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

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

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From dogs to gods, the science of understanding mysterious minds--including your own. Nothing seems more real than the minds of other people. When you consider what your boss is thinking or whether your spouse is happy, you are admitting them into the mind club. Its easy to assume other humans can think and feel, but what about a cow, a computer, a corporation? What kinds of mind do they have? Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray are award-winning psychologists who have discovered that minds--while incredibly important--are a matter of perception. Their research opens a trove of new findings, with insights into human behavior that are fascinating, frightening and funny. The Mind Club explains why we love some animals and eat others, why people debate the existence of God so intensely, how good people can be so cruel, and why robots make such poor lovers. By investigating the mind perception of extraordinary targets--animals, machines, comatose people, god--Wegner and Gray explain what it means to have a mind, and why it matters so much. Fusing cutting-edge research and personal anecdotes, The Mind Club explores the moral dimensions of mind perception with wit and compassion, revealing the surprisingly simple basis for what compels us to love and hate, to harm and to protect--

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VIKING An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York New - photo 1
VIKING An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York New - photo 2

VIKING

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

penguin.com

Copyright 2016 by The Estate of Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

ISBN 978-1-101-60642-1

Version_1

Contents
Preface

I n Jorge Luis Borgess short story The Secret Miracle, a writer is unjustly imprisoned by the Nazis and sentenced to death. On the eve of his execution, he prays to God, asking for a year to finish his play. That night he dreams that his prayer is answered, but the next morning he is nevertheless led down to the firing squad in gloomy rain. As he stands in front of four soldiers, a heavy drop of rain graze[s] [his] temple and roll[s] slowly down his cheek; the sergeant call[s] out the final order.

But suddenly, miraculously, the universe stops:

The weapons converged upon [him], but the men who were to kill him were immobile. The sergeants arm seemed to freeze, eternal, in an inconclusive gesture.... As though in a painting, the wind had died. [He] attempted a scream, a syllable, the twisting of a hand. He realized that he was paralyzed. He could hear not the slightest murmur of the halted word. He thought... time has halted....

He had asked God for an entire year in which to finish his work; God in His omnipotence had granted him a year. God had performed for him a secret miracle: the German bullet would kill him, at the determined hour, but in [his] mind a year would pass between the order to fire and the discharge of the rifles.

In this secret year the writer crafts his play into perfection. Without the aid of movement, or speech, or writing, he repeats the acts in his head, honing every paragraph and polishing every word. At long last [h]e complete[s] his play; only a single epithet [is] left to be decided upon now. He [finds] it; the drop of water roll[s] down his cheek. He [begins] a maddening cry, he [shakes] his head, and the fourfold volley fell[s] him.

In 2010 Dan Wegner was diagnosed with ALS. This degenerative disease slowly destroyed his ability to walk, to stand, to move, to talk, to eat, andeventuallyto breathe. Before his diagnosis, Dan had conceived of this book in his mind, butlike Borgess prisonerhad only just begun writing it. Recognizing the inexorable march of his disease, Dan asked me to join him and help transform the ideas into words. It is my hope that his wisdom and wit shine through in these chapters; if they do not, the fault is mine alone.

My miracle, it is no secret, was having Dan as my graduate adviser. This book is dedicated to his creativity and unique perspective, to his witty one-liners, his collection of robots, and his ability to render clear the mysteries of human experience. May we always perceive his mind.

KG

Chapter 1 WELCOME TO THE CLUB N othing seems more real than the minds of - photo 3
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.

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