#86 Colin McGinn: Types of Minds, Consciousness, Animal Rights

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Dr. Colin McGinn has taught philosophy at institutions of higher learning including University College London, Rutgers University, and Oxford University. He’s the author of over two dozen books including The Character of Mind, Consciousness and Its Objects, and The Making of a Philosopher, and he has also written for the London Review of Books, The New Republic, Wall Street Journal, The New York Review of Books, and other publications.

In this episode, I talk with Dr. McGinn about minds and consciousness. More specifically, about what is a mind; the different types of minds; how to avoid dualism; if the phenomenology of consciousness can be scientifically explained; the continuity of mental capacities between animals; a couple of science fiction proposals, like creating conscious machines, and mind uploading; and animal rights.

Time Links:
00:54 Types of minds
02:16 But, what is a mind?
06:20 Is the mind a single entity?
09:06 Does dualism still make sense?
14:08 The mind of a bat
19:28 Are mental capacities continuous between species?
21:48 The mysteriousness of consciousness
28:48 Does consciousness have several parts?
32:32 Are there degrees of consciousness along the animal kingdom?
34:49 Is language important for consciousness?
40:09 Is it possible to create conscious machines?
44:07 And what about uploading minds to computers?
48:25 Types of minds and animal rights
55:20 Where to follow Dr. McGinn’s work
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A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, BRENDON J. BREWER, JUNOS, SCIMED, AND PER HELGE HAAKSTD LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, RUI BELEZA, MIGUEL ESTRADA, ANTÓNIO CUNHA, CHANTEL GELINAS, AND JIM FRANK!

I also leave you with the link to a recent montage video I did with the interviews I have released until the end of June 2018:

#TheDissenter #ColinMcGinn #Philosophy

[jonstewart]

Brilliant! Much like John Searle, whenever I listen to Colin McGinn I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with every word. Extremely easy to understand, fascinating and seems like the loveliest person around. Bravo!

[d.mavridopoulos]

Thank you for posting this. Can't get enough of McGinn !

[ReverendDr.Thomas]

mind:
Although the meaning of “mind” has already been provided in Chapter 05 of this “Final Instruction Sheet for Humanity”, it shall prove beneficial to further clarify that definition here in the Glossary. It is NOT implied that mind is the sum of the actual thoughts, the sensations, the memories, and the abstract images that inhabit the mental element (or the “space”) that those phenomena occupy, but the faculty itself. This mental space has two phases: the potential state (traditionally referred to as the “unconscious mind”), where there are no mental objects present (such as in deep sleep or during profound meditation), and the actualized state (usually referred to as the “conscious mind”), where the aforementioned abstract objects occupy one’s cognition (such as feelings of pain).

Likewise, the intellect and the pseudo-ego are the containers (or the “receptacles”) that hold conceptual thoughts and the sense of self, respectively. It is important to understand that the aforementioned three subsets of consciousness (mind, intellect, and false-ego) are not gross, tangible objects. Rather, they are subtle, intangible objects, that is, objects that can be perceived solely by an observant subject. The three subsets of consciousness transpire from certain areas of the brain (a phenomenon known as “strong emergence”), yet, as stated above, are not themselves composed of gross matter. Only a handful of mammal species possess intelligence (that is, abstract, conceptual thought processes), whilst human beings alone have acquired the pseudo-ego (the I-thought, which develops in infancy, following the id stage). Cf. “matter, gross”, “matter, subtle”, “subject”, and “object”.

In the ancient Indian systems of metaphysics known as “Vedānta” and “Sāṃkhya”, mind is considered the sixth sense, although the five so-called “external” senses are, nonetheless, nominally distinguished from the mind, which is called an “internal” sense. This seems to be quite logical, because, just as the five “outer” senses involve a triad of experience (the perceived, the perception, and the perceiver), so too does the mind comprise a triad of cognition (the known, the knowing, and the knower). See also Chapter 06.

P.S. There is much confusion (to put it EXTREMELY mildly) in both Western philosophy and in the so-called “Eastern” philosophical traditions, between the faculty of mind (“manaḥ”, in Sanskrit) and the intellect (“buddhiḥ”, in Sanskrit). Therefore, the following example of the distinction ought to help one to understand the difference between the two subtle material elements:

When one observes a movie or television show on the screen of an electronic device that one is holding in one’s hands, one is cognizing auditory, textural, and visual percepts, originating from external objects, which “penetrate” the senses of the body, just as is the case with any other mammal. This is the component of consciousness known as “mind” (at least according to the philosophical terminology of this treatise, which is founded on Vedānta, according to widely-accepted English translations of the Sanskrit terms).
However, due to our intelligence, it is possible for we humans (and possibly a couple of other species of mammals, although to a far less-sophisticated degree) to construct conceptual thoughts on top of the purely sensory percepts. E.g. “Hey – look at that silly guy playing in the swimming pool!”, “I wonder what will happen next?”, or “I hate that the murderer has escaped from his prison cell!”.

To provide an even more organic illustration of how the faculty of mind “blends” into the faculty of the intellect, consider the following example: When the feeling of hunger (or to be more precise, appetite) appears in one’s consciousness, that feeling is in the mind. When we have the thought, “I’m hungry”, that is a conceptual idea that is a manifestation of the intellect.

So, as a general rule, as animals evolve, they develop an intellectual faculty, in which there is an increasingly greater perception of, or KNOWLEDGE of, the external world (and in the case of at least one species, knowledge of the inner world). In addition to these two faculties of mind and intellect, we humans possess the false-ego (“ahaṃkāraḥ”, in Sanskrit). See Chapter 10 regarding egoity.