The Mind Club: Who Thinks What Feels and Why It Matters Read online

  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

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  Chapter 1: WELCOME TO THE CLUB

  Chapter 2: THE ANIMAL

  Chapter 3: THE MACHINE

  Chapter 4: THE PATIENT

  Chapter 5: THE ENEMY

  Chapter 6: THE SILENT

  Chapter 7: THE GROUP

  Chapter 8: THE DEAD

  Chapter 9: GOD

  Chapter 10: THE SELF

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Preface

  In Jorge Luis Borges’s 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 sergeant’s 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, and—eventually—to breathe. Before his diagnosis, Dan had conceived of this book in his mind, but—like Borges’s prisoner—had 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

  Nothing 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 you’ve 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 zombie—someone who acts and speaks normally but who lacks conscious experiences. Your life may be filled with rich mental experiences, but your mother’s could be completely empty. Instead of a bustling city of thought and emotion, Mom’s 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 can’t reveal what it’s like to be another person.

  That your mother might be a fleshy automaton stems from the philosophical “problem of other minds.”1 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 else’s blue? Perhaps when you look at the sky, you see what someone else would call yellow. If you’re a man, then you can never know what it feels like to give birth. If you’re a woman, then you can never know what it feels like to be kicked in the goolies.

  More fundamental than the uncertainty of other people’s 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 interesting—and most terrible—human 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, Nilsen’s biggest concern was not about the families of those men he killed, or even about himself, but about his furry companion—would 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 thoughts—that is, more mind—than his victims. Most of us would scoff at this idea. No matter how cunning Nilsen’s canine, we generally agree that people have more mind than dogs, which means that people deserve more com
passion 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.”

  The mind club is that special collection of entities who can think and feel. It is that all-important league of mental heroes whose superpowers are not X-ray vision or teleportation but instead simply the ability for thought and emotion. Members in the mind club are “minds,” whereas nonmembers are simply “things.”

  Who belongs in this mind club? To begin with, we can probably rule out the turnip. It seems safe to say we aren’t missing much by assuming that there’s nobody home in there. At the other extreme are things that almost definitely have minds, like you and us. The snooty remark goes “and we’re not so sure about you,” but we are reasonably sure about you or we wouldn’t be bringing this up to you now.

  We are likely all members of the mind club. But how should we understand the things that fall between us and the turnip? What shall we make of dogs, chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants, or, for that matter, cats? Do they have minds? Really—cats? If we get serious about doorkeeping at the mind club, we also have to deal with newborn infants, unborn human fetuses, and people in persistent vegetative states—they could never be mistaken for turnips, but their minds can be sadly inscrutable.

  Then too we need to sort through the minds of intelligent robots and chess-playing supercomputers, angry mobs and cruel killers, and even companies like Google and Walmart. Some suggest that “corporations are people” and have their own minds—is that true? The application list for the mind club is already diverse, and we haven’t even mentioned entities that only some people believe in, such as gods or devils or angels or spirits of the dead. None of these things are turnips—but do they have minds?

  You’re probably thinking that you could sort through the candidates for the mind club pretty quickly, deciding who’s allowed past the bouncer and who has to wait outside in the cold. But could you explain how you decided, and would anyone agree with you? Scuffles over membership in the mind club have preoccupied philosophers for centuries, with no easy answers in sight.2 At one point the whole field of psychology split in two over the question of whether animals think—with behaviorists saying, “No way!” and everyone else saying “Wait a minute, what about my dog?”*3

  The questions about mind echo outside science and philosophy. Every day, judges and juries puzzle over just how “sound of mind” someone needs to be to bear responsibility for a crime. Mind is also the key to legal definitions of life itself. Consider the case of Jahi McMath, a little girl who was declared brain-dead after a botched tonsillectomy but whose parents still saw signs of mind in her hospital-bed twitches. At one point she was legally dead in California but legally alive in New Jersey—which ruling was correct depended on whether she had a mind.

  Membership in the mind club is immensely important, because it comes with clear privileges: those with minds are given respect, responsibility, and moral status, whereas those without minds are ignored, destroyed, or bought and sold as property. In historical cases where slavery was allowed, it was often justified by a belief that the enslaved people had a different kind of mind.

  Because of the importance of mind club membership, it would be nice if there were a clear admission rule to help us decide, just like the signs at amusement parks announcing that we have to be “at least this tall” to ride the roller coasters. Decisions of mind are quite easy at the extremes. Just as adults get to ride the coasters and toddlers are banished to the teacups, the extremes of mind are obvious: you have a mind and deserve moral rights, whereas the turnip doesn’t have a mind and can be eaten for dinner.

  But the tough questions about minds turn on nuance. Just as we’re not sure whether the kid with big hair and thick-soled shoes is really tall enough for the roller coaster, we cannot be sure whether a talented dog or developing fetus is in the club, or whether a sophisticated robot or someone with severe brain damage is out.

  The difficult cases of mind are called cryptominds. Some cryptominds have more “objective” mind than others. People can discuss Shakespeare, whereas dogs can only bark, but mind is seldom about these objective characteristics. Instead, as the case of Nilsen and Bleep suggests, mind is in the eye of the beholder. A mind is not an objective fact as much as it is a gift given by the person who perceives it. Mind is a matter of perception, with members being granted admission into the mind club based not on what they are but on what they appear to be. To get in, you need to look like you have a mind.

  There are many ways to look like you have a mind, such as wearing glasses or nodding knowingly when someone mentions Proust. But that’s not the point. The point is that minds are perceived into existence. The creation of minds through perception is best illustrated by a famous thought experiment known as the Turing test, which was devised in 1950 by British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing.*

  In the Turing test a person converses via text messages with two different entities—one human and one computer programmed to act like a human—and must decide which is which.4 At first this seems like an absurdly easy test, but as the cartoon caption goes, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” What could you ask at the keyboard that could possibly determine whether there is a human mind on the other end?

  Figure 1: The Turing Test

  You (on the bottom) must decide which of two texting entities is a computer and which is a fellow human being.

  Any widely known facts or ideas would be useless, as a computer could easily be programmed to recall those, just like IBM’s Jeopardy-winning Watson. Instead you might think to quiz the mind candidate about human sensations—say, “Please describe the smell of old books” or “Tell me what it feels like to have an orgasm.” But a computer could be programmed to describe those things too: “Old books smell heavy and musty, like a sleepy old forest” or “An orgasm feels better than just about anything and is a little bit like a sneeze.” Of course, the computer can’t really have an orgasm, but with enough exclamation points, it could certainly fake it—and how would you know the difference?

  Turing thought that if you couldn’t tell which entity was a person and which was a computer, then the creator of the computer would have succeeded in making a mind—a genuine case of artificial intelligence. If a computer can fool you into perceiving a mind, then, by Jove, it has one.

  We do our own version of the Turing test every day as we discern which things have minds and which things don’t. But what do we mean when we say something has a mind? Is “mind” a single unified dimension with humans at the top and turnips at the bottom? Just as a single IQ scale can represent people’s general mental ability, perhaps we simply see minds from “no mind” to “maximum mind.”

  For many centuries theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas have argued for this one-dimensional view, a “great chain of being” starting down at minerals and going up through vegetables, animals, people, the angels, and finally God.5 The one-dimensional view is also echoed by the philosophical approach of Daniel Dennett in his book Kinds of Minds.6 He suggests that there is a chain of perceiving mind through three different “stances.”

  The first is the “physical stance,” in which we view entities as completely mindless and understand them only through physical characteristics, such as mass and momentum. When we predict the action of a boulder, we need only know its weight and velocity. The second is the “design stance,” in which we view entities as themselves mindless but perceive the marks of mind upon them. When we use a screwdriver, for example, we understand that it was made by a mind for a purpose. Finally we can take the “intentional stance,” in which we recognize the behavior of entities as being based upon intention and desire. To predict people’s actions, it is certainly more useful to know what they think and want than
their mass and momentum.

  These one-dimensional approaches to mind have long been the rule, but we wondered whether people might make finer distinctions, grading minds not just in terms of “more” or “less” mind but also on different mental capacities. Maybe we see mind along multiple dimensions, like the reading, writing, and math scores of the SAT. We might use dozens or even hundreds of ways of distinguishing minds from nonminds. Knowing how people naturally perceive minds is essential for understanding the trickiest cryptominds and the moral chaos that encircles them.

  One might think we’d need sophisticated tools to study mind perception—brain scanners, electrodes, Bunsen burners, and Erlenmeyer flasks—but instead we just asked some people. A lot of people. Together with Heather Gray,* we conducted an online survey that asked 2,499 people to judge both standard minds and cryptominds7—the “mind survey.” This was our first foray into the new science of mind perception, and these results form the foundation for this book. Our lab has since delved into robots,8 the dead and vegetative patients,9 adult film stars,10 torture victims,11 and God,12 but it all started with this single survey on mind perception.

  The survey began by introducing respondents to thirteen potential minds, each with descriptions and pictures: Sharon Harvey, an advertising executive; Todd Billingsley, an accountant; Nicholas Gannon, a five-month-old; Samantha Hill, a five-year-old; Toby, a wild chimpanzee; Gerald Schiff, a patient in a persistent vegetative state; Delores Gleitman, recently deceased; Charlie, a family dog; Kismet, a sociable robot built at the MIT Media Lab; a green frog; a seven-week human fetus; you, the respondent; and finally, God.

  We also selected nineteen different mental abilities, drawing from psychology, philosophy, and literature. The philosopher Jeremy Bentham discussed the importance of pain and pleasure in judgments of moral status, so we included them. The Stoics suggested that the capacities of self-control and planning were what separated the minds of people from those of other animals, so we included them. Through Hamlet’s famous speech about “What a piece of work is a man,” Shakespeare emphasized the human mental powers of thought and understanding, so we included them. As pure reason may not be sufficient for a full mind, we included feelings like joy, embarrassment, and emotion recognition. We also included more “physical” capacities like hunger and desire, and other capacities like memory, pride, and communication.