Metathought
Hello everyone! Sorry for the disappearance, but I’ve been pretty busy lately; It’s late night as I write this, and these have been the only 15-20 minutes I’ve managed to save for my general activities. I should really be working, but, what kind of work could I deliver in 15 minutes late at night? So, I preferred to write a little random article here because this blog is accumulating spiderwebs. My subject of the day? While I was doing the dishes five minutes ago, I was thinking about what would I like to write tonight. Well, on the lack of a better idea, I chose to write about the “thinking” itself.
In the dawn of the 21th century, what do we know about thought? According to Millar, all we can say of it is that it’s something that humans do. He wrote on the 90s, if I’m not mistaken, but there aren’t any evidence that we have a better idea on the subject so far. fMRIs and all other developments of neuroscience have served us well into solving many mysteries, but the definition of thought still lure us very much. I mean, besides saying “it’s something that humans do”, can we say anything about the thought? Does a Chimp thinks? How about a computer?
In his article, Millar gives us a very humorous alegory for this problem. Imagine two men who lived they’re whole life in an Island, where the only thing they’ve ever seen flying were seagulls. Now say they want to define what “flying” is. Here we have our situation brilhantly represented. All they know about flight is that “it’s something the seagulls do”! One could then thrown a rock upwards and ask himself: is this rock flying?
The rock can stay away from the soil for a while, so that may be a criteria for saying that something flies. On the “thought” side of this analogy, a computer can play chess as well as a master nowadays. It clearly fulfills one of the criterias for thought (after all, one of the things humans can do due to their thinking is to play chess). But is that enough for us to say “It’s aliiiiiive, it’s aliiive!!!”? Also, can we say that the computer is not thinking at all while it does it, or should we rather declare it’s thinking, but only on a different or fragmentary level than humans do. Ok, Mr. Searle posed his great arguments against the possibility of machines (as we know them now) thinking, saying that, although we don’t really know what thought is, it is something that probably requires a human-like biostructure. Ok then, let’s forget the chess playing machines… what about sign-language speaking monkeys?
A few years ago I read an article (very famous, must be easy to find on google) about the researches with monkey’s and they’re learning of the human sign language. One thing that struck me as amazing was that it mentioned that the monkeys (pretty sure they were chimps) where able to connect verbs to create their own substantives. When the care-takers pointed a refrigerator, one of the chimps chose to call it the “open/eat/drink” instead of the substantive for “refrigerator”. At some level, this animal “knows” what a refrigerator is… but is that a thought?
Myself, I believe that thoughts and feelings have been used lately as a “second soul” argument. It’s very fashionable nowadays to keep oneself from saying “the dog can be jealous” or “it is sad”. Those are treated as anthropomorphisms that should be banned from the language of scientists because they refer to something that is an attribute of humans. Well, a hundred years ago we were different from all other animals because we had a soul. Now that the soul has been taken away from us, we need a new barrier to separate us from the “things” we eat and keep tied by the neck in our yards (just like the “soul” barrier did on the days when slaves had no soul).
Particularly, I’m tired of this dumb and childish rebellion of our species against the belief that we are animals mostly like all the others. I’m of the opinion that thought shouldn’t be just “that thing that humans do”, but that thing that all mammalians (and many others) do to some extent. Yes, that stake you ate at dinner had a thought of it’s own once! Feel guilty now? Well, I ate a stake too, and I’m not feeling anything. Questioning the morality of eating meat is just another pretentious way to try to set ourselves apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, as if we were those creatures that a god placed on earth to take care of everything else. What the hell, if that’s what you think you are… ok! Myself, I’m just an animal playing my part in the food chain.
