Other Minds and Zombies
Plus our upcoming café on paying attention, our first philosophy festival, suggested readings and resources, and more.
Introduction
By Sofia Panasiuk
It may not be a terrible idea to believe that other people aren’t zombies. Believing otherwise would imply that your favourite colleague, the friend meeting you for dinner this evening, and even your first cousin twice removed lack minds that experience the world like you do. They might even lack the ability to experience anything at all—how lonely… and spooky 👻! At our Halloween-themed Curiosity Café last Tuesday, moderated by our very own Alexandra Gustafson and Marybel Menzies, we grappled with the possibility that other minds might be unlike our own, and questioned whether any evidence could persuade us otherwise. But first:
Featured Content:
Curiosity Café Recap: Other Minds and Zombies
Community Survey
Upcoming Events (including our Philosophy Festival from November 19–23!)
Toronto Events
Readings & Resources
Curiosity Café Recap: Other Minds and Zombies
By Sofia Panasiuk
Our Curiosity Café last Tuesday began with a simple online experiment that you, our reader, can also complete at home. Here’s the link. The experiment is quite simple—it shows you a colour on the blue-green spectrum and asks you to label it as “blue” or “green.” After labelling eight colours you will receive a test score that tells you where your blue-green hue boundary is. This boundary tells you at what hue your “blue” becomes a “green.” Here’s the rub—almost no one at the café shared the same boundary.
So what does this have to do with other minds? Our moderators, Alexandra Gustafson and Marybel Menzies, explained that if we can’t even seem to agree about colour, how could we possibly hope to agree on our more complicated experiences like emotions?
With that in mind, here’s a small sample of what we heard you say in the large group discussion:
Similarities in the way we experience emotions may point to similarities in our minds. If we, for example, experience sadness around our temples, and joy in our hearts, could that be indicative of similarities in neurological structure and function?
On the other hand, our emotions may reside in different locations as a result of a deliberate effort to put them there, rather than inherent differences in our minds. For example, one attendee shared how she “moved” her sadness from her temple to her throat so that she could work through her sadness through song.
It may not be possible to fully feel certain emotions without having the concept of them first. To make sense of what we are feeling, it can be helpful to become acquainted with the concept of that experience. For example, we might feel a tension in our chest, but have no identifying label for it. Once we learn that it could be stress, or perhaps heartache, it gives meaning to the experience and helps us make sense of it.
At the same time, labels might alienate us from the feeling because language often falls short of reality. Language that is scientific and precise can often fail to capture reality as it is experienced. Furthermore, conveying an experience to someone else requires that we ourselves have clarity over the moment—a high bar to aim for.
We feel like our experiences have more in common with others’ when we have fewer, more abstract words to describe them, and we rely on our imaginations to infer what others are experiencing.
We may fail to relate to others’ emotions because of differences in language and culture. Some languages give precise labels to emotions in order to understand them. For example, “Fremdschämen” is a German word for embarrassment that we feel on behalf of someone else. Other languages, like English, may not have precise words for this feeling. In light of an earlier point on the clarifying function of labels, the lack of a specific word may prevent one from experiencing the corresponding feeling.
Not all emotions or experiences are available to us; they are limited by our capacities and context.
Because of their relationship structure, for example, people in monogamous relationships may not be able to experience compersion for their partner, especially in the case of their partner enjoying someone else’s romantic company.
Children are unlikely to experience existential dread because they do not yet have awareness of existence and meaninglessness.
In the second half, things got spookier as we contemplated the existence of other minds. The governing challenge of the discussion was to produce evidence that other minds existed, and what is perhaps more challenging, that would persuade others that we ourselves had a mind.
Here’s what some of you had to say:
We can tell that someone’s mind is similar to our own by their behavioural responses. For example, if they are moved to tears by a sad movie ending, or are delighted at the sight of a baby goat, their minds are surely like our own.
But what makes us the arbiters of normal responses? Implicit in the argument above is the expectation that for others to be like us, they must react like us.
What about involuntary behavioural responses? The almost universal, automatic, and often ear-splitting reaction to making contact with a hot heating element is surely evidence that our minds work the same.
A problem with this argument is that the number of involuntary behaviours pales in comparison to the number of voluntary ones. How should we account for differences in behaviours that are thoughtful, deliberate, and complex?
(To summarize, many were skeptical of behaviour as a signal of internal emotions, feelings, and states of mind. What else could we possibly rely on?)
We may be familiar with at least one person who, to us, acts and feels like a zombie. Their mind seems to be running a “program,” whether ideological, social, or technological (e.g., a TikTok algorithm).
If a person can defy this programming, they have a mind. For what but a human mind could exert agency?
It may not be necessary to defy programming at all. It is enough to be self-aware that one is making the choice to follow the status quo.
Does it even matter whether we have certainty of the existence of other minds? We could theorize about and empirically test whether other minds exist for millennia to come, but should we waste any time believing otherwise in the meantime? Ultimately, it is better to believe that others have minds, because by doing so we treat everyone with dignity and avoid doing harm unto others.
But it does seem to matter whether other minds exist. It is lonely to think of oneself as the only mind in the world.
Thank you to everyone who came out on Tuesday. I’ll sleep easier at night knowing that at least some of you have minds. If you’re curious about what’s coming next, including the next Curiosity Café and our philosophy festival next month—be sure to scroll down.
Community Survey
For those who’ve attended our Curiosity Cafés, please consider taking our brief community survey. We are conducting this survey to gather feedback on our events, and it should only take a few minutes to complete. Your responses are completely anonymous and will be invaluable in helping us improve our offerings. Thank you in advance!
Upcoming Events
Curiosity Café: Bi-weekly on Tuesdays, tickets below!
About: For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to join our Curiosity Cafés and are wondering what they’re all about: Every two weeks, we invite members of our community (that includes you, dear reader!) to come out to the Madison Avenue Pub to engage in a collaborative exploration of our chosen topic. Through these events, we aim to build our community of people who like to think deeply about life’s big questions, and provide each other with some philosophical tools to dig deeper into whatever it is we are most curious about. After our scheduled programming, we encourage attendees to stay and mingle over food and drinks.
We will host our next Curiosity Café on Tuesday, November 5th, from 6:00 - 8:30 pm at the Madison Avenue Pub (14 Madison Ave, Toronto, ON M5R 2S1). Come and hang out with us, grab food, and read through our handout from 6:00 - 6:30 pm. Our structured discussion will run from 6:30 - 8:30 pm with a 10-minute break in the middle!
Please get a ticket using the button below the event description. They go on sale today (October 29th) at 6 pm! If tickets are sold out, please contact us, either on Instagram @beingnbecomingorg or over email at sophia@beingnbecoming.org, and we will let you know if we can accommodate you.
The topic of our next café is: Paying Attention
Attention is as curious as it is multifaceted. It has been called a currency, the lack of it has been pathologized, and its span has apparently been decreasing. But what is attention, and what does it share with what are often understood to be its synonyms, like “focus,” “concentration,” and “awareness”? What role does it play in our lives and why might we feel like its nature and extent have been changing with rapid technological innovation and the pace of modern life?
The phrase “pay attention” is perhaps more appropriate today than ever. Nowadays, if you watch a YouTube video, scroll through Instagram, or even walk down a busy street in your city, chances are you’ll see an ad. Our attention, however brief, is quite literally paying companies who sell our attention to marketing departments. Why is our attention so valuable? How much control do we have when it comes to the object(s) of our attention? How much responsibility do we have over what we pay attention to?
At our next Curiosity Café, moderated by special guest Alexander de Guzman and our own Sofia Panasiuk, we will engage in a collaborative exploration of the nature and extent of our attention and why attention is more valuable today than ever.
Both the “Pay-What-You-Can” and “free” tickets serve as a ticket to our café! We ask that you consider making a donation by purchasing a “Pay-What-You-Can” ticket to help us make our work and growth as an organization possible. If you have accessibility-related concerns, please visit our Eventbrite Page—in the event description you will find some accessibility-related information about the venue and the event.
Philosophy Festival (November 19th–23rd)
Can’t get enough of philosophy? Get ready for a week-long philosophy festival in Toronto with workshops and socials from November 19th-23rd, organized by yours truly in celebration of World Philosophy Day. World Philosophy Day, November 21st, was proclaimed an international day by UNESCO in 2005:
Philosophy is an inspiring discipline as well as an everyday practice that can transform societies. By enabling [us] to discover the diversity of the intellectual currents in the world, philosophy stimulates intercultural dialogue. By awakening minds to the exercise of thinking and the reasoned confrontation of opinions, philosophy helps to build a more tolerant, more respectful society. It thus helps to understand and respond to major contemporary challenges by creating the intellectual conditions for change.
So why are we doing this, exactly?
We live in a time of rapid technological and informational change. We can access knowledge at the push of a button, hold conversations with AI, and browse social media feeds curated by algorithms to show us the exact right content at the exact right time. What has not changed is how we collectively search for truth and understanding—namely, sharing, discussing, and debating ideas with other people. As far as we can tell, conversation, as a method of exploration, is not going anywhere. At least for a while.
Dialogue is a powerful tool for understanding the world. When we engage in dialogue, our interlocutors can offer us important clarifications, objections, or simply different perspectives that can expand or enrich our own. Indeed, we believe that through conversation with others, we can live more intentional, connected, and meaningful lives.
At the same time, there are many ways in which productive dialogue can be subverted. We can fail to take another person’s perspective. We can neglect to ask enough questions about why someone holds a given belief. Moreover, we have a host of cognitive biases that, whether we like it or not, make us less likely to seek out or give a fair hearing to views that do not align with our own.
But collaborative dialogue remains indispensable. Luckily for us, philosophers have developed methods to facilitate conversations that help us better understand others and the world around us, while avoiding the pitfalls of bad dialogue.
Throughout the festival week (November 19th-23rd), evening workshops on different methods of inquiry and dialogue will be on offer. The final evening of the festival, on Saturday, November 23rd, will be the festival’s closing social with interactive programming centered on collaborative exploration and curiosity.
Here’s more about what’s happening throughout the week:
Tuesday, November 19th, 7:30-9:00 PM [FREE ONLINE SEMINAR, space is limited]
On Philosophical Disagreement with Overthink Podcast’s David M. Peña-Guzmán and Ellie Anderson
Short Seminar Description: Philosophers love to disagree. Through conversations, letters, books, articles, and more, they disagree among themselves and with non-philosophers. What does this tell us about the power of disagreement? In this presentation, Overthink podcast co-hosts Ellie Anderson and David M. Peña-Guzmán explore various approaches to disagreement in philosophical discourse.
Wednesday, November 20th, 7-9 PM [WORKSHOP]
Dialectic into Dialogos with Chris Mastropietro
Details and Tickets Coming Soon!
Thursday, November 21st, 7-9 PM [WORKSHOP]
The Phenomenological Method with David Suarez
Short Workshop Description: “Phenomenology” is a way of doing philosophy which calls for a return to phenomena, the “things themselves” as they show up for us in experience. In this session, David Suarez will give a brief introduction to the phenomenological method by way of a guided tour through a few examples illustrating how phenomenologists study experience. We will discuss what phenomenologists have to say about visual perception, embodiment, freedom, and value—and how 20th century French existentialism is rooted in phenomenology.
Friday, November 22nd, 7-9 PM [WORKSHOP]
The Meaning of Race/Culture with William Paris (in collaboration with Philosophers for Humanity, 20% of ticket proceeds go to WoodGreen Community Centre)
Short Workshop Description: We often speak of race and culture being real, but what are they really? Is race an artifact of social construction or a biological reality? Is culture simply a set of shared practices or is it a form of identity? Can race shape culture and vice versa? William Paris will explore the different interpretations and potential links between these two important, yet difficult to pin down concepts. By looking at works of some prominent philosophers as well as some real-world examples it will be possible to see that race and culture remain relevant as ever to social life and its problems.
Saturday, November 23rd, 7-10 PM [SOCIAL + WORKSHOP]
Philosophy Festival Social and Closing Workshop with the Being and Becoming Team and Community
Details and Tickets Coming Soon!
Accessibility
Each of our events will be hosted in a different venue in downtown Toronto. For accessibility information on each venue, check out the individual event pages on Eventbrite (links above). If the cost of any event presents a barrier to your participation, please reach out to us at info@beingnbecoming.org. We are giving away a limited number of free tickets as long as quantities last, no questions asked.
We are thrilled to welcome you to a week filled with exciting workshops, productive dialogue, and collaboration. Join us in taking full advantage of the time we have together to explore life’s big questions.
Toronto Events
This is a discussion-based series on intimacy, run by our own Sophia and Heidi, and our frequent attendee Misha! Check out their website here, and their next event, on Labels, here!
Chris’s Toronto Event Calendar
If you want more opportunities to connect, inquire and mingle with like-minded people, check out Chris’s calendar on Notion. Chris curates this calendar with events happening in Toronto. Events include thought-provoking lectures, group discussions, and workshops.
makeworld’s Calendar of Toronto Events
makeworld’s curated list of recurrent events in Toronto, which include tech meetups, lectures, unconventional comedy shows, and discussion-based events (like ours!).
More than your regular Substack. Run by Misha Glouberman and friends, the Toronto Event Generator supports events through microgrants, finding venues, and promotion, and by creating listings of events they like.
Readings & Resources
Marybel’s Recommendation:
“Sentience, Vulcans, and Zombies: the value of phenomenal consciousness” by Joshua Shepard
In this article, which was just published this year, Shephard argues that the possibility of phenomenal zombies and Vulcans gives us good reason to think that while consciousness may be sufficient to confer moral value onto an entity, it may not be necessary. To forward this, Shepherd discusses three primary views regarding the moral significance of phenomenal consciousness:
Valence Sentientism: This view posits that only beings with valenced or affective experiences possess moral significance.
Broad Sentientism: This perspective argues that all forms of phenomenal consciousness are necessary for moral significance.
Non-Necessitarianism: This view suggests that consciousness is not essential for moral status or well-being.
The paper uses the fictional example of Vulcans—beings who are conscious but lack affective experiences—to challenge the assumptions held by proponents of valence sentientism. Shepherd argues that considering Vulcans may lead to a broader acceptance of sentientism, while also opening avenues for non-necessitarian views, which assert that consciousness is not required for moral consideration.
Adrian’s Recommendation:
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, paired with “The Window: Knowledge of Other Minds in Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’” by Martha Nussbaum
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse—one of my favourite things ever written—features characters whose mutual alienation and imperfect communications highlight the difficulty of interpersonal knowledge, and who often speculate with varying degrees of accuracy about what is going on in another character’s mind. One of these characters, Lily Briscoe, puts the problem thus:
How, then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives, which were people.
What haunts Lily is not the possibility of other people being zombies—there are, after all, “murmurs” and “stirrings” that point to a bustling life within—but the impossibility of gaining entry into those “secret chambers” (as Lily earlier puts it). Nussbaum, in her essay, explores how Woolf’s novel portrays and responds to this variation of the problem of other minds. In Nussbaum’s reading, Woolf conceives of the problem as an ethical as well as an epistemological one—as “a problem produced by the motives and desires with which we approach beings who are both separate from us and vital to our projects.” As Nussbaum argues, the novel offers a partial solution to the problem of other minds by showing how our approach to interpersonal engagements can open a window—albeit not, exactly, a door—into the teeming private world of another’s mind and heart. The answer may be simpler (which is not to say easier) than we think:
… Woolf depicts our searches for knowledge in something like their full human complexity and many-sidedness…. The mysterious grand problem of other minds thus has, here, a mundane humble tentative answer or rather answers, whose meaning can only be fully grasped in the context of a narrative as complex as this novel: by working patiently to defeat shame, selfish anxiety, and the desire for power, it is sometimes possible for some people to get knowledge of one thing or another about some other people; and they can sometimes allow one thing or another thing about themselves to be known.
Sophia’s Recommendation:
The Overthink podcast’s episode on Zombies! Here’s a description from the hosts, Ellie and David:
Who’s afraid of zombification? Apparently not analytic philosophers. In episode 99 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk all about zombies and their unfortunate legacy in the thought experiments of academic philosophy. Their portrait as brain-eating and consciousness-lacking mobs is a far cry from their origins in the syncretic sorcery at the margins of Haitian Voodoo. This distance means that the uncanny zombie raises provocative questions about the problematic ways philosophy integrates and appropriates nonwestern culture into its canon. Your hosts probe beyond the limits of the tradition when they explore zombification in animals, in reading, in Derrida, and beyond.
Featured Quote
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our mission is to present a diversity of perspectives and views. The views and opinions expressed in this newsletter are solely those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Being and Becoming. Being and Becoming disclaims any responsibility for the content and opinions presented in the newsletter, as they are the exclusive responsibility of the respective authors. If you disagree with any of those presented herein, and you feel so inclined, we recommend reaching out to the original author and asking them how they came to hold that opinion. It’s a great conversation starter.