Anybody Home? Who Has a Mind and Why it Matters

Esteemed social psychologists illuminate the serious moral implications of one trippy question

By Kurt Gray

Does a turnip have a “mind?” You read me. It seems like an absurd question and it is. But psychologists Kurt Gray and the late Daniel Wegner show us in their new book that who has a “mind” makes the difference (literally) between life and death. A mind can endow someone, or something, with the ability to feel and think — to be hurt and to hurt.

This excerpt from “The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels and Why It Matters” (The Viking Press, Penguin Publishing Group) released on March 22, 2016, explores how the millennia-old philosophical question “what makes a ‘mind’?” has pragmatic consequences for the way we treat everybody and everything in our lives.

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.” 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.

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

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 actually had more mind — deeper thoughts and richer feelings — 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 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.”

The mind club is that special collection of entities upon which we bestow the ability to think and feel. It is that all-important league of mental heroes whose superpowers are not X-ray vision or teleportation but, instead, the ability to experience and understand the world. 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.

A copyright debate ensued after a monkey took this photo of herself. Did she mean to take it? If so, does she own the photo?/ Public Domain via Wiki Commons

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. 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?”¹

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.

A survey found that people perceive different entities to have varying amounts of two qualities that make a mind: experience (feelings) and agency (thinking and acting)

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.

¹ The first woman to earn a PhD in psychology, Margaret Floy Washburn, fanned the controversy back in 1908 with a forceful argument in favor of dogs and other animal minds

From “The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels and Why It Matters,” by Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray, published on March 22, 2016 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright by Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray, 2016.