All human beings are mortal
I am a human being.
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Therefore … I am a mortal.
But for the substitution of “I” for “Socrates” this is the most classical of all syllogisms. What kind of evidence is there for the two premises? The first premise presumes an abstract category, the class of human beings. The second premise is that I too belong to that class, despite the seemingly radical difference between myself and every other member of that class (which Harding is so fond of pointing out).
The idea of classes about which general statements can be made is not so shocking, but it it seems to be a rather advanced property of intelligence to be able to formulate classes beyond those that are part of an innate repertoire. Bees seem to have the class “flower” down pretty well, but it is doubtful that they can formulate a concept of “chimney” or “human.” Dogs and cats seem to be able to manufacture new classes, such as “food dish,” “door,” “toy,” and so on. But people are by far the best at the piling up of new category upon new category. This capacity is at the core of human nature and is a profound source of joy. Sportscasters and scientists and artists all give us great pleasure in their formulation of new kinds of concepts that enter our mental vocabulary.
The other part of the first premise is the general concept of death. That something can vanish or be destroyed is a very early discovery. The food in the spoon vanishes, the rattle falls off the high chair. Mommy goes away for a while, the balloon pops, the newspaper in the fireplace burns up, the house a block down the street is razed and so on. All very shocking and disturbing, certainly—but still acceptable. The swatted fly, the sprayed mosquitoes these build on the previous abstractions, and we come to the general concept of death. So much for the first premise.
(Patricks note.. In view of this, why do we insist in still thinking that WE are special and that WE and only WE live after death????)))
The second premise is the tricky one. As a child I formulated the abstraction “human being” by seeing things outside of me that had something in common—appearance, behaviour and so on. That this particular class could then “fold back” on me and engulf me—this realization necessarily comes at a later stage of cognitive development, and must be quite a shocking experience, although probably most of us do not remember it happening.
The truly amazing step, though, is the conjunction of the two premises. By the time we’ve developed the mental power to formulate them both, we also have developed a respect for the compelling of simple logic. But the sudden conjunction of these two premises slaps us in the face unexpectedly. It is an ugly, brutal blow that sends us reeling—probably for days, weeks, months. Actually, for years—for our whole lives! But somehow we suppress the conflict and turn it in other directions.
Do higher animals have the ability to see themselves as members of a class? Is a dog capable of (wordlessly) thinking the thought, “I bet I look like those dogs over there”? Imagine the following gory situation. A ring is formed of, say, twenty animals of one sort. An evil human repeatedly spins a dial and walks over to the designated animal and knifes it to death in front of the remaining ones. Is it likely that each one will realize its impending doom, will think, “That animal over there is just like me, and my goose may soon be cooked just as his was. Oh, no!”? ((Patrick’s note.. YES, animals do know, cows at the abattoir know they are going to be slaughtered… smack one dog and my others know they had better go hide....)
This ability to snap oneself onto others seems to be the exclusive property of members of higher species. (it is the central topic of Thomas Nagel’s article, “What is it like to be a Bat?” reprinted in selection 24.) One begins by making partial mappings: “I have feet, you have feet; I have hands, you have hands; hmm.. “ These partial mappings then can induce a total mapping. Pretty soon, I conclude from your having a head that I too have one, although I can’t see mine. But this stepping outside myself is a gigantic and, in some ways, self-denying step. It contradicts much direct knowledge about myself. It is like Harding’s two distinct types of verb “to see”—when applied to myself it is quite another thing than when it applies to you. The power of this distinction gets overcome, however, by the sheer weight of too many mappings all the time, establishing without doubt my membership in a class that I formulated originally without regard to myself.
So logic overrides intuition. Just as we could come to believe that our Earth can be round—as is the alien moon—without people falling off, so we finally come to believe that the solipsistic view is nutty. Only a powerful vision such as Harding’s Himalayan experience can return us to that primordial sense of self and otherness, which is at the root of the problems of consciousness, soul, and self.
Do I have a brain? Will I actually die? We all think about such questions many times during our lives. Occasionally, probably every imaginative person thinks that all of life is a huge joke or hoax—perhaps a psychology experiment—being perpetrated by some inconceivable superbeing, seeing how far it can push us into believing obvious absurdities (the idea that sounds that I can’t understand really mean something. The idea that someone can hear Chopin or eat chocolate ice-cream without loving it, the idea that light goes at the same speed in any reference frame, the idea that I am made of inanimate atoms, the idea of my own death, and so on). But unfortunately (or fortunately), that “conspiracy theory” undermines itself, since it postulates another mind—in fact a superintelligence and therefore inconceivable one—in order to explain away other mysteries.
There seems to be no alternative to accepting some sort of incomprehensible quality in existence. Take your pick. We all fluctuate delicately between a subjective and objective view of the world, and this quandary is central to human nature.
D.R.H.
Something peculiar has been going on in science for the past 100 years or so. Many researchers are unaware of it, and others won’t admit it even to their own colleagues. But there is strangeness in the air.
What has happened is that biologists, who once postulated a privileged role for the human mind in nature’s hierarchy, have been moving relentlessly toward the hard-core materialism that characterized nineteenth-century physics. At the same time, physicists, faced with compelling experimental evidence, have been moving away from strictly mechanical models of the universe to a view that sees the mind as playing an integral role in all physical events. It is as if the two disciplines were on two fast-moving trains, going in opposite directions and not noticing what is happening across the tracks.
This role reversal by biologists and physicists has left the contemporary psychologist in an ambivalent position. From the perspective of biology, the psychologist studies phenomena that are far removed from the core of certainty, that is, the submicroscopic world of atoms and molecules. From the perspective of physics, the psychologist deals with “the mind,” and undefined primitive that seems at once essential and impenetrable. Clearly both views embody some measure of truth—and a resolution of the problem is essential to deepening and extending the foundations of behavioural science.
4
“Rediscovered the Mind,” by Harold J. Morowitz. From