<text><span class="style10">ind and Body (2 of 3)</span><span class="style7"></span><span class="style10">Knowledge of other minds</span><span class="style7">Dualism gives rise to another problem: how do we know that minds other than our own do exist? Of course we see other human bodies around us, we hear seemingly articulate speech emanating from them, and we can apparently affect the behavior of these bodies in a way that suggests they have heard and understood our words and acted accordingly. But, for the dualist at least, none of this is conclusive evidence that other people have minds. The development of computers has given the </span><span class="style25">other-minds</span><span class="style7"> </span><span class="style25">problem</span><span class="style7"> a new lease of life. The languages of computing and human intellect have come to infect one another: we talk of a machine or a program deciding how to process a form, and of children being programmed by their early experiences. Although we know that computers merely apply rules in a de terminate manner and do not really think, such expressions no longer sound metaphorical, and the development of computers that are able to learn from their mistakes by amending their own programs offers the vision of a machine whose behavior is indistinguishable from that of a person.Perhaps another case sheds some light on this: the fact that scientists have taught chimpanzees to communicate in sign language at about the level of a 5-year-old child does not make them persons, yet we clearly regard this achievement as more significant than teaching a dog to walk on its hind legs. Dogs are said to recognize their owner's voice, horses refuse to jump, cats want to be let out, but frogs do not refuse and worms do not want. This suggests that whether we are prepared to talk of something as a person or treat it as a member of the moral community is not a matter of the existence or otherwise of some kind of immaterial entity, but rather of how close an analogy there is between its behavior and our own. The same ranking emerges in morality: few people have qualms about killing flies, while experiments on dogs cause more upset than those on rats; even the Nazis had first to portray their victims as 'sub-human' before wholesale murder could be presented as morally permissible. Perhaps then the concept of a person is itself a moral one: persons are those with whom we interact in terms of duties and obligations.</span><span class="style10">Materialism and behaviorism</span><span class="style7">The other-minds problem arose as a consequence of dualism, but dualism is not the only possible view of mind and body. Many philosophers have held instead that there is only one kind of substance. </span><span class="style25">Materialism</span><span class="style7"> is the theory that all that exists is material, physical substance, so that minds or souls as generally conceived do not exist. It is often suggested that neurology provides direct evidence for this, since mental impairment seems to be both the symptom and the consequence of brain damage. However, this is not conclusive against Descartes' view that the mind and body interact through the brain, for it could be that it is only the connections that are damaged and not the mind itself. Indeed, the common experience of stroke victims, who seem to know what they want to say and show frustration at their inability to express it, seems to be neurological evidence against materialism.Another problem with materialism is that the very fact that we understand each other's talk of minds and mental events suggests that there must be something about which we are talking. One form of </span><span class="style25">behaviorism</span><span class="style7"> denies that there are such things as minds, but avoids this objection by rejecting the naive referential view of how language works from which it would follow that mentalistic language is meaningless. Instead it is suggested that what look grammatically like expressions that refer to mental objects and events are in reality abbreviations for complex descriptions of behavior. This was the view of the English philosopher Giblet Ryle (1900-76), who argued that we do not judge someone a good chess player by inquiring about their mental processes but by observing that they consistently make the right moves. He claimed that Descartes' theory portrayed the mind as no more than a 'ghost in the machine', just as someone who had never before seen a car might insist that there must be a horse in it somewhere, albeit invisible and in tangible.</span></text>
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<text><span class="style10">ené Descartes’</span><span class="style7"> idea of vision, showing the passage of a nervous impulse from the eye to the pineal gland. Descartes believed that it was in the pineal gland that the mind and body interacted although they remained distinct and separate entities.</span></text>
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<text>ΓÇó ANIMAL COMMUNICATIONΓÇó THE BRAINΓÇó LEARNING, CREATIVITY AND INTELLIGENCEΓÇó SLEEP, DREAMS AND THE UN CONSCIOUSΓÇó ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCEΓÇó WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?ΓÇó KNOWLEDGE AND REALITYΓÇó ETHICSΓÇó LOGIC AND ARGUMENTΓÇó THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE</text>
