can also do it quietly. Ryle puts it like this. The fundamental classifications of the mind are ways of classifying behaviors. It is not as if there's always something inner. There is the real mental state as if when I was doing the calculation in the board, there's always something in the head. There's a real mental state or the real anger, and that's what psychology is concerned with. Really, what we're concerned with in psychology is the classification of behavior. What mental terms are doing is classifying behavior. People talk about, well, the mind is something underlying the behavior, and Ryle has this example. He says, looking for where the mind is is just a category mistake. He says, people hunt for the mind, and they say, is it in the brain? Is it in ectoplasm? Is it in something else? And he's got this example of showing someone the university. Suppose someone visits Berkeley, and you are keen to show off the splendors of the campus. You show them Wheeler Hall. You say, this is where the police routinely tear gases. This is where we like to hang from the windows. You say, look, there is the Campanile. There is the Merry Throne at lunchtime, and so on and so forth. There they all are. So you show your friend all around the campus, and your friend says, that's fantastic. So many spectacular and interesting sites. And then they say, but where? I've heard so much about the famous university of Berkeley. Where is it? I mean, is it the Campanile? No. Is it the Merry Throne at lunchtime? No. Is the university the same thing as Wheeler Hall? No. He says, are you showing me all these interesting sites? But where is the university? And you see what he's thinking. He's thinking that when he says, where is the university? That means that somewhere deep underground, maybe some dungeon below California Hall, is the real thing. That's where the University of California, Berkeley, is really located. That's a true thing. And the right answer is, that is just a mistake. The university is not something over and above all these other things. That was the university, all that stuff. There's no more to it than that. And similarly, when people say, well, yeah, I know you can do stuff like write stuff in the board, I know you can do stuff like write stuff in the board, or talk, have conversations about philosophy, shriek, stamp your fist, and so on. I know you can do all that, but where is the mind? That is a really puzzling thing. And the answer is, there is no more to having a mind than being able to engage in conversation, being able to interact with other people, being able to hunt for your watch when you've lost it. That's all there is to having a mind and searching for the true essence of the mind as if it's some ectoplasm in the brain, as if deep in some dungeon in the brain, we are going to find consciousness hiding. That is just a mistake. That is just a daft mistake, actually. There's an example Wittgenstein gives of expecting someone to come for tea at 4 o'clock. So you've invited, let us suppose, someone for tea at 4 o'clock. So you're expecting them then. So what happens? What goes on when you're expecting someone for tea? Well, you look at the clock as the time gets towards 4 o'clock. You guys know about tea, right? Tea? Okay, just checking. I never know. Okay. As the time gets towards 4 o'clock, you start to assemble the tea things. You look anxiously out of the window. You put water in the kettle. You pour the boiling water out of the kettle and into the teapot. That's what goes on when you're expecting someone at 4 o'clock. There's no more to expectation than that. It's not as if deep in a dungeon in the brain, there is some blob of sensation that's really expecting. That's a true expectation right in there in your head. All that's happening is all that stuff that is just perfectly visible behavior. So there's no more to your psychological life than complex behaviors. This is thought to be the kind of thing that Wigginsheim is imagining. There's the old boy there on the right. Okay. So that's getting behaviorism stated, but talking about the mind is just a way of talking about behavior. You don't have any special knowledge of your own mind. You don't have other people, but your own mind isn't particularly inaccessible to other people either. Fair enough. So that's a quite radically different picture today, Katz. No ectoplasm, just the ordinary behaviors, just ways of classifying ordinary behavior. That's fair enough. Can you put your hand up if you think that's right? Wow, good. I think this is a very important view, even if it's wrong, it probably is wrong. But there's something importantly right here too. According to Ryle, dualism is a kind of paramechanical hypothesis. That's to say, you've got the mechanics of the way the clockwork of the body works. You can think of the body as like a clockwork machine. And the mind is like a piece of ghostly clockwork, paramechanical in the same way we talk about parapsychology, that Descartes had made a mistake about the logic of his problem. Descartes was asking, what makes behavior intelligent? What makes behavior the exercise of a mind? And he should have been asking, what kind of complex behaviors would make us say that something had a mind? Instead, he said, well, given that mechanical causation by a brain is working pretty much the same in the case where you have a mind, in the case where you don't, what must be making the difference between intelligent behavior and behavior that's not intelligent is that there's some ghostly bit of clockwork making it go, and that's the ectoplasmic thing that really makes behavior intelligent. And psychology is what describes this ghostly clock. And it's supposed that each of us has their own ghostly clock, and you know about that by introspection. So you know how to classify your own behavior because you could look inwards at your own clock, but you can't see someone else's inner clockwork. So you never know really what's going on with other people. But Descartes was asking the wrong question there by asking about the causes of behavior. He should have been saying, how do you actually distinguish intelligent from non-intelligent behavior? If you're asking whether dolphins are intelligent, what you're asking is really a question about, how do they behave? And you wanna know something about what kind of behaviors they exhibit. So psychological terms on this kind of picture are just ways of classifying complex behaviors. They're not ways of identifying the causes of the behavior. We know what causes behavior. It's just bits of your brain. But that's not the same thing as the mind. Having a mind is a matter of how you behave, what the outcome is, how you interact with other people, that kind of thing. So analytical behaviorism is the idea that psychological words for what you want or what you like, what you are feeling, what you're, how you're thinking, they are just ways of classifying complex behaviors. That's all that's going on. Fair enough? So you see this is radically different to take up, yeah? Everything about the mind is on view. Sometimes you can hide it, but in principle, everything about your mind can be seen by other people. Yes? It could be a mistake, yes, yes. That's right. That's what Descartes has to start the fight back, that on this picture, even if you don't know, if you didn't know about anything about your behavior or other people's behavior, you wouldn't know anything about your mind, yeah? And that's what Descartes is saying, well, of course I know all about my mind, even if it was all a dream, yeah? Now, I agree that's powerful, but what I mean trying to do is to sabotage that. You know what I mean about saying, would you know that you have a good sense of humor? Yeah? I mean, maybe in your dream, everybody laughs, but I have dreams like that, right? But that doesn't show, that doesn't give you knowledge of what your psychological strengths are there. That's right, he's talking about how we actually talk about the mind, yeah? That's right. He's saying that's the only way to think about the mind. Yeah? I agree that the game isn't over, yeah? Really what I'm trying to do is to state what the game is. If you see what I mean, yeah, what the issue is here, yeah? Yeah? Well, words like desiring, feeling, being jealous, that kind of thing, yeah? Words that you can only use them in connection with a mind. So let me try and blast very quickly over a statement of what behaviorism is. I've taken a long time to try to shape up because if you don't take a while to shape up what the view is, it may seem just too crazy to take seriously. But I think it is actually the real insights in this way of thinking about the mind. So the idea is you could define psychological concepts in terms of behavior. Or here's Putnam, this is a quote from the Putnam article that we'll be looking at for next time. Putnam is not an analytical behaviorist. Putnam thinks it's a load of rubbish. So this is not Putnam's view. This is him just stating what the view is that he wants to attack. But Putnam says here's analytical behaviorism that exists in tellments between mind statements and behavior statements. In tellments that are not analytic. It's not when you say being angry is a matter of being inclined to shout, thump the table and hurt someone, then it's not that well that happens every single time. It's rather that you only understand what the word anger means when you understand that it's connected to things like shouting and banging the table and so on. So it's not as if you can translate, talk about anger and to talk about behavior. But that's only because of superficial reasons like talking about anger is relatively vague or unspecific compared to talk about exactly how you bang your fist in the table or whether you stamp or whether you shout. A description of behavior is always gonna be a bit more specific than talk about the mind. But when you describe someone's mind, what you're really doing is saying what kind of behaviors you can expect. Here's Rudolph Karnap, the great philosopher Karnap who defined A is excited as follows. Karnap said to say that A is excited is to assert the existence of that physical structure especially of a central nervous system that is characterized by a high pulse and rate of breathing which on the application of certain stimuli may be made even higher by vehement and factually unsatisfactory answers to questions by the occurrence of agitated movements on the application of certain stimuli, et cetera. So that's how you know whether you're excited. Are you giving vehement and factually unsatisfactory answers to questions? In that case, you're excited. Okay, but if Karnap's right, then you have no better knowledge of whether you're excited than anybody else does. Just in the last second, can we just take a vote on that? Do you have any better knowledge of whether you're excited than anyone else does? Can you put your hand up if you think you know better than anyone else? Well, I'll tell you whether I'm excited. If that's your view, uh-huh. And if you don't think that, okay, I would say it's a significant minority but a big minority, I mean a small minority that say it's the same. Okay, so we don't believe analytical behaviorism. Onwards, our next time is putting on brains and behavior. Thanks guys.