Phil 101: Star Witness (Parrot) reading and First Part of Leiber text

Three big categories of questions. (The questions are different though connected.)

1. What do minds consist of?

   We’ll be turning soon to debates about whether minds just inhere in our physical brains? or whether they involve some kind of non-physical soul.

   Another part of this question that we have already been addressing: what are the range/different important categories of mental states? We’ve mentioned:

   • feelings (emotions, conscious sensations)
   • thinking/reasoning, beliefs
   • having preferences, making choices/plans
   • memories
   • awareness of one’s self, reflecting on own mental resources
   • …

2. How can we know when creatures have minds or some of these mental states?

   We’re not expecting certain proof (can’t even have that about other humans). But what can at least give us good reason to believe that animals have various of these?

   Our current readings don’t challenge whether animals have feelings like pain. (Some later reading will.) These readings instead focus on what cognitive abilities animals have: which representational states, whether they can reason, what concepts they understand.

   Criteria (kinds of evidence) considered:

   1. brains and biology, evolutionary continuity (Star Witness discusses pp. 9-10 and 15-16, excludes pp. 20-22; see Leiber pp. 6-9)

   2. language? (Star Witness pp. 23-6)

   3. other kinds of behavior (we extrapolate from what causes them in our own case)

      • trying to avoid bodily damage and threats
      • seeming to expect something unpleasant
      • navigating obstacles
      • learning, solving problems
      • can deceive or persuade others?

   Maybe no single piece of evidence will be conclusive, but many may fit together to build a persuasive case.

   Star Witness focuses on whether parrot has “episodic” memories and can reliably report them (pp. 11-12, 30-31). Maybe parrot has thoughts, but the concepts it thinks with and expresses with its words don’t map exactly onto our own. The reading discusses this many times, regarding:

   • “Casey” (p. 16)
   • “squirrel” (pp. 5-6)
   • “peanut” (pp. 16-17)
   • “gazelle” (p. 17)
   • “death” (pp. 31-4)

   (Asking whether an animal has some general mental capacity we have, versus whether it has the same specific concepts or experiences we have.)

3. Why does it matter?

   The discussions connect having some mental capacities (it’s controversial which) to the status of “being a person.” What does this mean?

   • it’s connected to idea of one’s having special rights, “mattering” in special ways for how others can ethically treat you
   • are there going to be universal, non-arbitrary criteria for being a person? or is every species just going to count its own members? (Leiber p. 21)
   • is personhood all-or-nothing? or can it come in degrees? (Leiber p. 7)
   • what mental capacities does being a person take? is an infant already a person? what about humans who are senile or have other cognitive impairments? (Leiber pp. 38-9)
   • what’s going on with the kind of “legal personhood” corporations can have? (Leiber p. 9)