Flash Post: Other Minds
The epistemological problem of other minds is the challenge to answer this question:
How can one know that there are other minds like one’s own; i.e., how can one human person know that the other supposedly human persons he encounters possess tokens of the same type of consciousness that he possesses? How can one know that the others are not zombies, some other sort of non-conscious imposter, or perhaps tokens of another type of consciousness? (I’m referring to philosophical zombies, not Hollywood ones.)
This is an interesting problem, but it’s not what I have in mind for this post. Rather, I want to ask this question:
Suppose there are other types of mind, that is, non-human personal consciousnesses; and moreover, suppose that there are tokens of these other types: what would be the features of their kinds of consciousness?
I will call this the ontological problem of other types of mind.
I only have time to propose a small beginning of an answer. Arguably, intentionality (i.e., aboutness or of-ness) is an essential feature of consciousness. All mental states are about or of something. If this is correct, then all conscious beings have intentionality. Hence, a starting point for answering the question in bold is this:
One of the features of their types of mindedness would be intentionality, and at least in this respect, their consciousnesses would be like ours.
But theirs might well be quite different from ours in other important respects. Such as?
I’ll leave the “such as?” question for another time.