Gray Kurt James - The mind club: who thinks, what feels, and why it matters

Chapter 1

WELCOME TO THE CLUB

N othing seems more real than the minds of others. Every day, you consider what your boss might be thinking, whether your spouse is happy, and what that shady crew of teenagers wants. The apparent reality of other minds is so powerful that youve likely never stopped to ask whether they actually exist. But there is a very real possibility that everyone you know could be mindless zombies.

Even your mother could be a zombie. She may not shuffle, groan, or eat brains, but she could still be a philosophical zombiesomeone who acts and speaks normally but who lacks conscious experiences. Your life may be filled with rich mental experiences, but your mothers could be completely empty. Instead of a bustling city of thought and emotion, Moms mental life might be like a Hollywood set, with only the appearance of reality. When you hug each other, you might feel warm and safe, but her brain might only robotically register the pressure of your arms. Now, you might think, No, not my mother! but how could you prove otherwise? Even sophisticated brain scans cant reveal what its like to be another person.

That your mother might be a fleshy automaton stems from the philosophical problem of other minds. Because we can never directly experience the inside of other minds, many questions about them are fundamentally unanswerable. Do strawberries taste the same to you as to someone else? Is your blue the same as someone elses blue? Perhaps when you look at the sky, you see what someone else would call yellow. If youre a man, then you can never know what it feels like to give birth. If youre a woman, then you can never know what it feels like to be kicked in the goolies.

More fundamental than the uncertainty of other peoples specific experiences, you can never be certain that other minds even exist. You might be the only mind in the whole world, the sole sentient being in a crowd of mindless drones or the lone true thinker within a computer-generated matrix.

The uncertainty of other minds has fueled centuries of philosophizing and also lies at the heart of some of the most interestingand most terriblehuman behavior. As we will see, it can explain how the Nazis could murder six million Jews, why animals are sometimes tortured for sport, and why people debate the existence of God so intensely. The mysterious nature of other minds can also help to explain the behavior of one British man named Dennis Nilsen.

Dennis Nilsen was born in 1945 in a seaside town in Scotland. After a brief stint in the army, he moved to London, where he worked first as a police officer and then as a civil servant. Despite his good job, Nilsen felt unfulfilled and isolated; he seldom spoke to his family, had few friends, and had difficulty maintaining close relationships. He also had dark fantasies about sexually dominating young men, whom he liked to imagine as completely passive or even unconscious. After the dissolution of one relationship, Nilsen began luring young men into his apartment with the promise of food, alcohol, and lodging. Once they were asleep, Nilsen would strangle them into unconsciousness before drowning and dismembering them in the bathtub. He managed to murder fifteen people before being discovered and sentenced to prison for life.

Strikingly, although Nilsen was a ruthless murderer of other people, he had the deepest affection for his dog, a mutt named Bleep. Following his arrest, Nilsens biggest concern was not about the families of those men he killed, or even about himself, but about his furry companionwould she be traumatized by his arrest? How could Nilsen be indifferent to the pain of those he murdered and yet be overwhelmed by the possible suffering of his dog?

Perhaps the answer is that his dog was special and somehow had deeper emotions and richer thoughtsthat is, more mindthan his victims. Most of us would scoff at this idea. No matter how cunning Nilsens canine, we generally agree that people have more mind than dogs, which means that people deserve more compassion and concern than dogs. But Nilsen decided otherwise, believing that his dog had more mind than people, which gave Bleep essential moral rights denied to humans. Nilsen disagreed with the rest of us about the relative status of humans and dogs in the mind club.