Animals

  • to Philosophy of Mind"> An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind

    adminAnimals, Computers, Dualism, Free Choice, Knowledge, Mental States, Pain, Pleasure, Science

    When you think about the mind you can easily find yourself feeling confused. You might start asking questions like these: What is a mind? How does it relate to the body, something that is physical? Is it something we have control over? How does one know that other people have minds? Could computers have minds? Do animals have minds? These are the sorts of questions that philosophers of mind wonder about and have also given answers to. Though there is no consensus to these answers. In the lectures to come, you will get to think about these questions and other related questions. You will see how philosophers think about them too. As you ponder the questions try to think slowly about them. I once read that to do philosophy is to think in slow motion. You may react initially emotionally to a question, but try to fight this reaction. Think about your reasons for your beliefs and think about why someone might disagree with you. You strengthen your views when you can give reasonable responses to objections to them. The questions that philosophers ask about the mind are difficult to answer. This is why philosophers are still trying to answer them for so many centuries.  Part of the reason philosophy is enjoyed is that it can be therapeutic. Even if you can’t be sure of the answers to the questions, the act of thinking about them in a slow, reasoned way can sometimes help remove some of the confusion.

    In the paragraph above I used the term ‘mind’. However, in the lectures I will rarely, if ever, use this term. Instead, I will use the term ‘mental state’ for two reasons. One reason I do this is that the term ‘mind’ may suggest that it is a kind of thing, and this view is controversial. Some philosophers do think of the mind as a kind of thing that has or supports mental states, such as thoughts and feelings. But there are other philosophers who think of the mind, not as a thing, but rather as collection of mental states, that belong to a brain. Although philosophers disagree about whether a mind is a thing, almost all agree that there are mental states. Another reason I have chosen to use the term ‘mental state’ instead of ‘mind’ in the lectures is that the term ‘mind’ may cause you to think that we’re just talking about human minds. We must, however, think more generally when thinking about the mind, for there may be other things besides humans that may have minds. Most of us believe that animals have minds. Some philosophers believe that computers could have minds. If there are extra-terrestrial beings or if God exists, we may wonder about their minds. So for the sake of generality, the questions that we will explore will focus on mental states, not minds. Let me say a little more about these questions. (more…)

  • Mental States and Animals

    adminAnimals, Mental States

    In the last post, we discussed whether computers could have mental states. This is a highly controversial issue, especially among philosophers. What’s relatively not controversial, even among philosophers, is whether animals have mental states. By “animals” I mean non-human animals. Anyone who has had a cat or a dog as a pet takes it for granted that animals have mental states. Many pet owners describe their pets as being highly intelligent. [Watch this video and you will see some amazing intelligent crow behavior.] Besides intelligence, many pet owners say that their animals have the following mental states: sensations (e.g. they are in pain), perceptions (e.g. they can see and smell and hear and taste), emotions (e.g. they are scared or excited or happy), desires (e.g. they are hungry or tired) and memories (e.g. they remember where who you are or where a bone is buried – check out this video). Some pet owners even insist that their dogs dream. If these pet owners are correct, then animals, at least some of them, such as dogs, maybe even cats, have many of the types of mental states that humans have.

    But how similar are the mental states of non-human animals to the mental states of humans? Humans have thoughts about things. But can dogs or cats have thoughts about things? When you have a thought about something you think about it in a certain way, from a certain ‘conceptual point of view’. For instance, I think that there are electric cars in the United States, my thought is directed at something (cars) under a certain description (as being electric and existing in the United States). If we say that an animal has a thought, do we know what the thought is about. For instance, if you tell a dog to jump in the car, and the dog does it, do we know what the dog is thinking about? Is it thinking anything about the car? Does it think of it as something that has wheels or an engine? Probably not. If it is thinking of it as a car, how does it conceive of a car? If we cannot answer this, can we say that it has an thought about the car, or more generally, any thoughts at all?

    Even if we can know that animals have thoughts and what their thoughts are about, there isn’t much evidence that most animals have higher-order thoughts. A higher-order thought is a thought that is directed at another mental state, such as being in pain. We have thoughts about things in the world, e.g. cars and trees. But we also can think about our thoughts about these things. We can also think about the thoughts of others. Thus, we have higher-order thoughts.

    According to some philosophers, the fact that we have higher-order thoughts explains why our actions can be morally evaluated. When we do something for a reason, we can think think about the reason and evaluate whether it’s a moral reason. Did she kill her husband because she thought she was threatened? If her reason for acting was that she felt threatened, then we may decide that her act of killing is not wrong. Animals seem to act for reasons. The cat bit my foot because he was hungry. But is there any evidence that an animal can think about its reasons for acting. Can the cat think about its hunger. There is little to no evidence that a dog or a cat can think about its own thoughts or the thoughts of others. Furthermore, if an animal cannot think about its own thoughts, then, according to some philosophers, this means that the animal cannot have conscious mental states.

    Before we discuss these challenges to animal mental states, I want to explain why most philosophers agree with pet owners that animals have at least some mental states, even though we cannot experience or directly observe them.

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