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If asked questions about other minds, how would/does he respond, and does/would he nest his response in physical science and reductionist/determinist models? Does he say that their existence is easily demonstrated? Doesn't need to be demonstrated? Other?

Chris Sunami
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Jonathan Dunn
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    What do you mean with `other minds`? – oɔɯǝɹ Feb 14 '15 at 14:00
  • I know directly that I am conscious - but how do I know that other persons are? Particularly if I am a materialist using the scientific method, there is the other simple explanation for the behavior of others: physics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_other_minds – Jonathan Dunn Feb 14 '15 at 16:20
  • He'd say they're just other genes. "[Dawkins reveals the gene as not just the centre of the cell but the centre of all life, agency, and behaviour](https://aeon.co/essays/the-selfish-gene-is-a-great-meme-too-bad-it-s-so-wrong)" – MmmHmm Mar 16 '17 at 12:18

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Dawkins shows every sign of being a (philosophical) realist and resisting attempts at philosophical complication of empirically robust results. (If pushed, I'm pretty sure he'll follow the data: "the best model is that reality is 'real'".)

Therefore, he would, I imagine, say that we have oodles of evidence that our minds are all quite similar; whether or not it's easy to demonstrate, we have so much evidence that it is easy to draw the conclusion.

If you come up with some weird philosophical construct that raises doubt that there are other minds, Dawkins would likely respond with: is that parsimonious? Is that predictive? Does it have explanatory power? (And probably a few choice words of a less polite nature making clear that he doesn't think much of the process that makes one take such a proposition seriously in the face of so much evidence.)

Rex Kerr
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    Here's the thing: if you believe reductionist/determinist physics describes the behavior of a rock, and you don't need consciousness there, and you believe identical physical law describes the behavior of your neighbor, what do you need consciousness for? In empirical science, you either need to observe something, or require something to explain what is observed. Consciousness is neither, if the rock and the person follow the same physics. – Jonathan Dunn Feb 13 '15 at 21:48
  • @JonathanDunn Is this the argument you're making: physics basically completely describes the behaviour of rocks, and thus the behaviour of everything in the universe can be (parsimoniously) described in terms of the behaviour and features of rocks? – Dave Feb 14 '15 at 03:39
  • I'm inspecting materialism, in which rocks and other things are all described by the same physical laws. If you believe those laws completely describe the motions of each particle in your neighbor's body, what is left over for consciousness to explain? Nothing - and so it is not in evidence - and so how can you claim it is there - if consciousness does not *do* anything then there is no evidence for it. – Jonathan Dunn Feb 14 '15 at 08:54
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    @JonathanDunn: of course, Dawkins presumably has conscious experience, and would also think physical law also applies to him. He wouldn't know how he was conscious, but given that he is, he might suppose that whatever brings about consciousness about for him would also bring it about for others. – Niel de Beaudrap Feb 14 '15 at 15:17
  • Niel, all of which is reasonable in some sense, but he and the others claim to be reasonable in a very specific way - endeavoring to always adhere to scientific method - and in this particular type of reasonable, consciousness "out there" is not actually in evidence, nor can it be inferred (if all phenomena are due to mostly-known physical laws). – Jonathan Dunn Feb 14 '15 at 16:18
  • @JonathanDunn - People act like they are conscious. They say they are conscious. They write books about it, and papers about it, and call it a "hard problem". It is not at _all_ parsimonious to suppose that all this stuff happens for no reason, that people just lie blatantly about their experiences in this regard despite being pretty accurate about most other things. They may be wrong in details (people very often are, when introspecting). Just because you can concoct some elaborate, unsubstantiated story where consciousness isn't needed doesn't mean it's "not needed" for parsimony. – Rex Kerr Feb 16 '15 at 20:21
  • Rex: Whatever gut-level merits your approach has, they don't cut it at the level of physical reductionism. You don't seem to understand the whole business of physics > genes > behavior (or maybe you just don't buy it). Anyway that's why I specifically asked what *Dawkins* would say about other minds rather than anybody else, or what the average person would say. If you say a behavior is the result of an experience, you aren't being a reductionist. "in the study of the mind, sentience floats in its own plane, high above the causal chains of psychology and neural science" - Pinker – Jonathan Dunn Mar 17 '17 at 16:17
  • @JonathanDunn - There's nothing gut-level about this approach. You seem to want to throw away inconvenient data in order to make things easier as a reductionist. That's not scientific. **You need to explain observations.** If you can't, your model is incomplete or falsified. Experiences impact behavior (p = 0, in many experiments). To suggest otherwise, reductionist or no, is to stray so far from explaining reality that one isn't doing science any longer. – Rex Kerr Mar 30 '17 at 16:21
  • You have no empirical evidence that others even *have* experiences. Primitive people might think that the eruption of a volcano is the result of the volcano having the experience of craving a human sacrifice. Who's to say otherwise? "Explaining" is very often in the eye of the beholder. Science has advanced not by merely "explaining" but by doing so using reductionism & seeking mechanisms, thus "reducing" the importance of apparent aggregate entities towards zero. – Jonathan Dunn Mar 31 '17 at 20:42
  • I think you profoundly misunderstand reductionism. To paraphrase Einstein: "Make everything as simple as possible *but no simpler*." Or to paraphrase Asimov: "To think the earth flat is wrong, and to think it round is wrong, but to think that both are equally wrong is wronger than both of them put together." Reductionism doesn't go around yelling, "No air pressure, no consciousness, no such thing as a solid, no concrete position!!!!" Rather, it seeks to explain these **very obvious phenomena** in terms of simpler components. It muses: perhaps X is not fundamental but a consequence of Y. – Rex Kerr Apr 01 '17 at 18:21