A priori intuition and demonstration



Are any non-human animals or machines persons?Are some non-humans persons?In our ordinary speech, we only use the term ‘person’ to refer to human beings (as the dictionary definition indicates). But as a philosophical concept, this restriction needs to be justified. Even if we do only think of humans as persons, it is not as obvious that we apply the concept of a person to all human beings (see the handout on ‘Are all humans persons?’). So the concept distinguishes between those human beings who are persons and those who are not. But then, we can ask, what are the differences between these two sorts of human? Whatever we answer, we could then argue that some non-humans have some of the features that distinguish persons from those humans who are not persons. If these non-humans are more similar to persons than to humans who are not persons, we can say that in consistency we should apply the concept ‘person’ to those non-humans as well.This depends, of course, on what we think it takes to be a person.SoulsIf persons are souls, and only humans have souls, then no non-humans are persons. There is no religion that claims that computers have souls. Given that people created computers, then it would be odd if they had souls – for then it would seem that we have created souls! However, religions disagree on whether animals have souls. Traditional Christian doctrine is that they do not, that the possession of a soul is restricted to human beings. So even if some animals (or computers) displayed those characteristics of personhood, they wouldn’t be persons because they don’t have souls.Religions that claim animals do have souls, e.g. Hinduism, often also believe in reincarnation. Reincarnation is the existence of the same soul in different ‘lives’ or bodies over time. The same soul can be either an animal or a human being in different lives. Does this mean that the same soul can be a person in one life and not in a different life? If so, then having a soul is irrelevant to being a person. We need some other criterion for whether there are non-human persons or not. But if all souls are persons, then all animals count as persons, just because they have souls. In which case there are non-human persons. Non-human animals and the characteristics of personhoodAnother approach to the question is to see whether any non-human animals have the characteristics associated with personhood. We can expect to find the simpler characteristics more widespread and the more complex characteristics more restricted.Clearly a wide range of animals have some form of consciousness, as this is one of the distinguishing features of animals as compared to plants. We can talk of animals as having a ‘perspective’ on the world, as experiencing the world from a particular point of view.Belief and rationalityDo some animals have a network of beliefs? While we noted that it is intuitive to say that they do, some philosophers have debated this. First, ‘belief’ connects to the idea of truth. We arrive at beliefs by making judgments about what is true. For this, we need the concept of truth, and the ability to contrast truth and falsehood. Unless a creature can judge what is true, can it really have beliefs? Second, belief connects to inference. Inference involves making a judgment on the basis of understanding the connection between two beliefs. Making logical connections depends upon having concepts, and in particular, on having linguistic concepts. Suppose a creature can only form the kinds of concepts that go with basic recognition. It can recognise, say, cat food. And it can recognise other forms of food, e.g. cream, dead birds. Can it draw the inference that because cream is food and this is cream, this is food? It seems impossible to express this sequence of thought without language.So what about the dog which gets excited when it sees its master pick up its lead? Picking up the lead that caused the dog to anticipate the walk, but it didn’t infer this. We can describe animal behaviour in terms of the ability to recognise and respond appropriately to many objects and situations. But this is not enough to say that they have beliefs.We can object that this is a very restrictive use of the term ‘belief’. We can, instead, emphasise the connection of belief to action. Animals certainly seem to have desires, and many show some sense of selecting the means to get what they want. They demonstrate means-end reasoning, and this requires beliefs.A second objection is this: unless we could have beliefs without language, we could never learn a language. A baby needs to believe that when an adult says ‘table’, it is talking about the particular object in front of them both.Do any animals evaluate their beliefs and desires? As far as I know, they do not. Some animals can refrain from acting on their desires, e.g. for the promise of a future reward or from fear or. But this is not the same as thinking that one’s beliefs are false or one’s desires should not be acted on.Social beings and self-awarenessMany ‘higher’ animals live in groups with very specific social structures. They interact with different members of the group differently, depending on their relationship to them and their place in the structure. So they appear to have a social sense of themselves and of others as particular individuals.But do any animals have a conception of having a point of view, or being a continuing subject of experience? Many mammals have a sense of what they will experience in the future, shown in anticipation and fear. Some animals can also display memories of how they have been treated by other individual animals in the past. An experiment in the 1960s placed a rhesus monkey in a cage and taught to get food by pulling a chain when a light came on. A second monkey was then placed in another cage, which was wired up to the chain, so that when the first monkey pulled the chain, the second monkey received an electric shock. The first monkey could see the second, but not vice-versa. Repeatedly, the first monkey would go without food for long periods of time, rather than cause a shock to the second monkey. This suggests that some animals are capable of understanding other animals as subjects of experience in their own right. This adds another layer of complexity, because it suggests the idea of different perspectives on the world. But we can argue that it doesn’t demonstrate full self-awareness, because it is not yet an ability to think about oneself as a subject. A famous experiment by Gordon Gallup in 1977 shows that chimps are able to identify themselves in a mirror after a few days. Once they had, Gallup put the chimps under general anaesthetic and put a mark over one eyebrow and the opposite ear. After waking up, when seeing the marks in the mirrors, the chimps would explore the marks on themselves. By contrast, chimps that hadn’t been exposed to mirrors before being marked did not explore the marks on themselves. Nor did monkeys, even when they had been exposed to mirrors for a long time. Gallup concluded that chimps have or can acquire a sense of self-awareness, which monkeys do not have.However, how strong is this sense of self-awareness? Firstly, it seemed to develop only in response to a specific situation and is not something chimpanzees naturally develop on their own. Second, it is closely tied to the situation of the mirrors; the chimps do not start displaying other kinds of self-aware behaviour.Language, reflection, autonomyOnce we make the distinction between communication and language, then it is clear that no non-human animal that we know of has a natural language. However, apes can learn sign-language to a degree from human beings. (Sign-language is a genuine language as the signs are conventional, not natural.) The chimpanzee Washoe learned around 250 signs. At first, she was trained by being rewarded when she acquired a sign. But later she could learn new signs from other people signing around her without being rewarded. She was able to combine signs in a new way and even taught her son some signs. However, attempts to produce similar results with other chimpanzees did not work as well. As a result, scientists and philosophers disagree about whether any non-human animals can be language users.Without self-awareness and language, animals can’t become reflective about their experiences, feelings and motives in the way we can. Nor can they be autonomous. However, drawing on conversations with them in sign language, the Great Ape Project has argued that chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and chimpanzees possess enough self-awareness and rationality to have rights.machines and the characteristics of personhoodIn talking about whether machines might be persons, we will look just at computers. The development of the computer led to a revolution in psychology and the rise of ‘cognitive science’, which uses the idea of computation as a model for understanding thought. Computation involves following a strict procedures or rules to move from an input to an output. Adding numbers is a classic computation; it takes two or more numbers as input and produces their sum as output. Computer programmes are the rules that regulate what computers do.However, many scientists and philosophers have made a stronger claim. Computers don’t just provide a model for thought; if they are sophisticated enough, they can think.Can computers think? Do they have beliefs, about which they can reason and draw inferences? Can they use language? They are clearly not social beings, but could computers in the future come to have a sense of self-awareness?What do we mean by ‘thinking’? Philosophers who argue that computers can think defend the view that thinking can be understood computationally – from an input, following certain specified rules, reaching an output. When we think mathematically, this seems to be what we do. Of course, not all our thinking resembles thinking about maths, e.g. thinking in a language. But, they argue, this is just at the level of consciousness. Underlying what we experience consciously is a sub-conscious process that occurs in the brain, and this process can be described in terms of the transformation of symbols (e.g. meanings of words) in terms of rules (e.g. the rules of grammar). The essence of thinking is the ability to manipulate or process symbols, following rules.The Chinese RoomWe can object that this can’t be right. In his book Minds, Brains and Science, John Searle asks us to imagine a man locked in a room. In the room are symbols in Chinese, but the man doesn’t understand Chinese. Through a slot in the wall, someone passes in a symbol. There is a rulebook in the room that says when a particular symbol comes in, then pass another particular symbol out. The man follows the rules – Chinese symbols come in, Chinese symbols go out. To someone outside the room who understands Chinese, this exchange makes sense. The symbols going in are questions, the symbols coming out are answers. The man is processing symbols, following rules – but he doesn’t understand Chinese. Computers, likewise, are just following rules; they don’t understand the meaning of the symbols they manipulate, so they are not thinking. If they do not understand meanings, then computers do not have beliefs. The computer doesn’t have a perspective in the sense we identified as basic to having mental characteristics. And when they process in accordance with the rules of the programme, going from one symbol to the next, they are not making inferences or reasoning. They make no judgments, but just go through a series of states, each one causing the next. If these arguments are right, we should say that computers can simulate thinking, but what they do is not actually thinking (just as the Chinese Room simulates a person who knows Chinese).These arguments are contentious. Can the brain be anything other than a very sophisticated machine? Brain cells don’t understand anything, and yet when they work together, the person can understand. If computers become as sophisticated as the brain, why should we deny that they really can think? Perhaps, ultimately, there is no difference between simulating thinking and really thinking when the simulation becomes good enough. This idea is the basis for many works of science fiction.If this is right, then computers have some of the characteristics of personhood. They have beliefs, they can reason, they can use language. Perhaps they can even have self-awareness if they have some kind of ‘self-scanning’ programme. With self-awareness and a sophisticated programme, they could reflect on their programmes and the ends their programmes have given them and decide whether to rewrite their programmes and pursue other ends. In this case, they would achieve autonomy as well. Personhood and First-person perspectiveIdentifying the extent to which some animals and computers display characteristics associated with personhood is not enough to say that they are persons. We need to know which of the characteristics a creature must have in order to be a person.In Persons and Bodies (Ch. 3), Lynne Rudder Baker argues that answer is self-awareness. A person, she argues, essentially has the capacity for a first-person perspective, ‘a perspective from which one thinks of oneself as an individual facing a world, as a subject distinct from everything else’.Having a first-person perspective is more than just having a perspective. A dog has beliefs and desires and can reason about what it wants, so it has a perspective. But it doesn’t think of itself as anything, nor does it have a conception of its own perspective as unique and different from other possible perspectives. To have a first-person perspective is to be able to think of oneself and others as subjects of thought, and to think of one’s thoughts and experiences as one’s own.Baker argues that first-person perspective explains the importance of being a person. A creature with this perspective is fundamentally different from one without it, and the concept of a person marks the difference. The first-person perspective is the ground and origin both of what matters about us and what matters to us. It enables us to be rational in the strong sense of evaluating our beliefs and desires. It enables us to be reflective about our experiences, feelings and motives and those of others. We have a conception of our own futures and we attempt to shape them creatively through our autonomous choices. It enables us to be responsible, because we know what we are doing, and choose to do what we do. We understand that we, personally, have done things, and would have done different things with different desires and beliefs. The first-person perspective, then, is the ground of our rationality and our moral agency.Animals, machines and first-person perspectiveIf Baker is right, to decide whether there are any non-human persons, we need to consider whether either animals or computers have a first-person perspective. We considered the chimpanzees who could identify themselves in the mirror as a possible example of self-awareness. However, we noted that the self-awareness displayed was tied closely to the situation with the mirror, and that the chimps did not go on to display other behaviour that expressed a first-person perspective on themselves. On the other hand, the use of sign language by apes has led a number of thinkers, as in the Great Ape Project, to argue that they do have a sufficient first-person perspective to be considered puters do not currently display any form of self-awareness. There would need to be significant advances in the ways in which computers work for us to take this suggestion seriously. And even then, Searle’s argument suggests that they could do no more than simulate self-awareness. ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download