Towards an Image of a Person [1]: The Necessity of Imaginary Minds

Metaethics, Identity, and the Truman Show

This is the first post in a series that I’m starting which will focus on philosophical problems of personal identity and ethics. The goal is to end up with a (somewhat) novel and (hopefully) compelling view of what it is that people are, exactly. There are a lot of philosophical problems in these areas, and I hope to make some interesting contributions to them while also opening up these problems to people who may have not heard about them before.

I understand that this is a bit of a strange time to begin a new series (after one post into a separate series and waiting a very long time between posts), but the questions dealt with here have been bumping around my mind quite a bit. The Kant series will continue, but unlike the Kant series with its extensive citing and quoting and interpreting, these posts are my own thoughts (collectively inspired, of course, by many thinkers, including Kant) and therefore are less of a pain to write in some sense? Expect both series to continue (though not on any particular timeline) and, in parts, dovetail. It’s all a labor of love. But anyways, without further ado…

This post deals primarily with two premises whose truth should be fairly obvious, it seems to me, to those willing to see clearly. Most of the post will be about fleshing out what exactly these premises mean and building up a theory for how to think about them. The premises are as follows:

1. The problem of other minds (short definition to follow) is unresolvable.

2. Other minds are necessary for anything resembling a human inner life.

Implications of the two premises and the theory behind them bear on philosophical problems of ethics and personal identity. I also believe that they provide a jumping-off point for important reflections on the nature of human connection and what kind of beings people are. I expect to spell these considerations out in later posts. First, let’s deal with these two premises. The main philosophical novelty of this post, as I see it, will come in its consideration of the second premise, in particular the second argument for necessity.

Truth: the Impossibility of Knowing Other Minds

The problem of other minds, as traditionally conceived, is that we cannot prove the existence of other minds, due to the definition of what constitutues a mind. When we talk about minds, we mean beings which experience things. Philosophers like to call that-which-is-experienced “qualia.” I, as a mind, am the subject of a mental state, which consists of qualia. However, by definition, I only have access to my own qualia, and therefore only have confirmation that my own mind has experience, i.e. qualia. There is no way for me to ‘see’ the experiencing that you do. Everything we have — talking to one another, being the same species, brain scans/neurological complexity — is and forever will be a proxy for a mind. Since, from this skeptical stance towards other minds, our sample size is and forever will be n = 1 (I can only furnish foundational proof of my own mind), these proxies are fundamentally suspect. To summarize: to confirm that something has a mind, and not merely a complex non-mind collection of material, you must show that it has qualia. To show that it has qualia, you need to experience it experiencing. However, we can never experience another mind’s experience, only physical correlates of that experience. Therefore, we can never prove the truth of another mind.

Now, a first attempt at doing away with this problem, having acknowledged its unresolvability, might be to ask whether this matters. This is a favorite move of mine, in philosophical questions: do I care? To take the side of the ‘prosecution’ for a moment, there may be little reason to care about some metaphysical mumbo-jumbo like whether the guy sitting next to me on a plane has qualia. It matters more to me, perhaps, whether he can say the right words and do the right things when I need something from him — whether that is to allow me an armrest which is rightfully mine, give me some wise words for my difficult problem, or express kindness in a way which makes me feel comforted. To this, the ‘defense’ might answer that what might anger me about the first, interest me about the second, and comfort me about the third is that there is a mind behind these actions. What matters is that there is something experiencing like I am, and only in virtue of the fact that he is living and I am living as fellow travelers of experience do any of these possible interactions affect me and make claims on me more than a rock ‘deciding’ to block my path or not. In fact, while we might find abuse of objects vicious, in that it inculcates a certain predilection for destruction, it is usually only the abuse of other minds that we find truly immoral.¹

Acting in The Truman Show

Let’s call this back-and-forth the Truman Show Argument. We ought to all agree that life inside the Truman Show was not good for Truman. However, we might disagree as to why. Some, like the prosecution above, might say that Truman was adventurous, yet he had to (for the sake of the show) be discouraged at every step from living out his passion. He lost his ‘father’ for the sake of this entertainment, had his potential squandered, and had the love of his life removed from the set. This, the prosecution would attest, is the true crime of the Truman Show. We can now drop the legal analogy and call this the Lauren position, named for the woman Truman organically falls for as she is named in the show.

Others, like the defense, might say that the Lauren argument is missing the point. Truman was only getting a facsimile of life, of love, of fellowship. No one who surrounded him was living the same life as him — they did not share his experience in a fundamental way. To him, life was as it is for all of us: a question of what, fundamentally, to do. To everyone else, life was acted out under scripted conditions and for the purpose of the Truman Show: there were not decisions made, in the way that we would think about them. The actors were functionaries. They were not, in an important sense, human. They never asked themselves “what should I do?” but always “what would my character do?” They do not evaluate, they do not act. They merely follow the script. We can call this the Sylvia position, named for the woman Truman organically falls as she is named outside of the show — the actor who plays Lauren.

The Lauren argument fundamentally hinges on two premises: first, that all we care about is well-being, and second, that what makes for well-being must be something that we experience. If Truman never discovered the show, the Sylvian argument would never impact his well-being. It is instead the results of the show which actually impact his welfare. This focus on consequences points us to the fact that Laurens may often find themselves as fellow travelers to consequentialists — utilitarians and their ilk. Furthermore, the focus on what Truman actually experiences points toward an empiricist strain — i.e. that there is nothing to value over and above what is actually experienced. I don’t mean to argue here that any of these beliefs necessarily imply the others (especially in the latter case), but a certain fellow-traveling can be seen. They evince a similar manner of looking at things, a manner to which the philosophically inclined sometimes resign themselves but with which I find those uninitiated in the field are rarely (if ever) satisfied.² The second of the premises I find reasonable, but the first is troubling.

The movie The Truman Show itself seems to find itself in the Sylvias’ corner: we cheer as Truman disregards Christof’s entreaties to stay, leaving behind his world of artificiality and safety for the hope of something more honest and true, for the reason that it would be more honest and true. And here is the central problem for the Laurens: the reason why Truman experiences things as he does in the show is a fundamental misunderstanding of his situation. Though this argument is difficult to deal with cleanly without getting too bogged down in questions about what the good life is (though that may be a topic for a later post), we can make a first attempt here. Sylvias might bring up to the Laurens that if Truman did know about his true situation, he would feel accursedly lonely. No one around him could be a true companion, since none of them were living like Truman was — the only solace Truman might get is a certain level of forgetting, a fooling of himself that this really is alright. Yet even then we could imagine the pangs of remembrance rising like acid reflux in his soul, burning away his counterfeit connections to the not-quite-other people that he shares his life with.

With regard to uncertainty about the existence of other minds, we are in a somewhat similar position as Truman. As long as we search for certainty in the existence of other minds, we are plagued by its inability to come, and all we are left with is the ambition of momentary amnesia. It may be somewhat obvious, but I tend to side with the Sylvias here. We find the thought that we could be the only one experiencing things in the universe troubling, and even though we are in the modality of possibility, it is a steep cliff to peer off of. Either way, the nature of the question is such that we do care, sadly. We do want to know what, if anything, grounds the existence of other minds. Sadly, as we saw above, the problem of other minds is epistemologically unresolvable.

Truth vs. Necessity

We cannot dismiss the problem of other minds out of hand. This leaves us in a situation where we cannot prove the existence of other minds by observation, yet we really care about there being other minds. Since we cannot prove the existence of other minds by observation, we cannot prove their truth. Since we cannot prove their truth, any proposition of the existence of other minds is something of a supposition. This supposition, in turn, must be supported by something: why would we suppose other minds? And so we arrive at the second premise: the necessity of other minds for a human life. We cannot prove that they are there, but we may yet prove that they must be there (or, perhaps more correctly, that we must suppose them to be there). If other minds are necessary for something which is obviously true/foundational/itself necessary, then the supposition of other minds must occur. And if the supposition of other minds must occur, we have a sort of justification for other minds and caring about them: otherwise, we couldn’t live.

Arguments that function like this (a sort of philosophical blackmail: ‘believe this or your life doesn’t work!’) vary in their forcefulness.³ Here, I will be laying out two such arguments in the context of other minds. The first of these is the argument from loneliness. It is somewhat folksy, and it runs in a more Lauren-esque manner. Its ‘blackmail’ is less philosophically necessary, but more emotionally important. The latter is the argument from action and values. Its ‘blackmail’ is more abstractly necessary, and is definitely the more philosophically rigorous. However, together they give the best picture of how other minds factor in throughout our lives.

Necessity (1): the Argument from Loneliness

It is clear from watching any child play that we don’t have to be taught to think of other things as having minds. Children’s worlds explode with assumed intentionality — not only do their parents have minds, but so do their toys, natural objects, and even concocted characters sprung from their own minds! A child might worry, á la Toy Story, that their toys feel lonely when they aren’t played with for some time. They also might care for a pet rock (which, incidentally, could frustrate their non-rock friends) or get into a fight with an imaginary friend. If it seems somewhat illicit to make points about our own minds by discussing others’ whose existence we are in the process of discussing, then consider how you might lapse into such thinking when, say, a computer program is not running as you would like — “you stupid thing,” “it doesn’t like when you try to restart it so quickly,” “just work better!”⁴ So, it almost seems like the more common problem as regards us finding other minds in the world is not to be more generous in our interpretations of what has a mind, but more disciplined.

The human mind has an inborn drive to interact with other minds, and seems as well to have difficulty doing away with this mode of interaction even in fairly non-compelling cases, like plastic cowboys, pet rocks, and imaginary friends. This, to some, is enough reason to call the existence of other minds part of the foundation of human experience. We need other minds — otherwise, how lonely would we be? We would be the only thing in the universe experiencing love, despair, anxiety, or happiness. Any comfort we found in the world on such matters would not come from a fellow traveler, something that had experienced that same thing. Any such comfort would come from a script written by no one, an output of a formula that cannot give love, but a mere facsimile of it. One thinks of others as machines at one’s own peril.

This bears some similarities to the Truman Show argument, in particular the Sylvia side of the debate. Yet, at its core, it’s a prudential argument for believing in the existence of other minds: we would be sad if it wasn’t true. But there are a lot of things that would, for some time, make me happier if I believed they were true: I am on the way to an afterlife of eternal bliss; there is a surefire path to lasting love; chocolate and peanut butter are the two most important food groups. Some of these may be true, but it seems important that I only believe those for which I have some rational foundations. For something as basic and unprovable as minds, the prudential argument might seem like the best we can do: living without other minds is terrible, I have a mind, and by all proxies it seems like there are others.

So, why not believe it? Well, as illustrated above, if you take the problem of other minds seriously, all these proxies for minds are very brittle. Furthermore, we care a lot about not only whether we believe that minds exist, but also whether (in the case that we believe minds exist) other people also believe that minds exist. Merely relying on fellow-feeling isn’t so sturdy when you want to convince others with some rational argument. Instead, we can expand what exactly about living it is which we are holding hostage for the sake of other minds.

Necessity (2): the Argument from Action and Values

There is exactly one motivation for action that does not require other minds, and that is immediate pleasure, concurrent with the action in question. Specifically, that pleasure which has no further grounding in the expected consequences of or motivations behind the action, but is merely tied up exactly with that action. Motivation based on future pleasure, or values which are not themselves grounded on pleasure (but whose fulfillment may induce pleasure), or any other motivation at all requires other minds.

Subject and Self

First, let’s extend the problem of other minds somewhat. So far, we have framed the problem as worrying about the existence of minds as we suppose them in objects who are physically in front of us. However, if we are to take a high standard of supposing minds, we must also deal with the problem of supposing minds over time.

Take the ‘easiest’ mind: our own. Will my mind exist in 5 years? Even if that which I would call myself is still alive, in what sense would the mind found there (presuming it exists) be the same as my own? We can take the symmetrical problem as well: am I the same person I was 5 years ago? Well, yes and no. However, it doesn’t really matter if it’s the same mind for our purposes — what matters is that there is a mind. But why would I expect there to be? I have memories of experiencing things in the past, but the Last Thursdayists would make the very clear point that that’s no epistemologically sturdy reason to think there was a mind that really did experience those things in the past. Ask me what I was doing just one week ago and I might need to check my calendar app to provoke even a vague recollection. The past mind is not ‘with’ me metaphysically — I merely have impressions which I suppose correlate to prior times. It is not clear that my mind in the past existed, and there is even less reason to suppose my mind will continue to exist into the future.⁵

The only mind we are sure of is the mind experiencing the current moment as it flows from one arrangement to another, the mind which we are. This is what we will call the (transcendental) subject. The subject is a unified, metaphysically and ontologically distinct thing: it cannot be split; its attention must be directed at one thing and one thing only; there is no ambiguity between what is part of the subject and what is not. The experience of the subject can be analyzed — we can think about what we heard as separate from what we saw — but it comes in unified — we cannot have experience of a moment where what we heard actually is experienced separately from what we saw. The subject feels a deep connection to the immediate future and past, as the experience of the present continually shifts into what had been the future. It does not, however, extend into the past and future — it remains in the present, bringing about its future and pulling away from its past. This is its ‘presentism’.

I call the subject “transcendental” because it is necessary, yet pointed outwards.⁶ The subject is pointed outwards in that it cannot view its own workings, its own mechanics. Its attention cannot be turned in on itself, only on its past, its future, and the world it is in. To put more forcefully: we cannot see the shape of our souls; we can only chart them as they, ever-changing, bump up against the world. The very transcendental nature of the self further entrenches the problem of other minds: we can’t reach into our own mind and look around to see what makes it go, yet we know that it must exist, as a correlate of our experiencing things. This is one more reason why these aforementioned proxies of minds are so brittle.

The subject is clear as a singular existing thing, but its very singularity and clarity makes it so very, very small. And that is why we need the self. The experience of a life is not merely about this continually lapsing from present to felt past and anticipated future to present, but also about recalled memory and future plans. Once we need to recall a past experience, or suppose a future position, we are dealing with minds which are, epistemologically, on very similar footing as the ‘other minds’ we have heretofore been talking about. This is the self.

The self is messy — attempts to define it clearly and distinctly have, to my eye, always failed. Where the subject has delineations, the self has degrees. I can forget things about my past that others remember, I can misunderstand my character worse than others, and I can even feel a whole slew of emotions we associate with things happening to ourselves (pain, pleasure, fear, anxiety, sadness, pride) on behalf of someone else. Any special access we have to our ‘own’ minds is about the subject. Memory can be faulty, suggestible — I can mistake others’ memories for my own, and vice versa. Knowledge about future intentions can be mistaken, fragile — we can lie to ourselves or be weak-willed. Psychological continuity can be broken, misleading — amnesia, sleep, and large breaks in character all create problems. Experiences of others can impact me as much if not more than experiences of my own. It may be an empirical fact that we often know more about our selves than other selves, and that we are more intimately acquainted with our own lives than that of others, but this is a statistical tendency, not a metaphysical necessity. Everything that we consider important about a notion of self — having plans, caring about one’s own state, emotional reactions to experiences — can be extended to other individuals. We have a wonderful capacity to incorporate others into our selves, and to change what it is we define as our selves.

At this point, we are getting somewhat far afield.⁷ The point here is that the self is on the same epistemological playing field as other minds, while the subject is not. We inhabit the subject; we construct the self. This is our expansion of the problem of other minds: doubt other minds, and you are not left with your own self, but merely your own subject. Your self is as fragile, epistemologically speaking, as others’. Privileging it over others’ selves speaks more to a lack of backbone than rigorous skepticism. Now that we have expanded the problem, we can see where its true impossibility lies.

Values and Minds

Volumes have been written about the nature of intentions, values, and motivations. I sincerely hope that I am never included in that severe and scrupulous literature. However, I have to make some claims about the nature of actions and why we do them, so here we are, taking just a few steps in that direction. The claim is thus: no action can be concerned primarily with the subject. Actions are, with one possible exception (depending definitions), ‘pointed outwards’, like much about the subject, towards past and future and other selves.

All actions have an end, a purpose. Even if the end is not formed, explicitly, in our minds at the time of the action, we can still reflect and consider what drove us to act in such a way. Any deed — that which we do — can have many purposes, serve many ends, and be sliced up conceptually into many different actions. All actions have their ends (purposes, motivations, etc.) outside of the action itself. Therefore, they require a supposition of future, past, or other selves to have a motivating ground. The act of forming an intention, with thought to the consequences of a deed and the options one is presented with, is done for the sake of the deed, which will not be done until the future. Even when forming an intention is not done explicitly, even when actions are intuitive, beginning an action requires care for its consequences — its end both motivationally and temporally. There are easier cases and harder cases: sacrificing oneself in order to save another’s life is clearly reliant on the existence of other minds. However, even the act of making a pot roast to enjoy later requires a future mind (and who makes a pot roast without hoping that others will enjoy it as well?).

There is exactly one motivating ground for the subject which is contained in the subject: present pleasure and displeasure. However, this only remains true if the pleasure/displeasure is not itself derived from some value or plan or further motivation which itself relies on other minds. Since we are talking about believing in other minds, we might say that as long as the pleasure/displeasure is not consciously connected to such values, we can say its motivating ground is contained in the subject. Yet this is merely an attempt to forget that you don’t believe in minds — emotions predicated on a supposition of minds are logically grounded in that supposition, even if those who consciously deny minds may still experience them. We are talking about a possibility of a human life without supposing minds, so the imperfections of human recollection (to not have in our thoughts at all times that we deny other minds) should not bear on our consideration of the logical necessity of other minds for a human life. In fact, the impossibility of doing away with other minds is just one more way in which the supposition of other minds is unshakably necessary to our cognition. A human life truly lived while denying other minds would entail laying in bed until death because any action would require a future mind. If this is counterintuitive, consider just how difficult it is to live without supposing minds. There is no way to know — no such person could exist.⁸

Suppose we do restrict the conclusion to pleasure and displeasure consciously connected to such values. This is, perhaps, the life of someone who does not actively deny other minds, but chooses to find no worth in what appear to be other minds — a strange line to walk. Then, we get the less totalizing but still difficult conclusion that without other minds, the only framework for making decisions that could possibly make sense is an intensely presentist hedonism. Pleasure is passive. Pleasure arrives — we do not give ourselves it. We act or receive stimulus, and pleasure is an effect. To act for the sake of pleasure is still to act before receiving pleasure, requiring the supposition of a future mind. Only the actual reception of pleasure impacts the subject. It is true that the anticipated future of the subject can bear on the present’s mood, and shape it. However, such considerations could in no way extend to any sort of self-sacrifice, whether in the name of larger values or even future recompense. Such a life would be myopic and intoxicated, given over to immediate pleasures even when the ability for them to please has been exhausted, because what else is there? Anything more requires faith in a future.

It is not true that present pleasure has no reason to exist, or we should minimize its place in our lives — quiet contemplation of beauty is a clear example, and I would be remiss to minimize the importance of the aesthetic. The simply pleasing is, in its place, good.⁹ However, it is just as clear that no possible human life could focus exclusively on the simply pleasing. In the difficult-to-conceive-of case that someone was able to string together a life of merely the simply pleasing, it would be an alien one — and one, furthermore, that was missing something important about life.

Here is, then, our claim: every action requires some supposed mind — future, past, or present. Even with a restricted claim, where all motivations except pure presentist hedonism require a supposition of other minds, the impossibility of denying other minds is clear. We want to clean our room? We suppose our future selves will find it satisfying. We want to start a job? We suppose a future paycheck will be nice. We want to help a family member? We suppose they have a mind. We want to stop global warming? We suppose future selves across the world will reap benefits. We are utilitarians? We suppose things exist other than us which feel pain and pleasure. Any action whose motivating ground is not immediate satisfaction relies on other minds. Since we expanded the problem of other minds, every action worth thinking about falls apart without them. Without other minds, there is very little to do and nothing worth doing, only things that make us feel pleasure. The philosophically consistent choices are thus: (1) deny other minds and either take no actions and waste away or take immediate pleasure to be the only possible motivation for action, or (2) suppose other minds and act with the panoply of values, motivations, and ends that make a human life possible. Action requires other minds, other beings which we do things for.¹⁰ Without such minds, a human life would be impossible and entirely lacking in worth.

Life as a Subject in Search of Selves

Even if other minds cannot be proven true, we can see just how necessary they are to a human life: we could not act without supposing them. This, sadly, lacks the surety of tight epistemological truth. However, it brings us closer to these imagined minds, in its own way. While we can’t fact-check the existence of other minds, we can know just how deeply we need them, and that, more than any proof, can point us toward a better life. In future posts, I will build on this conclusion, the theories that undergird it, and the implications it brings out as they relate to other problems in philosophy. However, I would like to take, as an ending note here, a first glance at what the subject/self distinction and necessity of other minds can tell us about the nature of our lives.

The difference between thinking about one’s future self and others is not so great. Many pathologies, whether they fall under the general categories of self-hating or self-loving (in the derogatory sense), are pathological because they have an underlying self-obsession. Intense self-loathing is its own form of narcissism, providing, as it does, a cross to self-importantly bear. Very rarely does someone in the depths of self-hatred treat others to the standard they set for themselves — anyone who would should not be surprised to find themselves quite alone. The issue with self-love is often dramatized with the relationship to death. By focusing all one’s energies on the advancement of just one small slice of the world, the inevitable end of that slice threatens to undo one’s life’s work. It is only by learning to expand one’s circle of care to those who will outlast you that death can mean something not quite so destructive. After all, death isn’t so different from falling asleep. You just won’t have a chance in the morning to right yesterday’s wrongs.

The respect we show other minds and possibilities of other minds can reflect itself back on the respect we show ourselves. Since all we have of minds are their supposed correlates, whether those correlates are temporal or spatial, how we treat (a) correlates of consciousness, (b) general physical objects, and (c) ourselves will all likely bleed into one another. We cannot have, either instinctively or conceptually, sharp delineations between what has a mind and what does not. How we treat objects of our experience generally will bleed into how we treat minds, since we do not see minds, merely the objects which we suppose they inhabit. Even if one believes an animal does not have a mind, treating it with malice and cruelty evinces a lack of care towards the correlates of minds, and threatens to poison one’s appreciation of the value of a mind/life. That life is felt to be sacred is all-important. Losing that hollows out any possible value.

As we move into ethical considerations, I will discuss more what a value is and how we might understand the good in light of our budding theory of persons. We will also look at some problems which involve personal identity, epistemology, and other subjects besides. All of this is in virtue of trying to get a picture of a person. From this corner of our investigation, we have learned that while our subjectivity is fundamentally distinct, our selves and the values and projects we take on as our own require others, and are more intertwined with them than we might expect. The idea of the individual is a useful heuristic, but it is a heuristic — the individual is hopelessly and wonderfully spun into a world of other people, and could not exist without them.

1. You can replace ‘mind’ here with whatever it is that makes certain beings/objects uniquely valuable in an ethical/social/spiritual sense. You can call it a soul or the ability to feel pain/pleasure or whatever you want. Generally, though, it comes down to there being something experiencing the world in the same sense you do. Something more than just mechanics, just atoms pinging off one another in a particular pattern.

2. My own feelings on free will and moral responsibility get about as close to one of these sorts of positions as any I have, but that must be saved for another time.

3. Some of my Kantian leanings can be seen in this mode of argumentation. Kant’s ‘transcendental deduction’ was a particularly famous and forceful mode of these arguments, where he argued that we could prove the necessity of certain facts about the objects of our cognition by stating that they were necessary for the possibility of experience. His basic syllogism was neat: we have experience, x is necessary for experience; therefore x.

4. Matt Yglesias does a fair job describing how this ‘intentional stance’ can leak out of our interpersonal relationships. In his case, however, he is discussing the more specific issue of AI sentience, which I may turn to at a different time. For another take on the matter which relates such a foundation of human psychology to moral responsibility, P. F. Strawson’s Freedom and Resentment moves more clearly in that direction. You could, if you wanted, characterize my take in this post as broadly Strawsonian.

5. In some ways, treating future and past minds as ‘existing’ for the sake of placing value on their condition requires an even further jump than the supposition of present minds in objects outside of us. To do something for the sake of a past version of myself (“when I was 10, I always dreamed of rollerskating down a mountain”) is to do something for the sake of a mind that in no respect one expects to exist in the natural sense — rather, we have explicitly incorporated a mind that is not our own (presuming we have since given up the rollerskating dream) and which we do not expect to exist into our motivations. Similar for the sake of a future version of myself.

6. My discussion of the subject owes much to Kant’s construction of the ‘I’.

7. One quite nice illustration of a reckoning over the ephemerality of the subject is this wonderful comic. We can’t focus on the subject; doing so would destroy us. Every sleep, every break in consciousness, is a bit like a death — the metaphor of “going to sleep” has quite a bit more there there than you might think. Even the malleability and permeability of the self can seem to threaten the integrity of our self-definitions. The solution is not mindless hedonism or cold solipsism, but a broadening of one’s moral horizon. I may write more specifically on this problem later, but it’s tangential at best to our discussion here.

8. A philosopher whose thoughts come to mind with this line of argumentation is Heidegger and his notion that being-with (Mitsein, as in ‘being-with others’) is foundational to the Being of Dasein (Dasein being Heideggerian for people). More can be read on this matter here. Something worthy of note is that much of the distinctiveness of Heidegger’s project is an attempt to get away from thinking of people in their reflective, contemplative state, but instead considering how it is to be a person in the (far more common and basic) active mode of doing things. Just as Heidegger puts being-with at the foundation of his focus on the active state, so am I attempting to show how a supposition of other minds is necessary for any action at all.

9. Here we can see how considerations like this might complicate matters, because we ask why the pleasing is good, and suddenly we have to deal with other minds again (as will be shown elsewhere, the good cannot be contained in the subject — its very definition is in the existence of other minds). One might also note that the subject, while entirely in the present, has the weight of its history bearing on it. The past provides the the subject’s present, which then bears on the subject’s need, at certain moments, for pleasure (and sometimes simple pleasures).

10. It’s actually quite easy to incorporate religious and spiritual meaning into this framework. We have already come to terms with the necessity to suppose minds in the objects in front of us — it is not too crazy to think that perhaps those minds do not stop existing when their bodies die. It might be a lower chance, but the moral sublimity of doing something for the dead — who can never return the favor, who can never repay your devotion, who you have less evidence even exists — is a powerful lesson. And if we truly come to love doing good (an incredibly important moral goal), then such acts can become a celebration in and of themselves.