Beyond the Brain: How The Mind and The Body Shape Each Other? 9811995575, 9789811995576

Table of contents :
Contents
1 Introduction
1 Approaches of Exploring the Causal Relation Between Mind and Body
2 Metaphysical Dilemma
3 A Look at Mind–Body Relation from the Value Dimension
References
2 The Conceptual Fetters of the Mind–Body Problem
1 Introduction
2 Incommensurability Between the Concepts of Mind and Body
2.1 The Language Limit of Experience Expression
2.2 Disclosure of Psychological Events
2.3 First-Person Characteristics of Consciousness
3 “Mind” and “Body” as Interchangeable Perspectives
4 The Mind–Body Continuum
References
3 From ‘the Mind Isolated with the Body’ to ‘the Mind Being Embodied’
1 Introduction
2 The Body, Social Symbols and Value Signs
3 Body, World and Embodied Mind
4 Resorting to the ‘Embodied Mind’
5 Ecological Validity and Mind Evolution
6 Body Image, Self-Identity and Body Metaphor
References
4 In What Sense Should We Talk About the Perception of Other Minds?
1 Introduction
2 How Does Imitation Create the Inner States of Others in Our Minds?
3 The Advantages of Direct Projection Theory Over Analogy Theory
4 An Analysis of Causation in the Context of Neurological Explanations
5 Epistemological Characteristic of Other Minds
6 Discussion
References
5 Comparative Perspectives on Solutions for the Problem of Other Minds
1 Introduction
2 Recent Advances in Contemporary Research on Other Minds
3 An Interpretation of Zhuangzi on Other Minds: The Prioritization of Experience Relevant to the Situation
4 The Confucian Presupposition of Extending Oneself to Others: All Human Beings Belong to the Same “Kind”
5 Discussion and Conclusion
References
6 The Limits of Mind: An Epistemological Perspective
1 Introduction
2 The Dilemma of Internalism
3 The Dilemma of Externalism
4 Perception vs. Belief About Perception
5 Self-Correction of Experience Basing on Models
6 Discussion
References
7 What Makes Consciousness ‘Conscious’?
1 Introduction
2 The Essence of HOR to Consciousness Interpretation
3 Challenges, Retorts and Responses
4 A more Plausible Approach
5 Conclusion
References
8 Social Shaping of Emotions
1 Main Ideas of the Emotion Social Construction Theory
2 Value Internalization and Convention
3 Paradigm Transformation and Emotional Re-Construction
References

Citation preview

Duoyi Fei

Beyond the Brain

How the Mind and the Body Shape Each Other

Beyond the Brain

Duoyi Fei

Beyond the Brain How the Mind and the Body Shape Each Other

Duoyi Fei Department of Philosophy China University of Political Science and Law Beijing, China Institute of Foreign Philosophy Peking University Beijing, China

This work was supported by the Major Project of National Social Science Fund of China [Grant No. 18ZDA029] and the Major Project of the Key Research Base of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education of China [Grant No. 22JJD720005)]. ISBN 978-981-19-9557-6 ISBN 978-981-19-9558-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9558-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Contents

1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Approaches of Exploring the Causal Relation Between Mind and Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Metaphysical Dilemma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 A Look at Mind–Body Relation from the Value Dimension . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 2 4 7 11

2 The Conceptual Fetters of the Mind–Body Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Incommensurability Between the Concepts of Mind and Body . . . . . . 2.1 The Language Limit of Experience Expression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Disclosure of Psychological Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 First-Person Characteristics of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 “Mind” and “Body” as Interchangeable Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 The Mind–Body Continuum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

13 13 14 15 16 17 18 21 24

3 From ‘the Mind Isolated with the Body’ to ‘the Mind Being Embodied’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Body, Social Symbols and Value Signs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Body, World and Embodied Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Resorting to the ‘Embodied Mind’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Ecological Validity and Mind Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Body Image, Self-Identity and Body Metaphor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

27 27 28 31 34 38 40 43

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Contents

4 In What Sense Should We Talk About the Perception of Other Minds? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 How Does Imitation Create the Inner States of Others in Our Minds? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The Advantages of Direct Projection Theory Over Analogy Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 An Analysis of Causation in the Context of Neurological Explanations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Epistemological Characteristic of Other Minds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Comparative Perspectives on Solutions for the Problem of Other Minds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Recent Advances in Contemporary Research on Other Minds . . . . . . . 3 An Interpretation of Zhuangzi on Other Minds: The Prioritization of Experience Relevant to the Situation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 The Confucian Presupposition of Extending Oneself to Others: All Human Beings Belong to the Same “Kind” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Discussion and Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 The Limits of Mind: An Epistemological Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Dilemma of Internalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The Dilemma of Externalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Perception vs. Belief About Perception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Self-Correction of Experience Basing on Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

47 47 48 51 54 58 60 61 63 63 65 67 70 73 74 77 77 78 81 84 86 91 91

7 What Makes Consciousness ‘Conscious’? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 2 The Essence of HOR to Consciousness Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 3 Challenges, Retorts and Responses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 4 A more Plausible Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 8 Social Shaping of Emotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Main Ideas of the Emotion Social Construction Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Value Internalization and Convention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Paradigm Transformation and Emotional Re-Construction . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

109 110 113 115 118

Chapter 1

Introduction

In the contemporary philosophy of mind, physicalism and dualism are two rivals who dispute each other: reductionists in physicalism argue that the mind can be reduced to physical states, whereas anti-physicalists claim that reductionism is unsuccessful in explaining the mind–body problem, especially its inability to explain the qualia. More than 400 years ago, Descartes, in the Second Meditation part of his volume Meditations on First Philosophy, argued for dualism, saying (1) I cannot doubt my own existence as a thinking being; (2) I can doubt the existence of my body; and (3) my mind is not the same substance as my body (Descartes 2008). In his view, the world is comprised of two types of entities, namely material entities and mental entities. For him, an entity is a thing that is directly inhabited by something else, that is, it does not require any other creature to exist and its existence is the cause of its own being. The meditator particularly emphasized that mind and body can exist independently of one another and that they both have a real nature. Descartes’ assertions are highly in line with our common sense. According to one of our scientific understandings of the world, the only way we can explain our own existence is to recognize that everything is material. We have bodies, but our bodies are different from ourselves at least in the following sense. After a series of dramatic changes happen to our own bodies, we can still exist—every one of us has a mind and can talk about changes in our own mind. At the same time, mental entities and material entities can interact with each other, although they are completely different. Each mental entity is extremely closely related to a particular material entity. Our body would respond to our plans and decisions, while our mind could receive signals from our body through sensory experience and gain knowledge about the state of our body and the state of the world around our body. Our senses are the only avenue through which the world can work on our mind.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 D. Fei, Beyond the Brain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9558-3_1

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1 Approaches of Exploring the Causal Relation Between Mind and Body Discussions about “the mind” have been around since ancient times, which took the form of various statements about the soul in ancient Greek philosophy and have gradually evolved into an inquiry into the mind in modern times. On the one hand, the word “soul” has been inextricably intertwined with religion, to which philosophy is not devoted. On the other hand, Descartes’ mind–body dualism claims that the essential property of a material entity lies in the fact that it is spatially extended, while mind, as a mental entity, has no extension, and its essential property is that it thinks. As he insisted, our mind is not our brain, because it doesn’t have a spatial location, and it still exists after our death or without our body. Linking the concept of mind to the activity of thinking and the phenomenon of consciousness turns out to be an act that distinguishes the mind from the soul, a theological-religious concept in ancient times including the Medieval Ages, which ignites the philosophical debate on the mind–body relationship (Hatfield 2009) and constitutes the focal point of the discussions about the mind–body problem in modern and contemporary times. In the camp of dualism, some philosophers deny the possibility of mind–body interaction. Psychophysical parallelism claims that mental and bodily phenomena take place in two separate but parallel routes. The mental and physical realms operate in parallel: a mental phenomenon is only in the causal relation with other mental phenomena. Likewise, a physical phenomenon only exists in causality with other physical phenomena. However, there is no causal relation between mind and body. For instance, Baruch Spinoza argued that the order and connection of ideas are the same as the order and connection of things; an idea does not have as its cause the object of the idea, but another idea; and the body cannot determine the mind to thinking, and the mind cannot determine the body to motion (Spinoza 2009). Arnold Geulincx stated that we cannot act on the material world, nor can the material world act on us. For the particular action of God, our will does not cause motion, nor is motion the cause of ideas (Cooney 1978). Accordingly, different from Descartes, Geulincx in epistemology claimed that we cannot know things in themselves, but God can know things; we can only know ourselves. And for Gottfried Leibniz, a representative parallelist, the mind–body problem is part of a more general problem of causal explanation. As Leibniz held, God first created the soul, or other real unity, in such a way that everything in it arises from its own nature, and has a perfect connection with things outside it. This makes all entities have perfect conformity with each other, which produces the effect as if these entities could communicate with each other (Leibniz 1989). The soul and the body are just like two very exact clocks made by God, each working according to its own laws while remaining in unity with the other. This unity is neither due to the interaction of the two nor because of God’s ready adjustment. Instead, it comes from the harmony pre-established by God. The theory of pre-established harmony denies the existence of direct interaction between mind and body (although Leibniz in his view does not deny causality here). That is to say, both the mind monads and the

1 Approaches of Exploring the Causal Relation Between Mind and Body

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monads that constitute our body are constantly changing according to their nature, and this appears to the outside world as if the two are causally connected. According to Alexander Bain, the main representative of psychophysical parallelism, the body is a closed causal system with cause and effect quantitatively equivalent in terms of energy, and the mind is another causal system, both of which go in parallel to each other, unified and inseparable (Bain 2006). David Hartley, the proposer of the mind-brain parallelism, argued that nervous vibrations are in parallel with sensations and movements, and that vibrations in the brain are parallel to ideas (Berrios 2015). By the nineteenth century, almost all physiological psychologists were parallelists. Edward Bradford Titchener, for example, recognized neural processes as preconditions for mental processes, but denied that the former were causes of the latter. He insisted on a parallel correspondence between the two, while denying their causality (Titchener 1908). Wilhelm Wundt proposed his psychophysical parallelism from the perspective of idealism and empiricism, arguing that experience is the only reality, and that the different perspectives on experience have led to the formation of natural science and psychology and the formation of parallel physiological and psychological processes. He wrote that “we found it to be a truth of equal universality that mental processes are connected with definite physical processes within the body, especially in the brain; there is a uniform coordination of the two. The connexion can only be regarded as a parallelism of two causal series existing side by side, but never directly interfering with each other in virtue of the in-comparability of their terms. Wherever we have met with this principle, we have named it that of psychophysical parallelism” (Wundt 2014). With the dual classification approach, we can distinguish three kinds of psychophysical parallelism. The first is entity parallelism. Regarding the mind and the body as different entities, it believes that the two never interact with each other, but only develop in parallel. In other words, there is some kind of correspondence between the mind and the body. The second is attribute parallelism, which asserts that there is actually only one kind of entity. Either mind and body or thought and extension are two attributes of an entity, which develop in parallel and in correspondence with each other. The third is phenomenal parallelism. It claims that the same reality manifests itself as a certain activity of the body on the one hand, and as a certain thought/consciousness on the other hand, which is the mind–body dualism by nature. Clearly, dualistic parallelism relies on vague and highly controversial theological assumptions. Although psychophysical parallelism avoids the dilemma faced by the theory of mind–body interaction, it is both theoretically insurmountable and intuitively at odds with the reality of everyday life. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated by modern science that mental processes are based on physiological processes and that mental processes can, to a certain extent, affect physiological processes. Therefore, this theory has received little credence from modern philosophers, despite its popularity over the period from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. In addition to interactionism and parallelism, there is another view in dualism known as “one-way theory”, which asserts that only physical states lead unidirectionally to states of mind, whereas states of mind cannot generate any outcome. For

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example, epiphenomenalists hold that mental properties are not reducible to neural properties and are not efficacious. Mental events are viewed as completely dependent on physical functions and, as such, have no independent existence or causal efficacy; it is a mere appearance (Robinson 2010). The problem facing this assertion is how to explain we are intentional actors. If our consciousnesses cannot trigger our bodily actions, is our sense of actors merely an illusion? Overall, it seems that interactionism is fairly prevailing among many dualistic theories. However, interactionist dualism substantially contradicts our belief in the causal closure of the physical world. The promise that the physical world is causally selfsufficient has been justified by modern science, but if mental entities can act on the physical world, it means that the physical world is not causally self-sufficient. Moreover, such a dilemma remains inevitable, even assuming that mental entities can have some particular physical characteristics in addition to psychological ones. If there are only two types of entities in the world, namely physical and mental ones, how do we define them? How can we maintain the coordination between physical and mental entities, while adhering to the mind–body dualism? It is a common view that Descartes’ causal principle is to be understood in light of a similarity condition that accounts for how finite causes (as opposed, or in addition, to God) contribute to an explanation of their effects. Some scholars challenge this common view and offer a sui generis reading of Descartes’ views on causation that also has the advantage of solving the two exegetical issues of whether Descartes thought of the body-to-mind relation in occasionalist or causal terms and of whether Descartes regarded sensory thoughts innate or caused by bodies (De Rosaa 2013).

2 Metaphysical Dilemma Mind-body problem gives rise to a serious metaphysical dilemma. On the one hand, dualism (in whatever form it appears) mystifies the status and existence of consciousness. How can we conceive of any kind of causal interaction between consciousness and the physical world? By setting up a separate mental realm, dualists can’t explain how this mental realm relates to the physical world in which we live. Physicalism, on the other hand, claims that there is no such thing as a first-person or subjective ontological consciousness, which ultimately denies the existence of consciousness and thus the existence of the phenomena that give rise to the question (Flage 2014). So where is the way out? Modern psychologists have largely agreed on the relation between the mind and the brain. Our perceptions of the world hinge on the way physical stimuli act on our bodies and ultimately activate our thinking, feeling, and consciousness. In turn, our minds and desires explicitly govern our bodies and influence our behavior. Yet the close relation between the brain and the mind has ended up with a subject of much debate—how can a physical object like the brain dominate an invisible entity like the mind?

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At the heart of the mind–body problem is the question of how a physical system gives rise to conscious experience. We might break down the link between the physical and conscious experience into two parts: the link between the physical and the psychological, and the link between the psychological and the phenomenal. Some scholars have come up with a pretty good idea of how a physical system can have psychological properties, and by following this path, the psychological mind–body problem has been dissolved. What remains is the question of why and how these psychological properties are accompanied by phenomenal properties: why all the stimulation and reaction associated with pain are accompanied by the experience of pain. Current physical explanations take us as far as the psychological mind. What remains ill-understood is the link between the psychological mind and the phenomenal mind (Chalmers 1995). The ultimate of ultimate problems, of course, in the study of the relations of thought and brain, is to understand why and how such disparate things are connected at all. But before that problem is solved (if it ever is solved) there is a less ultimate problem which must first be settled. Before the connection of thought and brain can be explained, it must at least be stated in an elementary form; and there are great difficulties about so stating it. To state it in elementary form, one must reduce it to its lowest terms and know which mental fact and which cerebral fact are, so to speak, in immediate juxtaposition. We must find the minimal mental fact whose being reposes directly on a brain-fact; and we must similarly find the minimal brain-event which will have a mental counterpart at all. Between the mental and the physical minima thus found there will be an immediate relation, the expression of which, if we had it, would be the elementary psycho-physic law. But in taking the entire brain-process as its minimal fact on the material side, the aforesaid solution confronts other difficulties almost as bad. In the first place, it ignores the analogies, namely between the composition of the total brain-process and that of the object of the thought. The total brain-process is composed of parts, of simultaneous processes in the seeing, the hearing, the feeling, and other centers. The object of thought is also composed of parts, some of which are seen, others heard, and others perceived by touch and muscular manipulation. How then, should the thought not itself be composed of parts, each the counterpart of a part of the object and of a part of the brain-process (James 1983)? The second difficulty is deeper still. The entire brain-process is not a physical fact at all. It is the appearance to an onlooking mind of a multitude of physical facts. Also, it is our name for how a million molecules arranged in certain positions may affect our sense. If we are to have an elementary psycho-physic law at all, thrust right back upon something like the mind-stuff theory, for the molecular fact, being an element of the “brain”, would seem naturally to correspond, not to the total thoughts, but to elements in the thought. These questions have remained unanswered for centuries, because they cannot be settled by either neuroscience or brain science alone. In the twentieth century, no philosophers were acting in the dual capacity of a scientist and a philosopher like their predecessors—Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz. What we saw is a paradox where scientists had no time for questions beyond the brain mechanism, but philosophers could only hover on the periphery of the extensive research subject. Over the last

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two decades, of course, there have been more circumstances suggesting scientists become interested in philosophical questions, and that philosophers are actively engaged in dialogue and cooperation with scientists. Getting rid of the mystery, fiction, and misinterpretation that have enveloped it for nearly a millennium, the philosophical study of mind–body relations in modern times wields science, logic, semantic analysis, and thought experiments as its sharp swords to answer these longstanding questions by paraphrasing these questions themselves, updating related concepts, and introducing a diversity of exquisitely-designed methods. The result is that, on the one hand, the deconstruction or transformation of old theories, and, on the other hand, the internal collision, competition, absorption, and reconstruction among theories. According to the psychophysical parallelism mentioned earlier, we can make selfcontained causal explanations with mental events in the inner world, and neuronal events could be used to do so in the outer world. That is to say, the mental world and the physical world have their own causal chains, and these two chains exist simultaneously and in parallel. Though Leibniz discovered this parallelism more than 300 years ago, he depicted it as God’s pre-established harmony. Obviously, such an explanation turns out to be unsatisfactory in the age of science. But the parallel thinking is inspiring. From the internal point of view, what we can get is a mental event; seen from the external standpoint, it is a physical event. With the two perspectives put together, the physical event and the mental event might be deemed as the same event, and this is the fundamental reason why phenomena could occur in parallel and simultaneously. The relationship between mental and physical events just looks like two parallel rail tracks that will never intersect. Similarly, mental and physical events are in two different causal relations. In this sense, we can say that the mental world and the physical world are separate from each other. Meanwhile, two parallel tracks will never move in two opposite directions. Likewise, every change in mental events is always accompanied by a simultaneous change in physical events. In that regard, we can also say that they are closely connected. Among the contemporary solutions to the mind–body problem that run along parallel tracks, Thomas Nagel’s external and internal viewpoints are considered as a useful attempt. He elaborated on the relationship between the subjective and the objective. Since the 1960s, physicalism has played a dominating role in explaining the mind–body problem. In Nagel’s view, the attempts to explain psychological phenomena through physicalism miss the heart of the consciousness problem. For that reason, he proposed explaining the relation between the mental world and the physical world from two perspectives: the subjective and the objective. In his opinion, subjectivity is not purely subjective or conceptual, but an objective existence; objectivity is not purely objective. People always proceed from their own needs and values to see things, so objectivity arises depending on human needs, and always carries a personal perspective. Taking into account the irreducible existence of subjectivity and objectivity and aiming to avoid the explanatory gap between mind and body caused by the traditional mind–body dualism, Nagel constructed the dual aspect theory, arguing that one thing can have both physical and mental properties, which are irreducible (Nagel 1998). With regard to the question about how the subjective

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self fits into the objective world, he noted that we could understand more objectively our relation with the world through self-reflection. In doing so, we would keep going beyond our personal perspective and develop a new perspective that constantly combines the subjective and the objective. This two-sided theory emphasizes the irreducibility of personal perspective and subjectivity, but it conceives a non-physical explanation for the origin of consciousness, i.e. proto-mental properties. Hence, Nagel became an advocate of panpsychism, which in a sense is a physicalism, but only a dualistic-monism. Panpsychism has a number of problems. The first and foremost is the combination problem—if we grant that all elements of reality have some kind of mental, conscious aspects to them, how is it that some groups of such elements form higherlevel and unified states of consciousness? Although Nagel postulated the origin of mental states is “proto-mental properties”, he failed to explain how these properties, originally scattered throughout the brain, could be brought together to form unified consciousnesses. In addition to the combination problem, panpsychism also faces the not-mental problem—even supposing there was some evidence for a fundamental, non-physical property that permeated the world and had some causal influence upon events, why would we call it a mental property? Why not call it a new kind of physical property?

3 A Look at Mind–Body Relation from the Value Dimension The discussions about the mind–body relations from the value perspective began with Chalmers’ famous assertion that the problem related to conscious experience is the hard problem in the mind–body relation (Chalmers 1996). Conscious experiences are so diverse that the properties distinguishing one conscious experience from another are often referred to as the phenomenal properties or qualia of the experience (Kim 2011). In general, every specific act or state of consciousness has some particular qualia. In the case of sensation, each sensory experience has its own properties that are different from another sensory experience. Viewing a ripe red tomato, smelling the pungent gasoline, and enduring the pain of a sprained ankle—all of these sensory experiences are unique because of their particular qualia. As the central component of conscious experiences, qualia are characterized by the fact that they cannot be reduced to human behavior or to the physiological mechanisms and functions of the human brain. Qualia are in fact “the presentation of the nature of the object in the subject’s conscious experience”. Conscious experiences and qualia contained there are irreducible, not because consciousness is a kind of entities different from material entities, as Descartes argued, but because they are subjective in nature, namely conscious experiences are fully available only from the first-person point of view of the experiencing subject, but not from the third-person point of view adopted by physicalists (Hill 2009). This means that the incompatibility

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between the subjectivity, or the first-person point of view, of conscious experiences and the third-person point of view of the physicalist approach is the root cause of the inability to reduce qualia and the final failure of physicalism. Thus, if conscious experiences and the qualia contained there are the key to unpuzzling the mind–body problem, the issue of subjectivity proves to be the well-deserved linchpin. The subjectivity of conscious experiences means that such experiences can be revealed to “me” in a first-person view of point, but not to others in any other way. That is, conscious experiences always exist as my conscious experiences in the manner of “being an awareness of mine”. The subjectivity mentioned here differs from that in ontological thoughts. As an ontological concept, subjectivity refers to the consciousness or spirituality of the world. In other words, consciousness or spirit is deemed as the basis and subject of the entire world to answer the question: “what is the bearer of the world?” For example, the philosophy of Descartes who regarded “cogito”, or consciousness, as an “Archimedean point” of the whole world is often called the philosophy of subjectivity. In contrast, subjectivity in the philosophy of mind is intended to answer such questions as whether a conscious phenomenon (i.e. a conscious experience and qualia contained there) has a bearer in itself and what is the relationship between a consciousness and its bearer. In relation of value, “subjectivity” specifically means that the prescriptiveness of the subject (its needs, abilities, etc.) becomes the basis and measure of the object’s value. In other words, it refers to the properties that human beings show in their object-oriented behavior, such as reality, autonomy, initiative, and purposefulness. Since subjects are independent, they form intersubjective relations, each making value judgments and choices by their own yardstick. The subjectivity of conscious experiences is mainly manifested as follows: first, any conscious experience has a bearer and is owned by the subject; second, for the subject, owning his or her conscious experience is an intentional, not unintentional, ownership; third, the subject always intentionally owns conscious experiences as “my conscious experiences”. Specifically, conscious experiences are always owned by a particular bearer, but it is not like a person’s possessing coins in his or her pocket. On the contrary, conscious experiences are characterized by the subject having some “subjective sense” of them. In other words, as a bearer of conscious experiences, the subject possesses his or her conscious experiences intentionally rather than unintentionally. In this sense, what we are conscious of is never the object itself, but always the object that appears in a particular way (such as being judged, seen, feared, remembered, smelled, expected, or tasted). Conscious experiences are also marked by the fact that they are always granted as “my conscious experiences” from the first-person point of view. This is the most prominent expression of the subjectivity of conscious experiences. However, we will be unaware of the experienced object until we become aware of the conscious experience through which the object is manifested. Any kind of experience or manifestation is visible to “me” in the first-person point of view but invisible to other onlookers in any other way. That is, any kind of manifestation is always available to “me”, and

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any kind of experience is my experience. Conscious experiences always exist as “my conscious experiences” in the manner of “being an awareness of mine”. Given the subjectivity of conscious experiences, I tend not to use the concept of causation for depicting the mind–body relation, because the physical aspects of the world are thought to follow the law of causal closure, while consciousness itself is not causal. Hence, I prefer to describe the relationship between physical events and mental events using simultanience. The so-called mind–body interaction is actually a phenomenon that we feel by confusing or blurring internal and external perspectives. The conscious processes and structures and the neurobiological processes and structures always correspond to each other by means of reciprocal constraints (Varela 1996). The mind and the body can also be understood as two facets that have correspondence from two perspectives. This correspondence may be interpreted as a reciprocal constraint-generated relationship. In other words, consciousness and brain generate each other simultaneously, rather than one generates the other unilaterally, through the mutual constraint relationship. The strict distinction between the mental world from the inner perspective and the physical world from the outer dimension, along with the understanding of the root cause of the parallelism between mental and physical events, will make it possible for us to comprehend and explain mind–body interaction from a new height. As discussed earlier, the two categories (i.e. the mind and the body) that people use to describe conscious phenomena are separate presentations of real entities as the experiencing subject from the first-person perspective and as the observed object from the third-person perspective. The relationship between the experiential aspects and the physical aspects presented from the two perspectives is, in my opinion, a human-nature value relation. We can express value as the meaning of the object to the subject in the simplest way, so, value, as a qualitative form of the subject-object relationship, is essentially the implications of the world (including man himself) for man through practice. Or rather, value relation should be understood not only as a context with spiritual attributes, but further as a real form or historical process of man-world relation—man’s life in society (Li 2014). It is important to note that consciousness has its intrinsic value in addition to the aspects seen by physicalism (Seager 2001). Intrinsic value means that something is valuable for its own sake as opposed to being valuable for the sake of something else to which it is related in some way. As non-derivative value, intrinsic value is not derived from the results it produces or from its relation with something else, but is inherent in itself. On the contrary, extrinsic value is derivative value, also known as “instrumental value”. As its name suggests, it is intended to serve something else as an instrument. The so-called intrinsic value of consciousness means that conscious experiences can be valued from their intrinsic aspects. In other words, some conscious experiences are worth having for their own sake. How they emerge and what they will cause is not determined by something else, but by themselves. Such value can only be recognized by experiencers themselves. In fact, the idea that consciousness has intrinsic value was borrowed by Seager from Charles Siewert. The latter emphasized that value could be divided into instrumental and non-instrumental value. Only things of intrinsic or non-instrumental value

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can be regarded as conscious states. They are valuable because they have subjective components. Accordingly, conscious states can be distinguished from non-conscious states such as brain states: a brain state is of instrumental value rather than intrinsic value, whereas a conscious state has non-instrumental value, which is truly intrinsic value (Siewert 1998). Everything that has instrumental value is entirely dependent on the context in which it exists. This is precisely the case with the brain, which is not consciousness, although it is related to the realization of conscious states. A consciousness, once multi-realized, has its own status independent from a brain state. The difference between the two, in terms of value properties, lies mainly in the fact that brain states have only instrumental value. A nerve cell, for example, is the implementer of a conscious experience such as hearing a sound. Despite its ability to transmit nerve impulses, the cell is not an auditory consciousness, since it is entirely determined by the environment and possesses only instrumental value. However, the experience thus realized has intrinsic value of its own. Seager took in the above thoughts of Siewert and then explained the non-identity existing between conscious states and brain states as per Leibniz’s principle of identity of indiscernibles.1 The argument is expressed as follows: (1) conscious states have intrinsic value; (2) brain states have only instrumental value and no intrinsic value; (3) therefore, brain states are not conscious states according to the identity principle. This argument not only refutes the type identity theory and the tokentoken identity theory, but also serves as a basis for Seager’s advocacy of dualism. According to this argument, the mind and the body, one with intrinsic value and the other without, are two fundamentally different types of beings in nature. Traditional research on the mind–body problem assumes that mental processes are internal to the person, which is discussed more from an epistemological viewpoint. This book demonstrates the crucial role of contextual relevance in the workings of the mind and illustrates how mind emerges from the individual’s interactions with her physical, social, and cultural environments. It also develops the interpersonal and social aspects of embodied mind. The body that creates meaning is not only an emotional, kinesthetic, and aesthetically experiencing body; the body that creates meaning is a social body. Thus it suggests that mind–body relations is not only achieved through the interaction between our own mind and body, but by other minds in our intersubjective interactions. Generally the relation of mind and body has been treated as a problem of causality and solutions have been sought in various schemata of etiological relations. In contrast to these previous research approaches, considering the implications of the seemingly uniquely human predisposition to reconfigure our bodies, our desires, our emotion and our will by using culture, this book adds a value perspective on a foundational issue in the study of human mind. It explores the ways in which rational, free agents have a special place in the causal order of mind as initiators of new causal chains. Time is a good measure of the vitality of academic works. However, being contemporary-based does not conflict with this assertion. As the author of this book, 1

The principle is formulated as follows: for any two objects x and y, if they are identical, the properties possessed by one are also shared by the other in their entirety, or vice versa.

References

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I try to strike a balance between the two: presenting the latest research developments in the field while aiming to provide some forward-looking inspirations for future discussions. Keenly aware that no one can cover all the important issues, concepts, and theories in the field of mind–body relations in one book, I narrow down the focus of the book to the value dimension, hoping that it could spark some rational reflections on the mind–body relations and provide some substantive theoretical insights for micro-studies on man, nature, and society. It is a pleasure for me to acknowledge the contributions of many people who have had a significant impact on my 20-year-long career in the field of philosophy of mind. I would like to express my deep gratitude to my teachers, friends, and colleagues who have supported me through my academic journey. On the eve of publishing this book, I am particularly grateful to Professor Deshun Li for his inspiring guidance and strong support in the field of axiology, and to Professor Jun Feng for his instructive suggestions and valuable advice in the field of mind-body relation research. My heartfelt thanks also go to Robert Howell, Martin Stokhof, Colin McLarty, Bjørn Torgrim Ramberg, Duncan Pritchard, Chen Bo, Jeff Malpas, Jean-Michel Roy and James Sterba, who have put considerable time and effort into their comments on the draft of some chapters and have provided helpful inspiration. I would like to sincerely thank Editorial Director of Humanities and Social Sciences, China, Springer Nature Ms. Leana Li, who has given me constant encouragement and offered her generous help during the writing of my manuscript. Throughout the production of the text from manuscript to final print, I have benefited from the presence of publishing team. I hereby extend my sincere thanks to them for their meticulous work and kind help, without which the book would not have been what it is. Among them the following requires mentioning: the responsible editor Mr. He Zhang, Project Coordinator Rajasekar Ganesan, and project manager Ms. Jayalakshmi Raju. Despite rounds of revisions, there might still be something inappropriate in the book, which, in my view, represents an attempt to provide a starting point for more and better academic works to come out. Any criticism and correction from academic colleagues and readers are truly welcomed.

References Bain, Alexander. 2006. The Emotions and the Will, 552. New York: Cosimo Classics. Berrios, German E. 2015. David Hartley’s Views on Madness. History of Psychiatry 26 (1): 105–116. Chalmers, David J. 1995. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, 23. New York: Oxford University Press. Chalmers, David J. 1996. The Conscious Mind, 2123. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cooney, Brian. 1978. Arnold Geulincx: A Cartesian Idealist. Journal of the History of Philosophy 16 (2): 167–180. De Rosaa, Raffaella. 2013. Descartes’ Causal Principle and the Case of Body-to-Mind Causation. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 43 (4): 438–459.

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Descartes, René. 2008. Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. Michael Moriarty, 13–24. New York: Oxford University Press. Flage, Daniel. 2014. Descartes and the Real Distinction Between Mind and Body. Review of Metaphysics 68 (1): 93–106. Hatfield, Gary. 2009. Psychology in Philosophy: Historical Perspectives. In Psychology and Philosophy: Inquiries into the Soul from Late Scholasticism to Contemporary Thought, ed. Sara Heinämaa and Martina Reuter, 1–25. Helsinki: Springer. Hill, Christopher S. 2009. Consciousness, 19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, William. 1983. The Principles of Psychology, 178. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kim, Jaegwon. 2011. Philosophy of Mind, 1127. Boulder: Westview Press. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1989. Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2nd ed., trans. Leroy E. Loemker, 586–591. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Li, Deshun. 2014. Value Theory: A Research into Subjectivity, 103–135. Heidelberg: SpringerVerlag. Nagel, Thomas. 1998. Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem. Philosophy 73 (3): 337–352. Robinson, William S. 2010. Epiphenomenalism, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews. Cognitive Science 1 (4): 539–547. Seager, William. 2001. Consciousness, Value, and Functionalism. Psych 7 (20). Siewert, Charles. 1998. The Significance of Consciousness, 326–332. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Spinoza, Baruch. 2009. Ethics, Trans. R.H.M. Elwes, 68–146. Auckland: Floating Press. Titchener, Edward Bradford. 1908. Lectures on the Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention, 387–388. New York: The Macmillan Company. Varela, Francisco. 1996. Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy to the Hard Problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3 (4): 343. Wundt, Wilhelm. 2014. Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, Trans. James Edwin Creighton & Edward Bradford, Titchener, 440–445. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Chapter 2

The Conceptual Fetters of the Mind–Body Problem

Abstract The crux of our encounter with the mind–body problem originates from a predicament on the underlying ontological level—from the category of concepts, it seems that the form for grasping the subjective aspects of the mind is incommensurable with the one for understanding the objective level of the brain. This is reflected in the fact that empirical expression is restricted by language, that psychological events cannot be incorporated into strict laws, and that the subject has a path that, with his own mental state, others cannot share. In order to make progress in cracking the mind–body problem, this paper tries to abandon the assumption that “psychology” and “physics” are mutually exclusive and are incompatible ontological categories. The “mind” and “body” are considered as two interchangeable yet non-coexisting perspectives. Therefore, events in the body are represented as conceptions in the mind, and have an expressive correspondence with one another. Meanwhile, the approach for achieving such correspondence involves the entity itself—the ability of the organism to perform purposeful activities constitutes the source of its internal activities. Through the connection of life categories—or rather, the coupling of living beings and their worlds—mind and body maintain mechanisms which can be jointly realized. Keywords Mind–body problem · Conceptual fetters · Perspective · Continuum

1 Introduction The exact expression of the mind–body problem has been categorized in terms of the mind-matter problem in many scenarios—if psychological attributes differ from and depend on physical attributes, why can they affect behavior? How do these psychological things affect physical things? Schafer (2018) has discussed the nature of physical reality, referencing the book Senses of the Subject by Judith Butler and making an argument regarding Butler’s belief that the body is impossible to fully grasp from within the perspective of the conscious subject. Goff (2016) has tried to show that the premises of the standard anti-physicalist arguments can be used to argue that sentences which quantify over subjects of experience ontologically commit us to subjects of experience. We have no way to understand just how mind and body unite © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 D. Fei, Beyond the Brain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9558-3_2

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to form a human being or, for that matter, how they causally interact. Simmons (2017) has argued that they fall outside the domain of any humanly possible metaphysics, and that for us there will always be an element of mystery to these things. Our knowledge of the world depends on the basic concepts we hold about it. Though not every concept must match up with a certain corresponding being in the world, a theory made up of false or improper concepts cannot truly help us to get the bottom of nature. When confronted with difficulties in the mind–body problem, have we ever thought that the crux of them might stem from the concepts we use? In other words, the degree to which we grasp the concepts of matter and mind determines how we understand their associations. If the concepts themselves are flawed, the logical gap between the mind and matter will not be bridged by means of analyzing these concepts.

2 Incommensurability Between the Concepts of Mind and Body Conceptually, it seems that the form for grasping the subjective level of the mind is a far cry from that for understanding the objective level of the brain—the mind cannot be reduced to matter. This reduction has two aspects: the ontological reduction and the causal reduction. The ontological reduction refers to the reduction of a particular object to one of another kind; for example, genes are reduced to DNA molecules. Obviously, in terms of consciousness, we cannot conduct an ontological reduction because reductions of other phenomena rely on the distinction between “objective physical reality” and pure “subjective phenomena,” as well as the phenomena eliminated from the reduced ones; meanwhile, in the case of consciousness, its reality is also its phenomenon. If we try to remove the phenomenon and only define consciousness as the physical reality behind it, the main point of the reduction will be lost (Searle 1992). Causal reduction means that the causal force of a reduced entity can be completely explained by that of the reduction phenomenon. For instance, some objects are solid, and the resulting causal effects are that solid objects are pressureresistant and penetration-proof, etc. The causal explanation of such causal power can be made with reference to vibration in the lattice structures of molecules. If the causal relationship of the mind’s phenomenon can be totally accounted for by the causality correlation of physical phenomena, we may say that the mind can be reduced to the physical phenomenon regarding cause and effect. Taking “pain” as an example, we have subjective senses of pain, knowing its feeling and association with other senses. Meanwhile, we also have some objective knowledge of pain, like the facial expression of people suffering, the effect of the opioid paregoric, even the brain’s mechanisms of pain. However, when we attempt to explain the causality of mental phenomena in terms of the causality of physical theories, we are faced with the following difficulties.

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2.1 The Language Limit of Experience Expression Meaning expression and communication have always been the most important functions of language. In the description of objects or events in the physical world, language provides us with a powerful guarantee for the formation of common knowledge—the combination of symbols paves the way for the birth of meanings with the constant and sole certainty of their implications. However, in terms of describing people’s experience, it is difficult for languages to achieve a unified effect, and they are often even inaccurate or inadequate: all languages have their limits. Whether we use logical languages or daily ones, it is impossible for us to express things beyond language. Whenever we use one word to express a certain thing, we implement and recognize an inductive behavior. Besides, the use of words and expressions is often regarded as defining a category and giving it a certain essential attribute. Nevertheless, when the formal system of languages is used in experience, some uncertainty is included, and it is thus non-formalized in the process. The formalization of meanings relies, from the very beginning, on the practice of non-formal meaning, in which words and phrases are endowed with rich and unspeakable connotations (Polanyi 1998). In this sense, tacit thinking takes over the right of control, surmounting the logical gap. The tacit characteristics of knowledge are especially evident in the description of inner feelings—the content of the concept of the mind is richer and more complex than that expressed by our languages. For instance, in our experience, we have multiple different types of pain, but we do not have so many corresponding terms with which to express them; everyone might perceive an extremely large range of colors, but we are only able to name a handful of them. Besides, the colors we can memorize are very limited. Meanwhile, for a color with two different levels of saturation, though we can describe them by words and expressions, we cannot determine their chromaticity (Tye 2009)—the ability of the sensory experience to distinguish different colors is higher than that of concept or memory. Meanwhile, consciousness is differentiated or diversified. The occurrence of a certain consciousness state at a certain moment is the result of distinguishing between the numerous different states of an event. No matter how huge the numbers of different states of consciousness we experience or imagine are, we can still differentiate them, even though the differences among them are too subtle to describe in words. This characteristic helps us to understand why such a simple act as differentiating brightness from darkness is regarded as consciousness, whereas a physical device (like a photodiode) carrying out the same task is not treated that way. This is because diodes require a minimal amount of information for differentiating between brightness and darkness—with or without illumination. In comparison, for humans, the experiences of total brightness and darkness are just two special states among a myriad of possible conscious experiences. The selection of one kind of experiences means choosing from a large amount of information (Edelman and Tononi 2001). Each consciousness state is presented by excluding countless others.

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In addition, much experience is innate—individuals in their growth might have a form of thought before speaking a language, which is the reason why infants are able to understand their parents’ intentions before speaking. Admittedly, primary consciousness requires the process of conceptual formation, but here, the word “concept” is not propositional. Instead, it refers to the ability to connect different perceptual classifications related to a certain object and to form general characteristics, which reflects an abstraction of common features of various perceptions. For example, different faces have many diverse details, but the brain can discern the common similar features on all the faces. This is because the process of conceptualization is achieved by the high order mapping of the perception zone and movement zone of the brain, but languages develop after that, strengthening our conceptual communication and emotional exchanges. Also, “when we attend to mental states such as pain, love, sadness, and other related sensations, their content seems to be non-propositional” (Colomina 2013).

2.2 Disclosure of Psychological Events One of the features of physical reality is that physical change can be explained by laws that relate this change to other physically described changes and conditions; in physical laws, every physical event can be described by a kind of regularly testable vocabulary, with the latter establishing the link between concepts via the structure of necessary and sufficient conditions. For instance, hydrogen and oxygen are combined to produce water and are necessary conditions as reactants, and a reaction cannot complete without either of them, whereas the catalyst as a non-reactant is a sufficient condition. The reaction will occur when the requirement concerning the above three elements is met. However, the psychological concept cannot provide such an interpretive model. It is a feature of psychological reality that its attribution must depend on the background of the reason, faith, and intention of the psychological subject. This is because psychological events do not constitute a closed system—many events which do not belong to the psychological system will influence psychological things. No psychological-physical statement is (or can be incorporated into) a strict law, therefore, there is no strict law on which we can predict or elaborate on psychological phenomena. Imagine that, if the necessary and sufficient condition is used to describe the association between the mind’s phenomena, its form goes like this: when one person has a certain faith, desire, or emotion with some conditions being true, this person will definitely make a certain move. However, in fact, we cannot describe things this way. For instance, under what circumstances would I feel the pain? Or, which circumstances will make me feel disappointed and sad? No matter what necessary or sufficient conditions are put forward, there might be exceptions. Take another example: the person S is afraid of the thing T, so S does not like T. For such a statement, we can easily find counterexamples—people might certainly like the things they fear. The coincidence of love and fear is not uncommon. Similarly, the feeling of pain usually makes me uncomfortable, so pain has a certain connection

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with displeasure for cause and effect to some extent, but “suffering while enjoying” is common in life. In such cases, we will find that laws for describing the causal correlation of one’s state of mind cannot be unified. Specific psychological events can be explained only when we know the particular relationship (Davidson 1995). Such explanations require us to resort to many factors, such as one’s perception, desire, habits, knowledge, and faith. Some might argue that the laws of mind that we have known are mainly derived from the experience of consciousness, but at the level of unconsciousness, is there really no necessity or sufficiency? In fact, even if we find necessary and sufficient conditions on the non-consciousness level, the mind’s phenomena still do not conform to the laws of sufficient and necessary conditions. This is because when we have the same conscious experience, our brains might be in different states. The research results of neuroscience show that not all brain activities produce consciousness and that conscious experience is attributed to the overall or partial functions of the brain, but that not all the cells of the brain participate in this process. For instance, the electrical stimulation of multiple areas of the cerebral cortex does not receive any conscious report, but nerve cells in these “tacit” zones do indeed respond to the stimulation. Only a certain kind of neural activity in the brain lays the foundation for the occurrence of conscious events. For example, even if a million neurons in the primary visual cortex are motivated to move, their intense activities may not trigger any conscious experience without the response of neurons in the upper layers (Koch 2012). As a result, those nerves not directly related to consciousness result in different brain states and causal associations, but may show the same experience of consciousness.

2.3 First-Person Characteristics of Consciousness This differs from the general fields of scientific research in which we can often describe the phenomenon from “God’s view,” and consider that the less an opinion or thought depends on the characteristics of an individual’s structure and his place in the world, or the less it depends on the features of the particular species of creature to which the individual belongs, the more objective it becomes (Nagel 1974). For instance, we believe that the wavelength of light waves is more objective than colors, because individuals might have disputes over colors, or saturation and brightness— namely, individuals are not entirely consistent concerning what they see. But when we measure with an instrument, everyone will get the same data concerning waves. However, when talking about consciousness, we need to make a connection between the description of external things and our internal experience. The process we want to explain relates to ourselves—conscious observers—and we can not exclude ourselves. Why cannot consciousness be reduced to the behavior of neurons like other properties that are independent of observers, like that of solidity being reduced to molecules? Because it has a first-person characteristic, and it exists only when it is experienced in this way. By contrast, we can distinguish other phenomena like

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digestion, photosynthesis, and the like from our experience of them, which makes their reduction possible. In this sense, the subjectivity of experience is an indispensable element in the concept of mind. When removed, the connotation and essence of consciousness will be dissolved. This distinction concerns the features of epistemology: we have a certain approach to our mental states that no one else can share, and there is a basic asymmetry between introspective self-perception and an other’s perception of one’s mental states. This is not to say that we are able to obtain more certainty for our states, nor that my knowledge of them is infallible, but rather that I have a special way of grasping my thoughts and feelings, introspection, which is unavailable to others. The knowledge of my mental state is direct with no intermediary required, and I do not have to infer that I am conscious, nor do I have to observe my actions to confirm that I am executing them. For instance, your conscious experience with headaches is actually the experience of having a headache, rather than “the headache occurs, then you experience its occurrence while observing it.” In comparison, observation provides a symmetrical pathway to reach its object. Both you and I can grasp the same external objects through observation. Others’ knowledge of my state of consciousness is usually deduced from my behaviors. As we have seen, most of the problems occurring in the philosophy of mind cannot be studied directly, while in principle an empirical problem can at least be judged through experiments. Science explores the objective or open state of things, and the latter can be learned from different views by different people, but the content of the mind can only be perceived directly by ourselves. If we admit that conscious experience must have this kind of subjectivity, we cannot expect to grasp its essence only through science, because science is a kind of research from a third-person view, which provides knowledge with certain standards or rules, whereas conscious experience is a first-person feeling, a subjective experience of our specific abilities. These experiences cannot, in essence, be communicated directly through public and intersubjective scientific theories—no description can replace the individual’s subjective experience of consciousness. This seems to imply that any explanation of mind must give a certain status to such self-consciousness—all consciousness must be owned by one’s self. It is in this sense that we believe that when adopting and using others’ attitudes to control our own actions, the so-called mind will come into being: when individuals have self-consciousness, the mind is likely to make its gradual emergence. This ability of the state of mind is an important way in which the mind differs from the physical body.

3 “Mind” and “Body” as Interchangeable Perspectives Some of our visions of the mind are compatible with the experimental evidence now available, while others conflict with it. Although science provides a knowledge system predicated on the recurrent experience, it cannot tell us how to interpret these findings, nor does it mean that the in-depth problems plaguing the philosophy of mind

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can be solved by experience. At the same time, in our inquiry into what the mind is, it is difficult for us to draw clear conclusions from opposing philosophical perspectives and their debates, because the questions raised concerning the exploration of the mind are still fundamentally metaphysical. This situation is similar to Hume’s query into causal relationships: we believe that causal relationships exist because fundamentally, we think about problems through the conceptual framework of causality. As long as we rely on such a framework, we will not get rid of the confinement of causal relationships. The difficulty we face is not so much a lack of detailed information as a lack of an appropriate framework for explaining the information obtained, or a more appropriate conception of the underlying ontology. What it provides us with is not an axiomatic system from which the truth about the mind can be derived, but a conceptual system in which experience can be interpreted coherently, in which propositions from several disciplines can be united together. In this regard, we must go beyond the concept of matter contained in the formulation of hard problems for the sake of making progress in the mind -body problem. When we refer to things that can be felt or measured by the word “matter,” we have no reason to assume that everything in the physical world can be understood through the concept of objectivity in physics. One thing can possess both of the groups of properties “mental” and “physical,” which are irreducible to each other; therefore, the brain can be the subject of states of mind. Similarly, apart from having psychological attributes, “the mind also has physical properties” (Heil 2012). Whether in fact or in the psychological aspect, the parts of the space of things are inseparable from each other: in order to divide it, in reality we have to separate the original continuous part, whereas in psychology we have to imagine two areas where the original consecutive parts are on our mind. Naturally, one person can only think about the space which corresponds to one foot without considering other parts; he can naturally only think about the brightness of the sun without considering its heat, or the passivity of an object without its vastness … such is a local thinking, but when he ponders like this, he cannot separate the two fragments that are not affiliated with each other, and he never thinks that they could be separated (Locke 1999). This notion also improves the “understanding of how thinking, extension, solidity, and motion are connected in case they do coexist in the same substance” (Bolton 2015). This kind of “local thinking,” in which different things are seen through the change of perspectives, is similar to observations of ambiguous figures. For example, people might say that Fig. 1 is a duck or rabbit—in constantly changing scenes, there are sufficient reasons for both, but they are incompatible with one another. Similarly, in Fig. 2, people might see a wine glass or two people staring at each other, but they cannot find both the glass and the side-looking faces at the same time. In consciousness, there is always one thing occupying the center of attention. All the other things, including other perspectival forms of the object, retreat behind the curtain. The key to the problem lies in different perspectives, and perspectives are concepts. Starting from the concept of a duck, we see the duck; from a rabbit, the rabbit (Wittgenstein 2000). The dispute originates from different concepts rather than from the thing itself. Not accidentally, this echoes the practices that later philosophers such as Churchland, Fodor, and Siegel have debated: whether and how our cognitive states might

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influence our perceptual experiences, as well as how any such influences might affect the ability of our experiences to justify our beliefs about the external world. Silins has surveyed views about the nature of cognitive penetration, the epistemological consequences of denying cognitive penetration, and the epistemological consequences of affirming cognitive penetration (Silins 2016). The ontology of philosophy of mind is inherently consistent with this. For images made up of the same lines, people may see totally different scenes from different angles, and distinguish them internally by diverting attention. In other words, for entities sharing the same basis, people get to know them sometimes through this property and other times through another. As far as mind and body are concerned, people know them from the property of thought at one time and from the property of extension at the other. However, when a thing is considered in the form of thought, we must solely explain it by the properties of thought; in the form of extension, by the properties of extension, for its sequence and its cause and effect (Spinoza 2010: 68, 50). Therefore, we might understand why we cannot find a connection between physical concepts and mind concepts from a subjective or objective point of view alone—if there is one property P for explaining how the brain produces mental phenomena, or that includes the brain’s function and mental phenomena at the same time, then when we look at it from an objective point of view, we cannot see the Fig. 1 Duck/Rabbit illustration

Fig. 2 Wine glass/looking at each other (ambiguous figure)

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subjective mental attribute of property P; otherwise, when we look at property P from a subjective point of view, we cannot see all of it, because it is impossible for our inner world’s capacity for reflection (or so-called intuition) to observe the brain phenomenon. Probably the word “expression” can be used for understanding and illustrating this feature of the relationship between body and mind. “Expression” has dual meanings of explication and involvement. On the one hand, it is an explication, an unfolding and manifesting of its own object or attributes; on the other hand, these multiple expressions—entities manifest themselves in their attributes, and attributes in their patterns—contain a kind of uniformity. The style involves and explicates properties or entities. In turn, the property involves the essence of all of its styles (Cerezo 2011). This had been also alluded to by Deleuze, who make the significance of Spinoza’s point broader: that the various things that my body can do and the various things that my mind can do are the same things, expressed differently (Moore 2012). Expressionism overcame the internal difficulties of Cartesianism—it was difficult for Descartes to explain how two entities having nothing in common coordinate with each other, but in the terms of expressionism, thought and extension, as two properties of an entity, fully represent the same natural necessity of the entity. The mind and matter are thus considered two aspects of a unity, namely the internal aspect only accessible to the individual and the external aspect including observable brain structures and functions. The representation of the mind is the reflection of the interaction between the body and environment. It is about how the brain’s response to the environment affects the body’s response, and a reflection of how the body’s adjusting progresses in the changing state of life. Such assumption might require a higher level than that of mental and physical things, or require making a unified explanation of things based on a basic thing. As Russell advocated, the feeling as an object of direct awareness independent of the mind plays the role of neutral material, and the things of the mind and physics are built with them logically. Hence, each element can participate in the formation of a series of psychological things, as well as the composition of a series of physical things; they can be viewed from the perspective of physics as well as of psychology. Moreover, feeling is what is shared by the spiritual and physical world, which can be defined as the intersection of mind and matter (Russell 2005). It belongs to the laws of psychology and physics and is therefore “neutral.” In this way, we avoid the problem of how mind and body interact, but how to understand the nature of the neutral materials on which mind and body depend is another puzzle to be explored.

4 The Mind–Body Continuum How do the physical activities of nerve cells in the brain produce non-physical inner feelings? According to the traditional view of matter, this seems like a problem similar to that of the Big Bang because according to the physical causal closure principle, if the cause of an event is physical, the event itself is also physical. Of

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course, not all phenomena occurring in the physical world can be described by the concepts of cause and effect; for example, the occurrence of some phenomena in quantum mechanics may only be described by the concept of probability, but this does not affect the principle of the physical closure of cause and effect. For many philosophers, there is a profound difference between consciousness and biological life: consciousness is considered as a kind of subjective and internal property of one’s mental state, while life is seen as an external, objective, structural, and functional property of physical systems. Based on such a way of thinking, a special difficulty will be caused by the attempt at understanding consciousness and its place in nature—that is, if the conscious existence of individuals is experienced from within, how then can it relate to natural life observed and understood externally? The key is the conceptual point that the explanation of functions does not suffice for the explanation of experience (Chalmers 2017). In other words, there seems to be an interpretation gap between the structure and function of consciousness and the physical. There is a fundamental break between life and consciousness. As long as we still treat the concepts of consciousness and life in an either-or way of thinking, it is impossible to resolve the problem of the relationship between mind and body. This is because it assumes the mutual exclusion of “psychology” and “physics”: “matter” means “non-mind” and “mind” means “non-matter.” In terms of logical classifications, if we regard “mind” as a category opposed to “matter,” the two must be parallel in time and space without containing common elements. However, the mind, apart from having mental properties, also possesses physical properties. On the other hand, since such a view of matter is only focused on “extension,” it is certainly unable to explain the movements and changes of things—the extension itself cannot be the reason for movement. Matter can merely be regarded as things unable to move by themselves, and movement is added to the matter externally. Here, as a basic law of the universe, “continuity” is the key to the problem: matter does not totally mean passive or “inert” things, but only those that exist independently and that are not subject to other things, and their movements and changes should come from their own reasons. In fact, the perception we notice is gradually coming from the one that is too small to notice (Leibniz 1982). Leibniz believed the “true concept of substance” is found in “the concept of forces or powers.” Accordingly, he conceived monadic substances as metaphysically primitive forces whose modifications manifest both as monads’ appetitions and perceptions and as derivative forces in monads’ organic bodies (Phemister 2017). When matter is an organism, it has a certain degree of self-sufficiency within itself, and the latter constitutes the source of its internal activities. Life itself contains purposefulness—a kind of inherent trait containing selfhood and meaning generation. This is because all the creatures have a genetic program that has been historically wired, which endows the organism with the ability to carry out purposive activities. In this case, every living body has a ruling “Entelechy” (Leibniz 2002). The latest achievements in cell research are creating new links between the material and spiritual world. The research reveals that cells usually have a basic “perception” about their various internal movements, such as whether there is light, oxygen, hormones, toxins, nutrients, and other stimuli in the environment directly

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relating to them. The reason for possessing such an ability is that there are tens of thousands of perception switches in the cell membrane—the cell membrane receptoreffector proteins, which are the basic physical subunits of the brain’s intelligent mechanism of cells. Each of them is able to deliver and send information in their environment and connect the stimulus received to the protein pathway that initiates the reaction, thus opening or closing the genes (Lipton 2005); their interactions jointly create a response from a living cell. Meanwhile, the signaling molecules for regulating the physiological functions of every cell are also released to the environment, thereby affecting the behaviors of other beings. The point here is that the signals are transformed into perception that can be felt by all the cells in the group, and the latter provides the conditions for the primary “mind.” It is such an approach that allows the hidden survival intentions of the cells in our bodies to be translated into mental, conscious will—on the one hand, the neurotransmitters throughout the various organs of the body act like “messengers,” transmitting the information sent from a certain part (including the brain, for sure) of the body to the entire system. On the other hand, the information processing receptors in the cell membrane of the brain’s nerve cells also exist in most of the body cells, thereby affecting the division, regeneration, growth, depletion, repair, and antiinfection measures of somatic cells. In this way, the cells producing and receiving emotions and chemicals in the brain also spread over the whole body (Pert 2002). We can conclude that even the lowest organism predicts the mind, and even the highest mind is a part of the organism. This characteristic of “life implying the mind, and mind belonging to life” is exactly the deep continuity of life and mind (Thompson and Cosmelli 2011). This continuity is not only organizational, functional, and behavioral, but also includes aspects of experience. This also explains how the external world is portrayed in the internal world: when the body interacts with the environment, sensory organs like eyes, ears, and skin change, and the brain draws them into a map. As a result, the world outside the body is indirectly presented in the brain (Craver 2009). Perception provides us with knowledge of particulars in our environment and justifies singular thoughts about particulars. This question has been addressed by the exploration of the fundamental nature of perceptual experience—perceptual states are constituted by particulars—and then epistemic, ontological, psychologistic, and semantic approaches have been discussed to account for perceptual particularity (Schellenberg 2016). Some work in vision science has also provided strong reasons to think that “ensemble properties” which belong to a set of perceptible objects as a whole as opposed to the individuals that constitute that set should be added to the list of visually admissible properties (Bayne and McClelland 2018). The continuity of mind–body is formed and maintained through the association of life categories. This interpretation of the mind–body relationship gives rise to the unique epistemological questions raised by philosophers with New Platonist tendencies. It asks “why can not we know everything about ourselves?” instead of “how can we know ourselves?” This is because our cognition starts from perception and can perceive certain things only in a specific way, and because cognition has thus been seriously confused—in these opinions, there is no difference between the essence of external object and the peculiar nature of our own sensory organs. We ambiguously consider

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that external things motivate our bodies through themselves; we regard the body as a smooth “mirror of nature,” and “the resulting confusion is the source of ignorance and misconceptions about the world, body, and mind” (Marshall 2009). Correspondingly, we only pay attention to observable and measurable activities represented by the body, but ignore its self-experiencing in the process of realizing activities. As noted by David Chalmers, sentience or the ability to feel and sense raises a hard problem for contemporary theories of consciousness. And the intertwined inadequacies of monitoring consciousness are just what led Kant to introduce a new kind of awareness and hold that cognition is a mental state that determines a given object by attributing general features to it. Watkins and Willaschek explain what it means for Kant for an object to be given: givenness in the relevant sense involves an immediate relation to an existing object (Watkins and Willaschek 2017). To clear up these confusions, we need to understand the body more in our understanding of the mind, and to understand the way in which things in the natural environment motivate the body. The key lies in the important differentiation between living and non-living things: the former is able to perform behaviors as an intentional activity, which are unique features of creatures (Barbaras 2011). The innate capability of the body to make determinations by itself enables people to actively pursue their own well-being or achieve their own intentions and goals with positive efforts. In this case, mind and body have a jointly achievable mechanism—events in the body are represented as conceptions in the mind with expressive correspondence between the body and the mind, whereas the approach for achieving such correspondence has been inherent in an entity. In closing, I would like to say a few words about the possible questions that my point of view may face. Does the causal closure principle still hold in the new picture this paper depicts? The closure principle has been recognized as the cornerstone of physics. This is why physicalism prevailed in the twentieth century. As for this principle, David Papineau gave a famous argument (Papineau 2009) which can be found to actually justify the physical causal closure via an interpretation of reductionism. However, as far as current science is concerned, explanatory reductionism cannot effectively support physical causal closure, which is less likely to be proved applicable or reliable in the mental world. As described earlier, psychological events do not constitute a closed system—many events which do not belong to the psychological system will influence psychological things. As it is also questionable to discuss mind–body relation on the premise of physical causal closure, we cannot accept it as a presupposition. Thus, there will be no question of how to resolve the conflict between the proposition of this paper and current physics.

References Barbaras, Renaud. 2011. The World of Life. Philosophy Today 55 (Supplement): 8–16. Bayne, Tim, and Tom McClelland. 2018. Ensemble Representation and the Contents of Visual Experience. Philosophical Studies 3: 1–21.

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Bolton, Martha Brandt. 2015. Locke on Thinking Matter. In A Companion to Locke, ed. Matthew Stuart, 334–353.West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Cerezo, Antonio Castilla. 2011. Deleuze, Lector de Spinoza: Del Problema de La Expresión a La Filosofía práctica. Convivium 24: 163–179. Chalmers, David. 2017. The Hard Problem of Consciousness. In The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, ed. Susan L Schneider and Max Velmans, 32–42. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Colomina, Juan J. 2013. Problematizing Tye’s Intentionalism: The Content of Bodily Sensations, Emotions, and Moods. Journal of Mind and Behavior 34 (2): 177–195. Craver, Carl Frederick. 2009. Levels of Mechanisms: A Field Guide to the Hierarchical Structure of the World. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, ed. John Symons and Paco Calvo, 395–397. London: Routledge. Davidson, Donald. 1995. Laws and Cause. Laws and Cause 49 (20–4): 263–280. Edelman, Gerald, and Giulio Tononi. 2001. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination, 32–33. New York: Basic Books. Goff, Philip. 2016. Fundamentality and the Mind-Body Problem. Erkenntnis 81 (4): 881–898. Heil, John. 2012. Philosophy of Mind: A Contemporary Introduction, 182. London: Routledge. Koch, Christof. 2012. Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, 53. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 2002. Systeme Nouveau et les Eclaircissements de ce Systeme. Trans. Xiu-zhai Chen, 169. Beijing: The Commercial Press. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1982. Nouveaux Essais Sur L’Entendement Humain. Trans. Xiu-zhai Chen, 13–14. Beijing: The Commercial Press. Lipton, Bruce H. 2005. The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles, 74. California: Hay House Inc. Locke, John. 1999. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 140. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marshall, Colin. 2009. The Mind and the Body as ‘One and the Same Thing’ in Spinoza. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 17 (5): 897–919. Moore, Adrian. 2012. The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things, 50–51. New York: Cambridge University Press. Nagel, Thomas. 1974. What Is It Like to Be a Bat? The Philosophical Review 83 (4): 435–450. Papineau, David. 2009. The Causal Closure of the Physical and Naturalism. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, ed. Brian P. McLaughlin, Ansgar Beckermann, and Sven Walter, 57. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pert, Candace B. 2002. The Wisdom of the Receptors: Neuropeptides, the Emotions, and Bodymind. Advances in Mind-Body Medicine 18 (1): 30–35. Phemister, Pauline. 2017. Substance and Force: Or Why It Matters What We Think. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (3): 526–546. Polanyi, Michael. 1998. Personal Knowledge, 251. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. Russell, Bertrand. 2005. The Analysis of Mind, 122–123. London: Taylor and Francis e-Library. Schafer, Karl. 2018. Hard Problems Between Minds and Bodies. Philosophy & Phenomenological Research 96 (1): 224–232. Schellenberg, Susanna. 2016. Perceptual Particularity. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (1): 25–54. Searle, John R. 1992. The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Silins, Nicholas. 2016. Cognitive Penetration and the Epistemology of Perception. Philosophy Compass 11 (1): 24–42. Simmons, Alison. 2017. Mind-Body Union and the Limits of Cartesian Metaphysics. Philosophers’ Imprint 17 (14): 1–26. Spinoza, Benedict. 2010. The Ethics. Trans. L. He. Beijing: The Commercial Press. Thompson, Evan, and Diego Cosmelli. 2011. Brain in a Vat or Body in a World? Brainbound Versus Enactive Views of Experience. Philosophical Topics 39 (1): 163–180.

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Tye, Michael. 2009. Consciousness Revisited: Materialism Without Phenomenal Concepts, 106. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Watkins, Eric, and Marcus Willaschek. 2017. Kant’s Account of Cognition. Journal of the History of Philosophy 55 (1): 83–112. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2000. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. Buloi Li, 298–304. Beijing: The Commercial Press.

Chapter 3

From ‘the Mind Isolated with the Body’ to ‘the Mind Being Embodied’

Abstract In the interpretation of the body in the twentieth century, philosophy placed less emphasis than before on its natural composition and sought to integrate value judgements from different perspectives. The philosophy of the body addresses the deepest essential problems of human society and culture, it generates a uniquely detailed analysis of human nature and its various roles and performances in social operations, and it reveals contemporary society’s operating mechanisms and deep internal contradictions. Accordingly, philosophy no longer gives the mind any priority or superiority in terms of cognition, and the focus of research has moved away from pure consciousness and towards the body. Contemporary philosophical exploration of the body covers both the concept of belongingness and the feasibility of bodily freedom. It not only foregrounds the impossibility of viewing the body and the mind as separate entities but also leads us to examine the connections between humans and the world, taking meaning, reason and the body as their basis. This chapter explores the connections between body and thought in modern philosophy, traces the development of philosophy’s increasing concern with the body, elucidates the main contributions of representative figures in the field of philosophy of the body, and analyses the methodological significance and influence of the philosophy of the body as a contemporary philosophical trend. Keywords Body · Thought · Embodied mind · World · Identity

1 Introduction Since the ancient Greeks, a binary opposition between the body and the soul has been a basic framework of Western philosophy. People tend to consider their bodies as matter without thoughts and as fundamentally different from their souls and minds. No matter what else ‘body’ might mean, it refers principally to a thing without comprehension, choice or judgement, contrary to self-determination and free will (Walter 2011). According to René Descartes, although there is a close interaction between the mind and the body, they are two beings with different essences. The body stands for sensibility, contingency and uncertainty, whereas the mind represents

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sense, truth, stability and certainty. Thus, for much of the history of Western thought, the body has been in a hidden and obscure state. Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century, Nietzsche not only treated reason, emotion, thought and will in a new way but also re-explored the relationship between the human body and spirit. He analysed the operation of power, especially power that produces knowledge and subjectivity by taking the body as an object. Subsequently, philosophers started to focus on the hidden ties between body and thought; they began to use the term ‘body’ to resist the arbitrariness of the philosophy of consciousness, and they contributed to a philosophical movement that was increasingly concerned about the body. In the second half of the twentieth century, the body became a popular research topic, as scholars moved away from the examined object and towards the subject of thoughts and behaviours. The body has since been a focus of sustained attention in the humanities and social sciences and a major topic in discussions about contemporary politics and culture (Slatman 2014).

2 The Body, Social Symbols and Value Signs Since Friedrich Nietzsche, the body has occupied an important position in philosophy. Although various theories have been advanced, their common focus is the inherent materiality of the body, by which it reaches a certain level of social practice; in this way, they combine the body and society and take the body as the starting point of the world. The disenchantment and secularization of the body runs throughout modern Western history, affecting considerations of how individuals make choices in the physical development strategies of life planning and who determines the disposition of the body’s products and parts. The body as an aspect of nature has been seen as a carrier of social and political significance. Gradually subjected to human interference or even domination, it has become a site of interaction, possession, repossession and linking of systematic expert knowledge. Comparing society to a body (unlike comparing it to a family) makes the authoritative order of society more inevitable and irreplaceable, and thus the body becomes a source of acute contradictions in ideology. Most of Michel Foucault’s works are closely related to the body, which has long been a focus for examinations of phenomena such as psychosis, clinical medicine and prison systems. Foucault recognized that these issues, in order to become objects of study, must manifest themselves and that they can do that only in the human body. In his work on the archaeology of knowledge and the genealogy of power, Foucault attributed a variety of social events in different social and historical periods to the continuous process of reconstructing fractured relational networks based on differences in power, instead of to a specific, fixed historical structure. He believed that any original and continuous reconstruction process was closely related to the body in the flesh. None of these historical processes, no matter how brief, can be separated from the existence and operation of the body:

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The flesh—and all the things embedding into it including food, climates and earth—is where the source is: just as the body generates desires, weaknesses, and faults … all the events in the past … are also linked in the flesh, and sometimes jostle against one another in the flesh. They would also dissolve, fight, and vanish with each other, and pursue the insurmountable conflicts … Therefore, genealogy, as the stream analysis, is in the link between the body and history. (Foucault 2004a)

The historical shaping of the body is both the physical archive of historical events and the material witness of those events. However, the functions and operations of each part of the body have been affected and limited by sociocultural environments, and its modes of activity and the effects of its actions are presented in those environments directly. Accordingly, Foucault did not restrict himself to general discussions of the relationships between the body, the mind and thought. Instead, he explored how personal body conditions and modes of activity have been limited by social systems and regulations in different historical eras, how the body and social systems and regulations interact during the process of production, and how the functions of each part of the body are fulfilled through the relation between social normalization and personal subjectivation. He went on to explain how the demand and desire that are necessary for personal life are related to the maintenance and operation of the entire social system in terms of the fundamental functions of the body, such as the basic operations of the digestive system and the sexual organs. Those functions appear to belong to the physical processes of life, but in fact they possess social morality and great cultural significance and in different eras have been socialized rigidly and symbolized culturally through institutions and rituals. The purpose of Foucault’s research was to explain how power mechanisms relate directly to the human body, its many functions, and its physiological processes, feelings and enjoyment; far from obscuring the human body, those functions enable it to take its place in such an analysis. The relationship between biological nature and social nature becomes increasingly complex with the development of modern technologies of power, as opposed to being connected one after another, as depicted in traditional theories of sociology. Therefore, it is not the ‘spiritual history’ that attaches importance to the body in terms of how people endow it with significance and values but ‘the history of the body itself’ and the history of the methods that people use to surround physical and energetic things in bodies (Foucault 2004b). Like Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze regarded the body as an active, rising and positive productive force. Deleuze interpreted Nietzsche’s philosophy of the body in detail and developed it further, abstracting the body as a productive force or a huge desire machine. According to Deleuze, the body as desire is capable of growing, evolving and venturing forth endlessly. The production of desire is a contradictory process that has been suppressed both internally (a body without organs) and externally (society). A body without organs in this sense is not a soma without organs but a body without organization, an antistructural body, a generative and variable body: … a state that gets rid of its social connection, discipline, symbolism, and subjectivity, so as to become a body that is unrelated to, separated from, and decomposed of the society, therefore, … is able to be reconstructed in a new way. (Best and Kellner 2011)

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A body without organs performs internal or external resistance in the form of persecution of organs internally or of agents externally (Deleuze 2011). Desire is interpreted as decentralized, fragmented and dynamic in nature. The movement of desire is not to find objects that it lacks and that can satisfy it but to seek new links and representations within the drive of its abundant energy. In short, the pursuit of desire stands for a trend in subjective theory that keeps modernity at a distance. This change of attitude towards the body reflects the secularization of Western values. Whereas traditional Western values focused on abstinence and self-control, the consumer culture and fashion industry that arose in the twentieth century emphasized control of the body’s surface. The recurrence and interpretative schema of realistic rationalism are regarded as frozen, rigidly coercive objects that impede creativity. ‘Culture’ in modern society has become a synonym of and figure for a series of operations of commercialized symbols. In this context, contrary to the traditional ethic of ‘the body serving the individual’, the modern ethic of ‘enabling the individual to serve his/her own body’ takes priority: Its ‘rediscovery’, in a spirit of physical and sexual liberation, after a millennial age of puritanism; its omnipresence (specifically the omnipresence of the female body, a fact we shall have to try to explain) in advertising, fashion and mass culture; the hygienic, dietetic, therapeutic cult which surrounds it, the obsession with youth, elegance, virility/femininity, treatments and regimes, and the sacrificial practices attaching to it all bear witness to the fact that the body has today become an object of salvation. It has literally taken over that moral and ideological function from the soul. (Baudrillard 1998)

In other words, the body takes the place of the soul completely. With the spread of consumerism, people have increasingly focused on the aesthetic qualities of the body. Body capital has become a standard of taste. Nevertheless, the basis for the body’s being occupied again is not the independent goal of the subject but a standardized principle of entertainment and hedonistic utility, a utilitarian constraint directly associated with a social coding rule for production and directed consumption. The ‘liberated body’ is therefore a representation, indicating only that an ideology regarding souls has been replaced by a more functional ideology—that is, a spontaneous performance of the body has taken the place of the transcendence of the (completely internal) soul. However, this manifestation is false, as it takes the role of privileged spiritual pillar away from the soul only to give it to the body instead. Currently, the body has penetrated into production as its economic pillar, guiding psychological principles and political strategies that can be controlled; it has been reduced to an object of investment projects. The effects of such projects are even more profound than the alienation of the body in labour. The body’s occupation of this central position in daily life is particularly evident in the importance of ‘habits’, since the impressions caused by body posture concern the external expressions that one is least likely to change deliberately. Pierre Bourdieu developed his view that the body accumulates differences between social power and social inequality on the basis of his study of the social habits of professional groups. The body, as a symbolic sign, is capital in itself. It can usually be displaced as economic capital and converted into cultural capital, the conversion being accomplished by particular practices of the body. Habits, or practical senses, are the ‘quasi

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somatization’ of the world. A practical belief is a physical state, not a psychological state or a belief in institutionalized doctrines and creeds determined by spiritual freedom; the original acquisition regards the body as a memorandum and as the place where the greatest value is stored (Bourdieu 2012: 88, 101, 212). For instance, people attach importance to certain major collective ceremonies not only because ceremonious presentation is central to the style and features of a group but also for a less overt reason: it is through strict arrangement of practical activities and regular governance of the body, and especially bodily expression of emotions (such as laughter or tears), that thoughts are organized and emotions produced. Habits, as a kind of knowledge, are the memory of hands and bodies; when we cultivate habits, it is our bodies that ‘understand’. The body thus combines consciousness of social structures and world structures. The world structure enters the body through internalization, and body and mind are unified there. In this sense, practical sense is body sense.

3 Body, World and Embodied Mind In the second half of the twentieth century, all kinds of influences promoted the development from phenomenology to psychology. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body was a psychology established on the basis of a philosophy in which Descartes’s cogito was replaced by the perceptual body-subject. The Cartesian definition of perception as the internal performance of given objects of the external world results in a dualism of subject/object and of all the relevant philosophical questions. According to Merleau-Ponty, such questions cannot be fully addressed within the framework of Cartesianism/mentalism, and perception must therefore be reconsidered in a fundamental way. This insight was the starting point of his analysis of the embodiedness of perception and the intentionality of the body. Merleau-Ponty’s exposition and examination of issues such as time, space, the other, the natural world, freedom and intersubjectivity were all conducted through discussion of the body. In this approach, the body is the possessor of vision and touch, not merely their means; ‘eyes’ are visible ‘bodies’ and ‘minds’ are invisible ‘spirit’. The body provides conditions of conscious objects and meanings from perception. It watches everything and is able to watch itself. It is the visible and sensible object for itself. Since the body and everything else are made of the same materials, the vision of the body is formed in everything in a certain way, and the public visibility of things produces a secret visibility in the body (Merleau-Ponty 2007: 36–37, 39). The body and the world are coexisting relations, and the world is presented to a person with all the parts of his or her body through a connection similar to that which exists between each part of the body. This is a living connection rather than a ‘natural geometry’. Understanding of the world starts from the understanding of the body, since the world is not an objective existence and cannot be exhausted by rational knowledge. Access to the world is experiencing and perceiving through the body. Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology, and in particular the system he began to develop in The Visible and the Invisible, can be conceived of as a form of radical enactive cognition (Zavota 2016).

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This idea of perceiving the world through the body was further developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson at the end of the twentieth century. They began by criticizing a range of erroneous objectivist claims about thinking that ignore an important feature of human cognition: namely, that the physiological structure and physical experience of humans have played a key role in the process of forming meaningful concepts and reasoning. On this basis, they claimed that the formation of the concept of space derives from our continuous spatial experience; this most fundamental concept results from the interaction between individuals and their natural environment (Lakoff and Johnson 2015). Cognition or mind is inseparable from direct physical experience, which is not simple but is obtained under the premise of a certain extensive and profound culture. Cultural assumptions, values and attitudes are not conceptual coverings that we can choose to impose (or not impose) on experience. Culture is implied in each experience itself as the way we experience the world that we live in. Through natural dimensions, our bodies and the essence of our natural and cultural environments give structure to our experience. Recurring experience leads to the creation of categories, which are experiential ‘gestalts’ with natural dimensions. Those gestalts define the coherence of experience. We understand experience directly when we depend on experience gestalts obtained directly from ourselves, our environment and our interaction in the environment, and when we believe that experience has coherent structures; we understand experience metaphorically when we use a gestalt of one domain of experience to structure our experience of another domain (Lakoff and Johnson 2015). Merleau-Ponty’s writings have been cited as the theoretical foundation of embodied cognition theory, and in Structure of Behaviors he examined mutual regulations and choices between organisms and their environments: … all the movements of [the] organism have always been restricted by external influences, if we are willing to, we can totally take actions as a result of the environment. But likewise, just as all the stimulation obtained by the organism can only be achieved by means of their previous movements (they are achieved by exposing sensory organs to external influences), we can say that behaviors are primary reasons of all the stimulation. The form of such stimulation is created by inherent methods of organism itself, presented to external functions … [The] body selects the stimulation it wants to feel in the physical world, according to the nature of the receptor, the thresholds of its nerve center and the movements of its organization. (Merleau-Ponty 2010)

Inspired by this, embodied cognition theory has advanced the following propositions: (1) cognition depends on types of experience that come from bodies with various sensory movements; and (2) the perception movement abilities of individuals are embedded in a broader biological, psychological and cultural context. Those propositions emphasize that perception and movement processes, and consciousness and action in nature, are inseparable in cognition because they are linked in the individual not purely or accidentally but through evolution and integration (Varela et al. 2017). A growing body of evidence confirms that cognition is embodied and grounded. Nonetheless, abstract concepts remain a significant theoretical challenge. Guy Dove

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(2018) has argued that a successful account of how language augments cognition must emphasize its symbolic properties and incorporate a view of embodiment that recognizes the flexible, multimodal and task-related nature of action, emotion and perception systems. Micah Allen and Karl Friston (2018) have illustrated how the free energy principle can dissolve tensions between internalist and externalist accounts of cognition by providing a formal synthetic account of how internal representations arise from autopoietic self-organization. The free energy principle thus furnishes empirically productive process theories for guiding discovery through formal modelling of the embodied mind. As an alternative to representational approaches to the imagination, José Medina (2013) has articulated an enactivist approach to examining how the enactive imagination works in animal cooperative behaviour and in animal communication. His approach indicates that an enactive imagination is a key component in a person’s cognitive, affective and moral learning. A question remains as to how, if at all, emotions and subcortical contributions fit into this emerging picture. In this connection, Mark Miller and Andy Clark (2018) have proposed a tightly coordinated process of continuous reciprocal causation that weaves together bodily information and ‘top-down’ predictions, thereby generating a unified sense of what is out there and why it matters. In the exploration of cognition, we cannot avoid such logical implications, as any scientific description (of either biological or mental phenomena) must be a product of the structure of our cognitive system. We necessarily implement such reflective behaviours against the given background of biological, social and cultural beliefs and practices. Our assumptions about that background are simply the things that we do, and we adopt the schema as a whole, including the background we are exposed to. The basic cyclical shaft is the embodiment of experience and cognition, including the active body both as a structure of experience and as a cognitive mechanism. Understanding is not a state inside the head but one that criss-crosses brain, body and world. In this regard, extended cognition can be regarded as emphasizing the crucial role played in our cognitive processes by tools, material representations and the wider environment (Toon 2015). Bodily interaction with the world and the accompanying subconscious processing can change subjects’ dispositions to apply their concepts in ways that are not rationally accessible to them (even given a complete description of that interaction), and it does not constitute a change in the content of the concepts involved (Rupert 2016). Embodied cognition research draws on phenomenology’s elimination of both entity dualism and attribute dualism. If the mind is not an independent entity separated from the body, and if it is not an epiphenomenon unrelated to behaviour, then can we establish a theoretical conception of ‘the mind in the body’? The core conception of the mind in the body is that the mind is not merely an entity or attribute that is separate from the body but is essentially an act or physical activity, and any mental activity is rooted in physical activity. If we can refer to the mind governed by dualism as the mind of entity and of epiphenomenon, then we can refer to the mind in the body as the body–mind of embodied mind, or simply as physical mind. The concept of body–mind does not consist of two related entities or properties of the body and the mind. The purpose of connecting the words ‘body’ and ‘mind’ with

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a dash is to show that the mind is the body and that they are integral and inseparable. However, the integration of the body and the mind is not equivalent to the reduction of traditional psychosomatic theory to physical and physiological states of the brain in which the mind is equal to the active body. Indeed, a large body of evidence suggests that our concepts are often embodied and grounded in sensorimotor systems, and this speaks against standard forms of the phenomenal concept strategy (PCS). According to the PCS, thinking about the connection between mental facts and physical facts involves the exercise of both physical and phenomenal concepts. Nevertheless, it is possible to formulate a new version of the PCS that is more in keeping with embodied cognition, focuses on the features of physical concepts and adequately explains the appearance of contingency (Dove and Elpidorou 2016). In the process of exploring the mind and of criticizing Cartesian dualism, the philosophy of the body denies the supposed priority and superiority of the mind in cognition. That denial has moved the focus of research away from consciousness and towards the body, and subsequent explorations take account of both the concept of belongingness and the feasibility of bodily freedom. This leads us to recognize not only the impossibility of regarding the body and mind as separate entities but also the real associations between people and the world, with meaning, sense and the body as their basis. This reconstruction of cognitive activities and reinterpretation of the idea of the mind open up a wide expanse of road to us, even if we have so far taken only our first few steps along it.

4 Resorting to the ‘Embodied Mind’ In the 1970s, following these developments in psychology, the cognitivist or symbolic approach dominated research into cognition, particularly in the form of connectionism, which took neural network processing as its theoretical basis, supposing it to be analogous to human cognitive activities through the biological activities of the brain. In the AI (artificial intelligence) community, consciousness is regarded as a method of information processing in the human brain. This raises the question of how the brain represents and processes information, for which there are two main proposals: module theory, which implies a transcendental viewpoint, and distribution theory, which is more or less empirical. In terms of modules (analogies of ontology and faith), symbolism regards human brains as symbolic operation systems and human thinking as essentially a form of symbolic processing; in this view, intelligence can be modelled by static, sequential digital calculation models. In connectionism, the cognitive functions and features of human brains are integrated on the basis of neurophysiology, in that information is converted and sub-symbols are parallel-processed by means of digital features (instead of logical rules) (Garnham 2009). Undistributed systems are often directed by a single command, and commands are published centrally. Each network layer

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consists of a serial relationship, while the distributed system has multiple organizations to issue commands. (Since no unified command organization behaves asynchronously, asynchronous contents are obviously included here.) The distributed system is therefore characterized by good levels of fault tolerance, self-learning abilities, the generation of associations and speed. It should be noted that the elements in the pattern of intense excitement that characterizes consciousness usually occur one at a time. In other words, consciousness activities are serial, but the brain is a parallel information-processing system. Understanding this requires an acknowledgement that consciousness reflects the most important event being processed by the brain at any given time. A variety of conscious and unconscious neural activities take place in the brain, which is a parallel information-processing system that takes consciousness as its serial centre (Sharkey and Sharkey 2009). The module theory and the distribution theory, as two paradigms of mutual opposition and competition, can explain some of the existing findings. The module theory is effective in illustrating phenomena such as interference, generalization and ratings in the process of cognition psychology; for example, some types of language failures in patients with brain injuries support the module theory of language structures, and parallel calculation is widespread in the nervous system. In contrast, the distributed theory is more successful in simulating relatively simple cognitive processes. With its rich experimental results, cognitive psychology has changed the face of psychology, but it has also been heavily criticized, not least at the level of methodology. Research in cognitive psychology has focused on individual cognitive phenomena to the neglect of interactions between individuals, interactions between individuals and culture, and the essence of social structures in which individuals are members. Traditionally, cognitive psychologists adopted computer metaphors to explain mental activities. Programmers, on this analogy, do not need to know about hardware, and cognitive psychologists therefore work at the level of behavioural analysis. Nowadays, however, a growing number of psychologists acknowledge that the role of human information processing in almost every important aspect of its functioning is importantly different from that of a standard digital computer. The basis of contemporary cognitive psychology is mental representation and computation theory. Representation theory regards cognition as reproduction of the object world, whereas computation theory regards it as a process of computing information or manipulating symbols according to limited formal systems or algorithmic rules. Either way, what is revealed is the computational mind, which is at a considerable distance from the experiential mind, although complete human cognition must include both aspects at the same time (Jackendoff 2002). The riddle of consciousness has not been solved, but at least we have gained the methodological insight that the solution will require the integration of multiple disciplines. Over the past 30 years, a welcome trend in cognitive psychology has been a focus on the occurrence and development of psychological phenomena in daily life, in an attempt to establish a cognitive model that is consistent with the human experience of consciousness and that will reveal cognitive activities through the characteristics of human intuitive experience.

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Since the results of quantitative research on psychological phenomena are specific and precise, theories in almost all fields of modern cognition can be tested under standard laboratory conditions. However, there are many respects in which laboratory studies do not adequately represent the realities of daily life. In a psychological experiment, the response of the subject is not caused by the stimulation directly but by the stimulation as a clue to the experimenter’s subjective response. This interference with independent variables may affect the subject’s understanding of the experimental scenario and their own role within it, and the motivational directions taken by the subject. In other words, subjects tend to behave according to the so-called Hawthorn effect, presenting demand characteristics in response to the experimenter’s assumptions (Pickel 2008). The existence of such experimental effects is enough to show that there is a difference between the experimental scenario and the ‘real’ world; because the former is a transient, artificial and abnormal situation formed by interaction between subjects and experimenters, extending the results of any experiment to a larger group is problematic. Another prominent aspect of laboratory research is the so-called decoupling problem. With the development of research expertise, it has been noted that the scope of experimental methods is very limited. Research into interests, necessities, emotions and hopes involves a large number of unrelated variables, and experimental methods are often unsuited to controlling them. The unnatural environment of the experiment therefore affects the individual’s psychological and behavioural responses, bringing the validity of the test into question. For moral reasons, some studies do not control subjects, instead tailoring the study environment to the individual. In this connection, Ulric Neisser (1999) has noted that the study of information-processing approaches has yet to explore any aspect of human nature beyond laboratory limitations, and its basic assumptions have not gone beyond the computer models on which it relies. The human mind is not a general-purpose computer, and it is only the organ that is very sensitive to external stimulation. Eysenck and Keane’s (2010) warning is therefore unsurprising: ... from the perspective that the discovery of new phenomena leads to a surprising number of related sub-phenomena, the more scientific the study of memories, the further it is away from the goals it should have.

Although that view is somewhat pessimistic, it is useful to remain alert to the qualitative impacts of changes in motivation and mood in internal cognitive activity. A focus on inner psychological processes under strict control that fails to take account of the main features of perception and memory that occur in daily life will lead cognitive psychology to repeat the mistakes of behaviourism, thus becoming a narrow and specialized field without broader significance. These considerations are not intended to illustrate that purely descriptive scientific concepts and methods should not be applied in psychology; nor do they deny the importance of distinguishing between purely physical experience and spiritual matters. For present purposes, it is important to maintain a critical awareness of the preconceptions of the physics of modern psychology. On the one hand, it criticizes the use of empirical concepts to guide description when those concepts have

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not been analysed sufficiently carefully; on the other hand, it criticizes the way in which descriptive and explanatory sciences are juxtaposed and regarded as similar interpretations. Phenomenology examines people’s sense of reality (the way the world presents itself to the individual). For the phenomenologist, human psychology is dominated by subjective feelings rather than by the objective world. What we perceive is not necessarily the same as the objective existence of the outside world, and our behaviour depends on how the objective object appears. Edmund Husserl believed that feelings brought us direct knowledge about the world in its original appearance but that the purpose of our perception can distort that authenticity. The distortion can take many forms, from simple visual illusion to racial prejudice. Perception is often distorted because our minds are mixtures of opinions, assumptions and expectations: … it is impossible for the science of the mind to act according to the natural sciences, to learn from natural science in method, even in the schema where description is opposed to explanation … only derived from the intuitiveness given by reality itself … from the experience of the original living world … from the inherent nature of mental things. (Husserl 2001: 190–191, 268)

According to psychology, the mind is revealed by what it does; according to phenomenology, the mind is revealed in the way it feels. Scholars who emphasize the importance of phenomenology in psychology argue that scientific research requires supplementation by detailed phenomenological research from human experience. The basis of their argument is that psychology is very different from the natural or biological sciences in that it studies people, who are self-conscious and thus different from other organisms. Human experience is alive and can be expressed clearly in the first person, and consciousness is a uniquely important thing that psychologists care about. This concern requires special research techniques different from those used in traditional science, which are more appropriate for behavioural research (Zahavi 2009). Phenomenology has provided psychologists with a way to solve a series of special problems. ‘Phenomenological suspension’ can be seen as a move away from reflection on inner intentionality towards explanations of the inner process that are free of artificial restrictions. Some common themes have emerged from research in this area. First, psychologists should be concerned with the functioning of the entire person instead of considering people in terms of isolated processes (such as learning and memory). Second, within certain limits, people have freedom to choose what to do; consciousness is the basic process of human beings, and research into consciousness is inseparable from the study of human beings. Third, psychologists should be concerned with the needs and problems of real life and people’s motivations, not just with what is under study in the laboratory. Given the uniqueness of their subject matter, psychologists should design methods that are appropriate for that subject matter; simple reliance on traditional scientific techniques amounts to an evasion of the responsibility to make meaningful judgements. Finally, psychologists should concern themselves with helping people to understand themselves, rather than simply predicting and controlling human behaviours (Smith 2016).

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5 Ecological Validity and Mind Evolution Experimental psychologists have focused on understanding phenomena such as memory and forgetting and have sought a fundamental understanding of brains and sensory organs, which they regard as systems capable of selecting, organizing, storing and retrieving information. They believe that this understanding must be based on experiments under simulated conditions that are designed to provide a high degree of control. Thus, during memory experiments, subjects are usually presented with two groups of materials: oral and non-oral. The oral materials may consist of a series of proper nouns, adjectives, verbs, fragments of prose, poetry and stories; the nonverbal materials generally include geometric figures, pictures of people, still lifes and landscapes. In order to describe and classify the performances of their subjects, cognitive psychologists place them in an experimental context with the aim of eliminating specific cultural content. Their research emphasizes and explores the existence and universality of basic cognitive structures. They seek to identify ‘infrastructure’, ‘initial processes’, ‘general phenomena’ and the universal mental functions that are indispensable to human nature. In contrast, the ecological paradigm of cognitive research emphasizes that cognitive activities are rooted in cultural backgrounds. We acknowledge, for example, that in most cultures the memories of men and women will be different because of education and career differences; similarly, we observe that witnesses from very different cultural backgrounds have different recollections of the same events, especially complex events that are recounted orally. Over the past two decades, ecological validity has attracted increasing attention, winning wide acceptance from psychologists and becoming an important reference point for experimental research and design. Ecological validity is the extent to which the results of psychological research extend to real-life situations. This concept emphasizes research on naturally occurring psychological processes and psychological phenomena with functional significance. It is used to evaluate whether a theory or an experimental result is of practical value, and it sees applicability to different groups of people, tasks and stimulations as a prerequisite of external validity (Galotti 2008: 19, 29–30). In other words, if a study lacks ecological validity, it yields only the psychological and behavioural responses of the subjects in the particular study, not their actual representation in daily life. Take memory studies as an example. The early cognitive psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus used meaningless syllables as memory materials in order to simplify the stimuli and isolate responses. As a result, he arrived at the well-known Ebbinghaus memory curve. This kind of formalized research seldom involves behaviour with daily significance. Nevertheless, it has a number of advantages. It is based in the daily lives of its subjects; it shows that the memory materials for descriptive recall patterns are different from those for meaningless syllables; it requires no special observation or recall methods; and it dispenses with time limits. In the middle of the twentieth century, Frederic Bartlett realized that the development of psychological theory depends on research that solves practical problems.

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His work narrowed the gap between basic psychology and practical psychology, providing psychological research with a more realistic focus. He rejected Ebbinghaus’s use of meaningless syllables divorced from reality and began to study memory in environments similar to real life. His materials were pictures and stories connected to everyday experience, incorporated into what he characterized as the descriptive method, the hieroglyph method, the series reproduction method and the diary method, and he used them to examine the whole process of memory, as well as to study his own autobiographical memory. In Bartlett’s view, mental processes tend to be contained in memory terms in a realistic way; that is, as they actually occur in a normal individual, within or outside a social group (Bartlett 1932). The purpose of his methods, in addition to considering the correctness of the recall, was to analyse the free descriptions of the subjects and their thoughts when answering the experimenters’ test questions, thus examining the naturally occurring behaviours of the subjects rather than the behaviours prompted by the psychologists. Although Bartlett’s theory contains many speculative components and never gained wide acceptance, his research prompted many people to think about the nature and dynamics of memories from a completely different perspective. Until recently, cognitive research has been dominated by the computationalrepresentational understanding of mind (CRUM). In CRUM terms, representation is the way that information is presented and recorded in the human brain. Cognitivism and connectionism both regard cognition as representations; cognitivism regards symbol processing as the appropriate carrier of representation, whereas connectionism regards the entire emergent representation as the representation of the world (Thagard 2012). The concept of representations is based in part on foundationalism and essentialism—the view that information and significance (or the essence, law or truth of things) are expressed through phenomena and that symbols are carriers for revealing information or significance. The generative view refuses to take representations as the Archimedean standpoint of cognitive science, instead regarding cognition as an embodied action. It emphasizes that cognition is the joint enaction of the mind and the world on the basis of all kinds of activities that human beings engage in. It is the history of structural coupling and a reflection of real human life experience in the process of ‘generation’ (Bergen and Feldman 2008). Other scholars believe that human cognition has no structures and no rules; since at any given time there is an information exchange in a continuously changing state between the brain and the environment, cognition is the interaction between the cognitive subject and the environment. They interpret cognition as a dynamic system that includes anything that changes over time. In their view, symbolism and connectionism overlook the role of time in the cognitive picture. In fact, the state of the brain is constantly changing, as the state space in a noncomputational dynamic system (how the subject of cognition deals with information from the environment) is constantly developing. It follows that, as long as we know the changing process of mental state at different times, we can solve the mystery of the mind (Eliasmith 2003). Thus, by focusing on how agency distinguishes mere ‘thrashing about’ from meaningful movement, Michele Merritt (2015) strengthens

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the position of radical enactivism from the unique perspective of the dance of sensemaking. Similarly, using the concept of cognitive niche, Konrad Werner (2020) unpacks ideas that are crucial for the enactivist movement, particularly in its original formulation by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. The work of those researchers has undoubtedly provided a naturalistic explanation for the continuity of cognitive behaviours in the time dimension. If a refusal to accept psychological representation as authoritative dispels the so-called foundation of the external world, then the negation of cognitive structures and rules points towards a more thorough anti-foundationalism. The psychological value of phenomenology lies in its emphasis on the unity of people and the world. The object that exists in consciousness is different from that of nature, and spirit is independent, self-contained existence. The experience and the significance presented through experience can become the object of psychological research. It should be noted that phenomenology does not exclude empirical methods, and phenomenological and empirical methods are in fact interdependent (Yoshimi 2016). Certain substantive questions have to be faced. For instance, how can we ensure that a convincing framework for psychological development is constructed through phenomenology? How can real-life experience be included in a psychology that continues to use scientific research methods? Until those problems are addressed, the status of phenomenological psychology as a non-mainstream psychology remains uncertain.

6 Body Image, Self-Identity and Body Metaphor The return to the body creates a new quest for self-identity. Under the conditions of high modernity, the relationship between the body and the self is far more intimate than it was in premodern times. In the 1920s, psychology and sociology communities opened up research into body image—the depiction of one’s own body in one’s own mind, or how an individual thinks of his/her body. Body image is not only a cognition structure but also includes the attitudes of others and interaction with others as sources of somatotype perception changes, feelings of being too light or too heavy, and influences on interpersonal interaction (Waintrater 2015). The concept has been used to explore individuals’ awareness and experience of their own bodies. Over the past 10 years, in particular, both academics and the general public have begun to pay attention to the issue of body image, prompting Bryan Turner to characterize contemporary society as the ‘somatic society’. Psychologists, too, have explored the psychological factors that affect individuals’ satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their own bodies. Sarah Grogan (2007: 40, 135, 190) defined body image as perceptions, thoughts and feelings about one’s body and its elements, including a speculative estimate of the size of the body, an assessment of its attractiveness and a sense of one’s own somatotype. Body dissatisfaction involves negative thoughts and feelings of the individual about his/her body. This self-perception of the body is not

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limited to the individual’s subjective sense of experience; since it is influenced by experiences of social interaction, it is also a product of social construction. Central to body image is the self-identity of the body. The embedding of the body in daily interactions is a fundamental way of maintaining a coherent sense of self-identity. In order to maintain a ‘normal’ appearance and at the same time be convinced of their continuity beyond time and space, individuals must maintain stable behaviours over changing interactive scenes and must effectively integrate their behaviours into a personalized narrative. The work of Erving Goffman (2008) has shown the tightness and complexity of the control that individuals are expected to maintain over their bodies in all social interactions. Regular control of the body is a fundamental means of preserving the personal experience of self-identity; meanwhile, the self is ceaselessly ‘presented’ in front of others according to its incarnation. Routine control of the body constitutes the active nature and the acceptance (trust) of others as an intrinsic part of the existence and essence of competence. The consistent expressions required for role performance in everyday life mark a crucial difference between our humanized selves and our socialized selves. As human beings, we may be animals driven by capricious emotions and unpredictable energy, but in our social role we must maintain relatively stable states, not allowing our high-level social activities to change as our perceptions and body consciousness follow our body states. Self-monitoring and the reactions of others remind people continually of the gap between the ideal body and the body in the mirror, and people use that self-monitoring to detect and try to correct that distance. With the emergence of a high degree of modernity, an important element of selfidentity is a more durable form of self-reflection that also extends to the body. Reflective monitoring of the body is in fact reflection on the ‘system of life’, and constant concern for the ‘body’ means choosing and adopting an ideal system of life in line with bodily changes. Anthony Giddens (1998) has examined the phenomenon of self-identity through the internal reference system of the self and the body, making use of JeanClaude Kaufmann’s concept of ‘normal appearance’—a (closely monitored) physical behaviour in which individuals actively reproduce protective shells in a ‘normal’ situation. A normal appearance allows individuals to continue their current activities without having to pay much attention to the stability of the environment. Most of the time, however, people are still anxious, because physical appearances are not consistent with selves or self-identity. This is the separation of physical action and self-identity, which directly affects self-identity and generates ‘existential anxiety’. The reason why the body plays such an important role in selves and self-identity is that it is a form of expression for obtaining what might be termed a sense of ontological security, and people monitor their bodies closely in order to obtain it. Physical exile can be felt in the tensions of everyday life when everyone’s ontological safety is disrupted, but this is usually a temporary reaction rather than a permanent separation. Once the separation becomes permanent, self-distorting or mental division results. The difference between a person with schizophrenia and one without is that maintaining a normal appearance is a terrible burden for the former. In such situations, the

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self-identity narrative leads individuals to view physical activities with alienation, hatred or cynicism. Recognition of the self also depends on the self being free from the body’s experience, and diseases are often seen as a form of self-trial or self-betrayal. In terms of body image, if health is a state in which each organ is at peace, then disease is a rebellion by some organs. Disease is a language spoken by the body and a will expressed by the body. Susan Sontag (2001) examined how disease (especially malignant tumours and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, leprosy, syphilis and AIDS) is metaphorized step by step, transformed from ‘just’ a disease of the body into a moral judgement or a political attitude. Tuberculosis, cancers and AIDS have been given very different meanings, stamped with the brands of the eras of aristocratic society, industrial society and contemporary society, respectively. Tuberculosis used to be a relatively common fatal disease, but its association with elegance, thinness and intense emotion made it a romantic disease in the nineteenth century. The metaphor of the disease increased the spiritual status and value of those who suffered from it. In contrast, cancer is regarded as easily contracted by people who are frustrated, angry or depressed in ways that lead to lack of prudence or an unhealthy lifestyle. For example, oesophageal cancers are associated with alcoholism, and lung cancers are associated with smoking. Myths about certain behaviours (overconsumption, lack of exercise) that are seen as problematic can have the effect of ‘punishing’ those with cancer and may prevent them from seeking appropriate treatment. AIDS has been stigmatized to an even greater degree than cancer. It has been considered as a disease of indecency or misconduct resulting from weakness or unsafe behaviour, and as applying specifically to groups regarded as ‘dangerous’ or ‘untouchable’. Sontag (2001) identified two prevalent metaphors for the microprocess and mode of transmission of AIDS: invasion and pollution. In addition, she found that AIDS is described as an invasive disease. Viruses can live in it, and even occupy the territory. It is imagined as an alien ‘otherness’ that first occurred in underdeveloped areas and then spread to the United States and Europe, replacing the plague as a retribution to society for its supposed licentiousness. Above all, the interpretation of the body in the twentieth century has placed less emphasis on its natural composition and has sought to integrate value judgements of different visual thresholds. The philosophy of the body involves the deepest essential questions of human society and culture, and it can provide original and detailed analysis of human nature and its roles and performances in social operations, revealing the operating mechanisms and internal contradictions of contemporary Western society. In terms of methodology, the philosophy of the body abandons the idea of a binary opposition between the body and mind. However, research into the body still finds it difficult to rid itself of certain basic patterns of thought about the relationship of the individual to society, about nature and culture, or essentialism and constructivism. The ontology of the body usually follows the path of fundamentalism or anti-foundationalism; the former understands the living experience from the perspective of physical phenomenology and attempts to analyse the complex interactions

References

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between the bodily system, the cultural framework and the social process; the latter conceptualizes the body as a discourse about the nature of social relations or as a metaphor for a symbolic system or a social structure. Particularly with regard to its problems (and the accompanying truth questions), the body is negotiated and confirmed—a product of the legitimate discourses of which it is constructed. If we take the embodied milieu as both precondition and result of our theoretical and practical activities, then that challenges the traditional sense of the word ‘social’ and, in turn, the basic purposes of a social philosophy of science (Stoliarova 2016). In terms of epistemology, the main debate is between social constructivists, who believe that the body is constructed socially by discourse practice, and anticonstructivists, who regard the body as independent of the discourse forms that represent it (Turner 2008: 12–16). It is necessary to break the binary opposition between the epistemology and the ontology of body studies, between the noumenon of the body and its representations and discourses. A truly phenomenological approach not only cares about how the body is shaped in society but also reveals how society itself is constructed in the affairs of the body, thus taking full account of the complexity of the body as a special historical connection.

References Allen, Micah, and Karl J. Friston. 2018. From Cognitivism to Autopoiesis: Towards a Computational Framework for the Embodied Mind. Synthese 195 (6): 2459–2482. Bartlett, Frederic. 1932. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, 227–238. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1998. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, 130–140. London: Sage. Bergen, Benjamin, and Jerome Feldman. 2008. Embodied Concept Learning. In Handbook of Cognitive Science: An Embodied Approach, ed. Paco Calvo and Antoni Gomila, 315–318. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. 2011. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. Trans. Zhibin Zhang, 118. Beijing: Central Compilation & Translation Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2012. Le sens pratique. Trans. Zihua Jiang, 88, 101, 212. Nanjing: YiLin Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 2011. Body Without Organs. Trans. Yongguo Chen. In Post-body: Culture, Power and Life Politics, ed. Wang Minan and Chen Yongguo, 112. Changchun: Jilin People’s Publishing House. Dove, Guy. 2018. Language as a Disruptive Technology: Abstract Concepts, Embodiment and the Flexible Mind. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 373 (1752): 1–9. Dove, Guy, and Andreas Elpidorou. 2016. Embodied Conceivability: How to Keep the Phenomenal Concept Strategy Grounded. Mind & Language 31 (5): 580–611. Eliasmith, Chris. 2003. Moving Beyond Metaphors: Understanding the Mind for What It Is. Journal of Philosophy 100 (10): 493–520. Eysenck, Michael W., and Mark T. Keane. 2010. Cognitive Psychology, 4–5. Hove: Psychology Press. Foucault, Michel. 2004a. Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. Trans. Jian Wang. In Foucault Collection, ed. Xiaozhen Du, 152–153. Shanghai: Shanghai Far East Publishers. Foucault, Michel. 2004b. Right of Death and Power over Life. Trans. Heng Shang. In Foucault Collection, ed. Xiaozhen Du, 383. Shanghai: Shanghai Far East Publishers.

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Galotti, Kathleen 2008. Cognitive Psychology in and out of the Laboratory, 19, 29–30. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth. Garnham, Alan. 2009. Cognitivism. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, ed. John Symons and Paco Calvo, 99–110. Abingdon: Routledge. Giddens, Anthony. 1998. Modernity and Self-Identity. Trans. Xudong Zhao and Wen Fang, 65. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company. Goffman, Erving. 2008. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Trans. Gang Feng, 41–47. Beijing: Peking University Press. Grogan, Sarah. 2007. Body Image: Understanding Body Dissatisfaction in Men, Women and Children, 40, 135, 190. Abingdon: Routledge. Husserl, Edmund Gustav Albrecht. 2001. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Trans. Bingwen Wang, 190–191, 268. Beijing: The Commercial Press. Jackendoff, Ray. 2002. The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology. Language 78 (1): 164–170. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 2015. Metaphors We Live By. Trans. Wenzhong He, 57–58. Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press. Medina, José. 2013. An Enactivist Approach to the Imagination: Embodied Enactments and ‘Fictional Emotions.’ American Philosophical Quarterly 50 (3): 317–335. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2007. Eye and Mind. Trans. Dachun Yang, 36–37, 39. Beijing: The Commercial Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2010. The Structure of Behaviour. Trans. Dachun Yang and Yaojun Zhang, 27–28. Beijing: The Commercial Press. Merritt, Michele. 2015. Thinking-Is-Moving: Dance, Agency, and a Radically Enactive Mind. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (1): 95–110. Miller, Mark, and Andy Clark. 2018. Happily Entangled: Prediction, Emotion, and the Embodied Mind. Synthese 195 (6): 2559–2575. Neisser, Ulric. 1999. Ecological Psychology. In The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, ed. Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil, 255–256. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pickel, Kerri. 2008. Memory and Eyewitness Testimony. In 21st Century Psychology: A Reference Handbook, ed. Stephen F. Davis and William Buskist, 441. London: Sage. Rupert, Robert. 2016. Embodied Knowledge, Conceptual Change, and the A Priori; or, Justification, Revision, and the Ways Life Could Go. American Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2): 169–192. Sharkey, Amanda, and Noel Sharkey. 2009. Connectionism. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, ed. John Symons and Paco Calvo, 180–191. Abingdon: Routledge. Slatman, Jenny. 2014. Our Strange Body: Philosophical Reflections on Identity and Medical Interventions, 15–21. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Smith, David Woodruff. 2016. Cognitive Phenomenology. In Philosophy of Mind and Phenomenology, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Andreas Elpidorou, and Walter Hopp, 15–33. Abingdon: Routledge. Sontag, Susan. 2001. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, 8–12, 92–99. New York: Picador. Stoliarova, Olga. 2016. Milieu, Embodiment, and Cultural Studies of Science: Comment on Rom Harré’s ‘the Social Ingredients in All Ways of Acquiring Reliable Knowledge.’ Epistemology & Philosophy of Science 47 (1): 78–83. Thagard, Paul. 2012. Mind: Introduction to Cognitive Science. Trans. Jing Zhu and Mengya Chen, 11–13. Shanghai: Shanghai Lexicographical Publishing House. Toon, Adam. 2015. Where Is the Understanding? Synthese 192 (12): 3859–3875. Turner, Bryan. 2008. The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory, 12–16. London: Sage. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 2017. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, 173. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Chapter 4

In What Sense Should We Talk About the Perception of Other Minds?

Abstract By means of spontaneous and unconscious imitation, an observer may be able to directly experience the inner states of another person because the observer and the observed share similar neural pathways. This discovery of a common neural basis reveals the correlative mechanisms through which the intentions of others are perceived. While analysing the implications of this discovery, this chapter notes that the correlation does not provide a complete explanation of our understanding of other minds. Instead, the correlation comes into play only to a minimal degree. The chpater also explores the epistemological characteristic of the knowledge harboured by other minds. That is, as a kind of private knowledge, the experience of other minds can help us arrive at a relatively consistent understanding of others and engage in communication with them through public expression and the description of mental states. However, it is impossible to truly understand other minds because conscious experience in the strict sense resides only in its owner, and the unique qualia emerging inside the subject cannot be directly observed from a third-person perspective. In this sense, the so-called perception of other minds is not suited to seeking a causal explanation of the ways in which others act, but for reading the meanings expressed by them in a given situation. Keywords Other minds · Perception · Causality · Experience · Epistemological characteristic

1 Introduction The perception of other minds has helped form the foundation of social behaviour. But how do we understand another person’s thoughts? Can we perceive other people’s mental states? If so, what is the basis for and approach to that effort, and what is the nature of such knowledge? In past centuries, philosophers proposed various solutions based on introspection, which was used to discover evidence and refute conjectures in their examinations of the mind. Today, with significant advances in knowledge and the tools of investigation at our disposal, progress in neuroscience has revealed certain brain processes

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underlying human thoughts and emotions, which can provide useful insights for us to examine issues pertaining to the mind. Various solutions to the problem have emerged. In recent research, Sollberger (2017) revisited the received dogma, which holds that people cannot know someone else’s mental life in the same way that they know their own minds, and reinforced the dialectical position of inferentialists who believe that we have knowledge of someone else’s mind by virtue of analogical inference. Gangopadhyay and Pichler (2017) addressed the epistemological debate between emerging perceptual accounts of knowing other minds and traditional approaches based on the theory of mind. Roelofs (2018) argued that our knowledge of other minds involves both perception and inference through ‘perceptual co-presentation’, which yields knowledge that is simultaneously perceptual and inferential. These studies have involved a discussion of the epistemological issues of the perception of other minds. Despite progress in this area, consensus on the issue remains elusive. In my opinion, the key to the problem is to determine precisely what we mean when we talk about knowledge of other minds. I would like to point out that the view under discussion here differs from the conventional view, which is concerned more about whether the knowledge of other minds is epistemically direct in the sense of being inferential and observational, and this paper does not directly argue for the superiority of my view but instead offers a philosophical alternative. The remainder of this chapter proceeds as follows. I first examine the discovery of the neural basis as well as the correlative mechanisms through which the intentions of the actions of others are perceived, explain the advantages of direct projection theory over analogical theory, and then go on to analyse the predicaments and challenges facing neurological explanations. After a critical analysis of mental causation, I further explore the epistemological characteristic of the knowledge of other minds. That is, as a kind of private knowledge, the so-called perception of other minds is not suited to seeking a causal explanation of the ways in which others act, but for reading the meanings expressed by others in a given situation. I close with a brief summary of the primary results and suggestions for future research in the area.

2 How Does Imitation Create the Inner States of Others in Our Minds? When a person perceives and recognizes another person’s mental state (including that person’s feelings, perceptions, intentions and thoughts), we often say that the perceiver’s feelings have attained a level that matches those of the perceived person. Perhaps such inferences can be confirmed by the experience of others, but each person’s experience is owned exclusively by that person. For mental states that cannot be directly reached, observers can extract only the verbal and non-verbal cues displayed. In the empirical world, we cannot expect others to verbally express all

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their ideas and opinions. In fact, when people try to hide their mental states, focusing on the non-verbal cues provided by them, rather than verbal ones, is probably the best strategy. A study has shown that people with language impairment as a result of some form of brain damage, such as a stroke, are better at detecting lies (Vrij et al. 2000). What kind of behavioural cues convey information, and what part of the nervous system is sensitive to that information? Another study has shown that attending to the direction of a person’s gaze can provide us with important information about their attentive state (Pelphrey et al. 2004). When someone’s speech is not in line with his or her mental state, the direction of his or her gaze serves as helpful evidence to understand his or her thoughts. The cells of the superior temporal sulcus help us distinguish head motion from gaze direction: some of the cells react only to head motion, while others respond only to gaze direction. Although head motion often corresponds to gaze direction, the ability to distinguish between them enables us to identify whether other people’s external behaviour matches their intention, thereby paving the way for inferences regarding their mental states based on those cues. There are also studies showing that people’s inferences regarding others’ beliefs about their behaviour are based on a generalization of their own choices and personality traits, whereas their judgements about other aspects of others depend on their memory of specific events in their lives. In other words, people’s perception of other minds is connected to their self-perception. An experiment using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has shown that both the perception of a similar person and self-perception activate a region of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), whereas the perception of a different person does not activate the MPFC. Social cognition is fundamentally different when we interact with others rather than merely observe them (Sameen et al. 2013). In another scenario, we may have stored abundant emotional information about ourselves and about our loved ones, which is supported by an experiment conducted by Jiang et al. (2016). To address the electrophysiological bases underlying the decoupling mechanism (the mechanism for distinguishing the mental states of others from one’s own), they compared the temporal course of neural activities associated with beliefrelated reasoning of the self and of others when the belief held by the self was consistent or inconsistent with that held by others. They found that, during a 450– 600 ms period, belief reasoning of the self elicited a larger late positive component than of others when beliefs were inconsistent. This result was not caused by the perception of the similarity between the close others and the self, and might have represented the commonalities between the information that we have stored about ourselves and that about the close others, in terms of its complexity or emotion. In either of the above cases, the participation of the same region of the brain in the perception of others and self-perception may indicate that a shared mental function is capable of accomplishing two types of tasks. The involvement of the MPFC in the two perceptual phenomena suggests that this region of the brain is important for self-reflection and reflection on others, and that the perception of others requires the participation of self-perception. We rely on our own mental states to understand someone we hardly know but who is similar to us. And when we have a rich store

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of information about ourselves and close others, those processes may be correlated as well. We use non-verbal cues (such as facial expressions and gaze) to gather information about others’ mental states, characterize the abstract information and use it to form an impression of their possible inner states. In this sense, an intrinsic connection exists between the perception of others and self-perception. People may rely on certain characteristics of self-perception to infer the mental states of others. This conclusion supports the simulation theory; that is, that the understanding of other minds is based on the ability to place oneself in others’ shoes, so to speak—to speculate on the mental states of others by imagining being in their position. With the help of imitation, we are not only aware that others have different mental states, including desires, intentions and beliefs, but are also able to form a general and accurate theory of their mental states and use this information to predict and explain their behaviour (Goldman 2012). The simulation theory assumes that, because humans cannot directly observe other minds, we assume that other people have similar mental states to ours, and use this hypothesis to speculate about the intentions, responses and actions of others, or imaginatively put ourselves in the position of the simulated persons to experience their feelings. People’s ability to undertake normal social activities is directly related to their ability to simulate. Simulation provides us with a way into the inner world of others. Nevertheless, such simulation can be used to target only animate objects because responses to our impressions of inanimate objects do not exhibit a connection with the MPFC (Mitchell et al. 2005). We have specialized neural circuits in our brains to recognize the movements of animate and inanimate objects, as well as circuits to identify faces and facial movements. These circuits enable us to understand that we are similar to other people. This also explains why we imitate only the behaviour of humans rather than inanimate objects. How does imitation create the perception of the inner state of others in our minds? Since the end of the twentieth century, scientists have obtained evidence, based on transcranial magnetic stimulation and positron emission tomography, that shows that primate brains, including the human brain, have certain type of neuron in the area of F5 that is activated both when one performs an action and when one observes the same action performed by another. The neuron ‘mirrors’ the action of another person and hence is called the ‘mirror neuron’ (Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004; Lurz et al. 2018). In other words, our understanding of the actions of others seems to depend on the neural structure activities that also occur in us when we perform the actions ourselves. Due to this correlation, neuroscientists use mirror systems to describe neural networks that also participate in understanding actions. In their view, mirror neurons enable us to empathize with others by imitating their inner states in our own brains. Mirror neurons can be viewed as a dynamic part of larger circuits that support our understanding of the options and action potentials that we, and perhaps others, have in the affordance space (Brincker 2015). Mirroring and resonance also appear in the context of pain and moods. Studies have shown that perceiving emotions also triggers neural mechanisms that play a key role in the generation of emotions, and many of the same areas of the brain are activated when the subject mimics and observes the facial expressions of others

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representing various emotions. A series of experiments have shown that both nausea and aversion activate similar areas of the insula, and the intensity of both activities is positively correlated with the activation of the insula. This is supported by experiments conducted by Vaughn et al. (2018) on pain: there is a common mechanism for feeling an emotion and perceiving the same emotion in others. Watching another person in pain activates areas of the brain involved in the sensation of our own pain. Rodríguez (2018) offered an argument for a non-relational conception of expression and, therefore, for the view that we directly perceive people’s mental states from their expressive features. We know the pain we experience, but how do we feel the pain of others? Nowadays, brain imaging technologies have led to the discovery of a network of areas called the pain matrix that becomes active when people experience pain. However, subjective pain is not directly coupled to the physical properties that constitute the painful stimulus. When we are distracted, we do not find the pain caused by a very hot object unbearable even if it remains burning hot. The feeling of pain can be strengthened by psychological suggestion. So how can we experience the feelings of others? By closely observing the relevant areas of the brain when we empathize with others, it can be seen that areas related to the physical aspects of pain, such as the temperature of an object and the point of contact with the skin, are not active, while areas related to the mental experience or subjective feeling of pain become active. In this case, we share the mental experience of pain rather than its physical aspects. It should be pointed out that mirror neurons do not respond only to a visually observed action. For example, they can be activated through sounds or the imagination, thus conveying the meaning of the aurally perceived or considered action. The mechanism of mirror neurons connects simple actions to the semantic network, thus allowing us to quickly and directly understand the actions of others. This direct perceptual capacity depends upon recognizing the manner in which the other person is responsive to the affordances of the environment (Kiverstein 2015). Such a shared neural mechanism seems to allow a direct exchange of experience between the observer and the observed. And, if we adopt a certain kind of pluralism about social cognition, then the mirror neuron system can play a role in social cognition even if it provides no access to the minds of others at all (Borg 2017).

3 The Advantages of Direct Projection Theory Over Analogy Theory By observing the physical movements and facial expressions of others, hearing their meaningful words and reading their writing, we can determine their mental states, thoughts, intentions and desires. This is because our knowledge of other minds is based on the causal inference of ‘mind–behaviour’, which uses the principle of mental causation: a behaviour is always accompanied by a mental state, and that causal relationship is regular and universal. If the general induction of mind–behaviour

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causation is correct, and if the behaviours of others are similar to ours, then, by analogy with ourselves, such generalization also applies to others. Through such generalization, we have reason to arrive at specific inferences regarding the mental states of a specific individual. Causal inference in psychological studies is based on the premise that the law of mental causation has been established. There are two ways to establish the law of mental causation: · by establishing a universal law for mental phenomena through scientific research on vision, inference, language acquisition and various cognitive mechanisms · by establishing a law between mental phenomena and individual behaviours by empirically generalizing the observation of the causal relationship between the mind and behaviour. The latter constitutes our common sense, which serves as the basis for the mental causal inference applied by people. It seems that the mind–behaviour causal inference and the principles of mental causation have been accepted by most philosophers. However, is there any reason to conclude that similar mental states between any pair of individuals would result in similar behaviours? We do not doubt our ongoing thoughts and experiences. However, although we can infer the mental states of others by observing their behaviour, what kind of reasonable evidence do we have to support these mind–behaviour inferences? The regularities suggested by the principles of mental causation do not fully apply to all mental causal phenomena. Moreover, the mind and behaviour perhaps have a many-to-many, rather than a one-to-one, relationship. In other words, in response to a certain environmental stimulus, the subject has many mental states at the same time and then exhibits many behaviours. Rarely do people exhibit one-to-one mind– behaviour relationships. In addition, by inferring other people’s mental states using the principles of mental causation, we fall victim to the fallacy of circular reasoning because, when we make a causal inference, we must assume that the principles of mental causation are applicable to the given object. Only in this way can we infer the object’s mental states from the observation of his or her behaviours. If this condition cannot be established, how can we apply the principles of mental causation to other people? This is the very question that needs to be dealt with in the problem of other minds. Of course, asking this question is not an attempt to deny its possibility; nor, by extension, is it an assertion of the impossibility of understanding other minds. My question aims to illustrate that perceiving other minds somehow has a kind of epistemological characteristic and involves the acquisition of knowledge in a private manner. The experience produced by mirror neurons offers an ‘internal perspective’ through which we can experience what others do. We do not first perceive their behaviours, and then infer or assume that their behaviours are caused by some similar experience or internal state that leads us to perform similar behaviours. Instead, we see others as entire persons; that is, as intentional beings whose gestures and actions

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can express their experiences or mental states. Here, the living body has the characteristics of both the first person and the third person: I can experience the body from the first-person perspective and others can feel it from the third- or second-person perspective. When I empathize with you, I treat myself as another person relative to you. With regard to the first person (proprioception) and the third person (external feeling) in social interaction, we can establish a connection between their cognitive patterns so that we can imagine our perceptions of each other—we are all involved in an intersubjective perspective. The body is the interface between the mind and perception. Without the body, we cannot have emotional interactions. We understand others through cycles of cognition–behaviour interaction, which is often carried out by our bodies: emotional understanding and resonance are gained through gestures, expressions, movements and interactions of bodies. In this sense, the perception of other minds works more like reading body language rather than mental states. The emotional communication between infants and their parents embodies the most primitive form of intersubjectivity. Early infants’ social cognitive abilities do not develop continually into, say, a four-year-old’s capabilities of belief attribution (Fenici 2015). Newborns are ignorant of any concept or knowledge such that they cannot infer or understand the emotions of others by applying theories. Their way of imitating and responding to the facial expressions of adults is a direct physical interaction that also functions in the emotional interaction among adults. For example, the tacit cooperation between dancers relies on the interaction between body movements and eye contact. An opposite example is that patients with impaired amygdalas can neither experience nor recognize fear, which shows that experiencing and expressing fear—the two states that were previously believed to be independent—have an important commonality. People unconsciously experience the feelings of others, not through indirect theoretical approaches, but through direct emotional response and expression. By ‘direct’, I mean that the emotions of an individual and others occur through the same neural pathways without mediation (causal inference or simulation). The importance of mirror neurons in perceiving the intentions of others means that, through spontaneous and unconscious imitation, humans may, through direct projection mechanisms, activate regions of the brain that elicit instinctual action responses, thus taking the first step in understanding others and building social relationships. At the same time, the human mind has the ability to understand other minds through imagination. We feel, through imagination, a sense of proximity and physical equivalence to others that forms the basis of our understanding of other minds. It consists of two aspects: one is the ability to attribute a cause to one’s own mental state or that of others. The mental states include belief, desire, intention, thought, knowledge, concept, attention and all emotions. Take intention as an example. The average person can distinguish between a moving, living being with an intention (such as a human or an animal) and a moving natural object (such as a stone or a leaf) without any intention. The other aspect is a corresponding emotional response to the mental states of others. We not only attribute a cause to an individual’s mental state, but also become involved in and respond appropriately to his or her mental state. In terms of experience, people are emotionally connected with one another and can appropriately respond. Human

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beings can develop an understanding of other people’s inner mental states (such as deception and belief), respond to and express emotions, share ideas with others, and so on. Such empathy and resonance form the foundation of social behaviour (Ferrari and Rizzolatti 2014).

4 An Analysis of Causation in the Context of Neurological Explanations The discovery of neural structures and their activities has revealed the relevant mechanisms for perceiving the inner experience of others, thus providing an objective explanation of their minds. But that explanation is incomplete, and we cannot establish a causal relationship between the understanding of other minds and neural correlation. First, evidence to explain the perception of other minds through only physical imitation is insufficient at present. Is the activation of the premotor cortex when observing a behaviour sufficient for understanding it? Does that understanding require the involvement of the motor cortex? It is currently difficult to definitively answer those questions. Besides, the imaging system composed of mirror neurons is not the only way or the decisive factor for understanding behaviour. For example, patients with Möbius syndrome have facial paralysis that prevents them from making any facial expression, but they can easily recognize and understand other people’s facial expressions. Moreover, patients with congenital physical disabilities can provide reasonable explanations for the physical expressions of others. Such phenomena cannot be explained through physical imitation. Perhaps, when interpreting the relevant experimental data, we should think more carefully about what is activated and how it is activated in those regions of the brain, rather than which neural structure determines the perception of other minds. One of the most important reasons why we cannot clearly localize brain functions is that they are usually based on many processes, each of which contains many independent neural activities, and we need to refer to different levels of the brain to locate the relevant function. The function of a complex neural circuit is achieved through coordination among the activities of multiple regions of the brain. Except for the most basic physiological actions and conditioned reflexes, most of our behaviours are the products of complex neural circuits that are widely distributed and interrelated. No single neuron can by itself trigger any specific complex behaviour. Take the basic qualia as an example: an external stimulus stimulates our senses, and the nervous system receives and transmits the corresponding nerve impulses to evoke a certain feeling. There is no one-to-one mapping between the qualia produced in this way and the external stimuli because the qualia are determined by the positions of the corresponding nerve impulses in the entire nervous system. Even if the physical properties of the external stimuli are the same, different nerve effects may be induced as long as the positions of the nerve impulses produced are different, which in turn

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generates different qualia. Moreover, those positions are defined by the interrelationship between nerve impulses; that is, the qualia are determined by the relationship between the corresponding nerve impulses and other impulses. Further, all other complex behaviours cannot be determined by the presence or absence of a specific type of cell or a specific brain structure. Second, the activation of mirror neurons depends on the entire chain of action: the goal of the action, the situation at the time and what the actor has done before (Gallese et al. 2004). An action is in fact a sequence composed of different parts. An experienced dancer’s mirror neural network is more active when they are watching a familiar video than when they are watching an unfamiliar one. Compared with the observation of isolated actions, the observation of actions in a certain context leads to higher levels of activation of the mirror neuron system. This suggests that observers can relate actions outside their field of view to behaviours within their field of view, and a certain meaning is necessary for the establishment of such an association. That is to say, the reappearance of an action in the brain includes both the representation of the action and the understanding of its meaning. It can then be inferred that reflection is based on cognition and requires the mirror neuron system to process and convert visual information into knowledge without excluding the possibility that theoretical or background knowledge may be involved in that process. When we try to explain a person’s action, it is necessary to find its underlying causes. Actions are motivated by reasons, which form the rational basis for action. Whether an action is reasonable is the basic premise of whether it can be understood. A reason is normative in nature. It is related to choices that ‘should be made’, and to the way people look at things and the rules that they follow. It is also related to the personality and emotions of the actors as well as their beliefs, wishes, intentions and evaluations (Davidson 1993). For example, when I turn on a light switch, the explanation for that behaviour requires references to my wish (wanting the room to be lit up) and belief (believing the room will be lit up if I turn on the switch), and so on. In addition, our understanding of the motives and intentions of others is not so much the result of our being influenced by their behaviours or emotions, but rather the environment that causes such behaviours or emotions. In other words, the information generated by imitating the inner life of others is perceived and processed along with information from other sources, and is combined with the assessment of similar situations. This is because behaviour is related to context. For example, the action of a nod in one context may mean an approval of what is proposed, and in another context may mean indifference to the outcome. The key here is that the involvement of mental processes enables one person to better understand the situation that another person is in. Therefore, complete information about the processes required to understand other minds should not be based solely on the results, but also on the relationship between the perceptions of the observer and the observed. It is clear that, if we want to grasp the mental states of others, we must go beyond physical experience and examine their behavioural motives, emotions and wills. Third, although the basis of understanding other minds can be located, to a certain extent, in the human mirror neuron system, the activation of the mirror neurons is only a copying and reproduction of the consciousness and feelings of others, rather

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than an endogenous activity of the consciousness. Mirror neurons are activated when people act and when they observe other people’s actions; we cannot tell who the actor is, and thus cannot conclude that the mental state inspired by the mirror neurons is that mapped by the actor. We can simply see emotions, and not just low-level features of facial and bodily expressions. However, seeing emotions is not sufficient for recognizing them as mental states in order to ascribe them to others (Smortchkova 2017). If I simply watch someone else being beaten, why do I not mistakenly think that I am being beaten? This is because there are tactile receptors on our skin that send a message to the brain telling us that, although the feelings of others resonate with us, we do not truly experience the process of being touched; otherwise, we would be rendered confused and confounded. A feedback signal rejects the information sent by the mirror neurons so that we do not have a ‘real’ experience in our consciousness. But what if our arms are removed or an anesthetic is injected into them? There are anatomical connections between regions that compose the pain system in the brain that are highly interactive. However, there appears to be a separation between the sensory and the emotional perceptions of pain. MRI scans show activity in both the observer and the recipient of pain in the part of the brain that is active with the emotional perception of pain, but only in the recipient is activity recorded in the area that is active with sensory experience. If we see another person suffering from pain, we feel anxious but do not physically feel the pain ourselves. Furthermore, simply understanding the intention of an action is not enough to understand the psychology of the other. Understanding the intention of an action does not mean knowing the other’s thoughts because the intention is not identical to the purpose of the action. It can be the result of a completely different state of mind: the action can be the representation of the actual intention, or maybe the actor deliberately assumes a certain posture to try to create an illusion. This involves the understanding of consciousness from the perspective of phenomenology—the consciousness of oneself as a distinct existent versus the objects of one’s truthmaking endeavours. Simulation requires more than mere interpersonal mental resemblance: A simulation must have the purpose or function of resembling its target (Herschbach 2012, 2015). Yet, mirror neurons are effective at identifying simple intentions and actions, and this low-level cognitive process is relatively simple, primitive, spontaneous and, to a great extent, unconscious. Fourth, mental states and their neural properties are two different objects. We can use the counter-evidence method to prove this. According to the principle of identity substitution, the same expressions can be replaced with each other: For any x and y, x is equivalent to y if and only if x and y have the same properties (Leibniz 1982). We can break this up into two conditional sentences: · L1 (indistinguishability of identical things): For any x and y, if x and y are the same, then x and y have the same properties · L2 (indistinguishable identity): For any x and y, if x and y have the same properties, then x and y are the same. According to this principle, if a pleasant mental state is equivalent to a certain brain state, then states of the cranial nerve have all the properties that belong to

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pleasure, and vice versa. Then, all mental states, and cranial nerve states equivalent to them, are consistent with such inferences. However, that does not appear to be the case. For example, when a finger is cut, it produces a ‘finger pain’ mental state, and then the pain appears in the finger. If this is equivalent to a certain brain state, does the cranial nerve state also appear in the finger? That does not make sense unless we think that, when the finger hurts, the pain does not appear in the finger but in the brain. In addition, ‘equivalent’ is a transitive relationship. In other words, if x is equivalent to y and y is equivalent to z, then x is equivalent to z. Assume that the pain of a dog is equivalent to that of a person: if the pain of the person is equivalent to the state of his or her brain, and the pain of the dog is equivalent to the state of its brain, then is this type of cranial nerve state of the person equivalent to that of the dog? In short, it is crucial to make a distinction between the following two things: the information about the stimulus defined by the observer, and the information about the meaning of the stimulus for the subject. The former provides correlation data, and correlation is easy to achieve in terms of research method, while the latter gives a description of causality, which is composed of a correlation between concepts, such as knowledge, beliefs, conjectures, evidence, grounds and reasoning. Moreover, the description is also linked to the defensive logical implication of considerable content, such as certainty and uncertainty, what is obvious and what needs evidence, and so on. In addition, in-group and out-group distinctions and related phenomena must be taken seriously, all of which have been neglected in the mainstream social cognition literature (Gallagher and Varga 2014). On none of these issues can we achieve a breakthrough by discovering more information about the brain. The normativity of experience at the personal level will not be replaced by neurological processes at the sub-personal level. Those two different levels of information explain human behaviours from different perspectives, and are complementary in solving the relevant problems. Some may argue that we already know that direct electrical stimulation on the cortex creates a variety of conscious experiences. This fact provides a sound reason for the claim that certain neural substrates are at least adequate for the creation of consciousness. There is undoubtedly a correlation between internally observable ‘mental’ events and externally observable ‘physical’ events, but their relationship can be discovered only by the simultaneous observation of these two independent phenomena. For example, when electrical stimulation is applied to the brain cortices of people, they feel pain in their fingers, which means that it is one thing to recognize neural activity as the minimum sufficient condition for instantiating the phenomenal consciousness of an instant fragment, but quite another to consider neural activity as the minimum sufficient condition for instantiating consciousness in the sense of a coherent intentional experience of the world. The normalization of experience at the individual level will not be replaced by neural processes at the sub-individual level. The two different theoretical levels explain the causes of human behaviour, respectively, and complement each other in terms of their shared problems and purposes. The investigation here does not suggest that neuroscience cares only about the development of brain imaging technology, and attempts only to provide an image of

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every point in the brain as it completes a certain job. One criticism of neuroscience is that it seems to offer ‘a location map of certain events in the brain’; some even mock neuroscience for showing merely that behaviour is caused by the activities of the nervous system. However, no one has ever doubted that (Burton 2014). In fact, the significance of neuroscience is by no means exhausted by the provision of an image of mental activity. By recording regions of the brain activated by certain tasks, especially by seeking the intersections of regions of the brain activated by different tasks, neuroscientists have gained a better understanding of these problems: What are the functions of different areas of the brain? How do the different regions of the brain interact? How does the brain process different types of problems? Neuroscientists have begun to use data on differences in brain activation and other clues to clarify the patterns and functions of the brain tissue, which in turn can significantly enhance our understanding of the way the brain works. By contrast, the philosophy of mind is concerned with: What is mental ability or mental state? What is pain? What is the characteristic of feeling? As we ask these ‘what’ questions, we are investigating the commonalities of having some kind of mental capacity or state for all real or possible living beings that have the relevant mental capacity or state (Tye 2017). Thus, neuroscientists do not provide answers directly to questions pondered by the philosophers of mind, but the latter should pay close attention to the answers provided by the former to the relevant ‘how’ questions.

5 Epistemological Characteristic of Other Minds As is clear from the above analysis, there are some things that we are perfectly aware of by ourselves but can never make others understand. I cannot share my own feeling of performing a certain action with another, and vice versa. When performing an action, I cannot share all my feelings with the other because I have a particular, privileged access to such information that imbues in me a sense of subjectivity that another can never experience. But does it then mean that there is a dichotomy between my experience and that of another? Our daily experience tells us that that is not the case. I can analyse the given condition of a specific event, roughly predict its results and when the results occur, and then monitor how those predictions work. The cause and effect are linked to become the actions to be carried out by me, just as colours, shapes and motions are combined to form objects. By connecting the causes and consequences of the actions that I perform, my brain creates my experience with me as the subject. And when the subject of action is not me, but another, I will still be able to connect the cause and effect of the action. It is thus clear that, according to the connection between cause and effect, I can feel someone else’s ability to act in the manner in which I can feel actions of my own. Let us consider an example. Although the receptors in our bodies are stimulated when we exercise our limbs so that we can feel them even without touching ourselves or anything else, the brain’s response to the stimulus is usually suppressed when we act as the subject and actively move our limbs. By contrast, if our limbs are

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exercised passively (for example, when our arms are lifted by someone else), our cerebral cortex reacts so strongly to the stimulus that we can clearly recognize these internal signals. Here, we regard ourselves as the subject and, in the same way, regard others as subjects. Thus, instead of resorting to our own physical experience, we focus on the relationship between the action and its outcome, taking account of the previous intentions of which we are aware. The model of the physical world that we recognize is created by the brain by combining sensory signals and our transcendental expectations, and, in the same way, we acquire knowledge of the spiritual world—the minds of others. We make use of transcendental knowledge and clues derived from feelings to create models of other minds. When we act in this world and interact with other people, our brains use those models to predict what happens next. If our predictions about others turn out to be correct, then we have succeeded in ‘reading’ their minds. A subject who is observing another person can reconstruct the mental process of the observed. Such inner reconstruction is made possible because the neural structure of the observer is similar to that of the observed, and basic human emotions can be exhibited through common facial expressions, in which the visual medium plays a special role. Due to the publicity and social nature of the language system, we can reach a relatively consistent understanding of others by grasping common words and expressions that express states of the mind when we talk about the characteristics of ‘other minds’ (Wittgenstein 2000). In this sense, it is possible to obtain knowledge of other minds. The purpose of such mind-reading is to obtain useful information from the person observed. However, it is fundamentally impossible to understand other minds. Everyone enjoys special access to his or her own inner world—he or she is the only one who has the privilege to acquire information about that inner world. This passage to the experience of one’s own state of mind is beyond the reach of others. The ‘privacy’ of the state of mind makes itself ‘directly observable’ only for its holder, while others can merely speculate about it through the ensuing material consequences. You can tell me what is on your mind, and I can speculate about it from your expressions. Neuroscientists can even infer your thoughts by detecting your pattern of neural activities. But our detection of your mental life can never be as direct as what you feel yourself. We cannot observe or measure your state of mind. Consider a person suffering from a headache, for example. Even if we use a sophisticated instrument that shows the brain structure well, what we observe remains completely different from the person’s feeling. Provided that we are familiar with physiological knowledge of headaches but have never experienced one, we can never feel the state of the headache. In the situation just described, we are essentially comparing two things. First, what does conscious experience mean to observers? Second, what does conscious experience mean to someone who is experiencing it? The former is a neural activity, while the latter is a neurological event. Conscious experience is the sole property of its owner. My conscious experience belongs only to me and cannot be transferred to become another’s conscious experience. Once the owner of consciousness is changed, the original consciousness no longer exists. We can transplant someone’s organ into another person, but we cannot

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transplant someone’s feelings into that person. Even if my own joy can influence others, the joy they experience is not the same as mine. My happiness can be experienced only by me. That is to say, the subject of experience does not belong to an observer or a detector, which means that the subject of experience is not in an entity that monitors experiential events. We cannot observe our own experiences; they are part of us. We are partly made up of those experiences. Based on the example of bats, Nagel describes this feature of conscious experience. The bat flies with its unique echo detection system. With the rapid development of science and technology, we gain an increasing understanding of the physiological structure of bats. However, if bats are as conscious as human beings, can we scientifically determine what is going through their minds in the process of prey detection? Can we know their conscious experience? The answer is no. Why? Conscious experience is perceived in the firstperson perspective while the physical world can be perceived in the third-person perspective. We can never be its subject. Conscious experience must be presented to the cognitive subject in a certain way. We cannot infer the inner life of a bat according to our own experience (Nagel 2000). However imaginative we are, when we imagine ourselves as bats, we are still using our own conscious experience to speculate about that of a bat. Indeed, we have learned how to describe the nature of our states of mind with the aid of objects that we can publicly observe and that remind us of those qualities. The way in which I describe my own experience is the same as yours when you are describing your experience. For example, we all acknowledge that we have experienced the colour of ripe tomatoes, for we describe that experience in the same way. Thus, it seems that the link between the types of neural and mental activities can be attributed to that between the descriptions of mental activities by neural activities, which indicates that different states can share the same description. However, why should we believe that two kinds of experience described as such are exactly the same? Perhaps your experience is similar to mine when we see a lemon, and our descriptions are exactly the same, but the nature of the state of mind I have described is completely different from that of yours. Ultimately, the qualia presented by the empirical subject are more than a physical concept. No description in the physical aspect can exhaust everything about qualia, and this ‘interpretation gap’ causes difficulties in understanding other minds in an objective way.

6 Discussion From the above, we can conclude that our perceived ability to compare our own activities with what we have observed in other people’s physical activities is a type of understanding at the primary level. The method of analogy adopted is not intended to trace back to the cause from the result, nor to inquire about a causal explanation for the behaviours of others, but to read other people’s expressions (movements, postures and facial expressions). That reading process has to be placed in a certain situation that forms the background and context of understanding others. For that reason, the

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neural correlation of understanding the minds of others cannot provide sufficient and necessary explanations for the cognition of their minds. The examined targets of studies that have clearly established such associations have mostly been adapted during the history of human evolution, and are more related to reflective behaviour, but rational processes in real life are much more complicated, involving the capabilities to process abstract symbols and conceptual skills. Neurological interpretations apply to the simplest behaviours of humans and other animals, such as sensory exchanges, movements, foraging and so on. They are only useful at a minimal level compared with thinking about abstract and complex decisions and choices with farreaching influences, which falls precisely in the realm of traditional cognitive theory that requires the shift in the focus of neuroscience research from basic cognitive processes to the so-called advanced functions (such as reasoning, social judgement and decision-making). In the case of self-knowledge, we focus on the so-called ‘transparency method’ and the extent to which its use delivers inferential self-knowledge. By contrast, in the case of our knowledge of others’ thoughts, we discuss the role of perception as a source of such knowledge and argue that even so-called ‘perceptual’ knowledge of other minds is inferential. When discussing the nature of the knowledge of other minds, we should not pursue knowledge that is absolutely unmistakable and universally inevitable, and should not expect the sender and receiver of the information to both have the same realization of the meaning of the given information. That kind of knowledge does not exist. The true meaning of understanding the minds of others is to be able to predict their behaviours; that is, to already ‘know’ what action other people would take, or tend to take, before they do anything. And, in cases where the action has already been completed, we can explain the reasons or motivation for it. If we view the problem of other minds from this perspective, we may still be able to obtain some knowledge with a certain degree of certainty and reliability. The point is to make clear the following three questions: · In what circumstances do the two mechanisms of direct perception and mental speculation apply to daily life? · Are they in a competitive or a cooperative relationship? · If the latter, in what circumstances is cooperation between them possible?

References Borg, Emma. 2017. Mirroring, Mind-Reading and Smart Behaviour-Reading. Journal of Consciousness Studies 24 (5–6): 24–49. Brincker, Maria. 2015. Beyond Sensorimotor Segregation: On Mirror Neurons and Social Affordance Space Tracking. Cognitive Systems Research 34: 18–34. Burton, Robert. 2014. A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves. Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries 51 (5): 861. Davidson, Donald. 1993. Truth, Meaning, Actions and Events. Trans. Bo Mu, 241, 255, 264. Beijing: The Commercial Press.

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Fenici, Marco. 2015. Social Cognitive Abilities in Infancy: Is Mindreading the Best Explanation? Philosophical Psychology 28 (3): 387–411. Ferrari, Pier Francesco, and Giacomo Rizzolatti. 2014. Mirror Neuron Research: The Past and the Future. Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 369 (1644): 1–4. Gallagher, Shaun, and Somogy Varga. 2014. Social Constraints on the Direct Perception of Emotions and Intentions. Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy 33 (1): 185–199. Gallese, Vittorio, Christian Keysers, Giacomo Rizzolatti, et al. 2004. A Unifying View of the Basis of Social Cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (9): 396–403. Gangopadhyay, Nivedita, and Alois Pichler. 2017. Understanding the Immediacy of Other Minds. European Journal of Philosophy 25 (4): 1305–1326. Goldman, Alvin. 2012. Theory of Mind. In Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Cognitive Science, ed. Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels, and Stephen Stich, 410–412. New York: Oxford University Press. Herschbach, Mitchell. 2012. Mirroring Versus Simulation: On the Representational Function of Simulation. Synthese 189 (3): 483–513. Herschbach, Mitchell. 2015. Direct Social Perception and Dual Process Theories of Mindreading. Consciousness and Cognition 36: 483–497. Jiang, Qin, Qi Wang, Peng Li, Hong Li, et al. 2016. The Neural Correlates Underlying Belief Reasoning for Self and for Others: Evidence from ERPs. Frontiers in Psychology 7: 1–7. Kiverstein, Julian. 2015. Empathy and the Responsiveness to Social Affordances. Consciousness and Cognition 36: 532–542. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1982. New Essays on Human Understanding. Trans. Xiu-zhai Chen, 234–235. Beijing: The Commercial Press. Lurz, Robert, Carla Krachun, Lindsay Mahovetz, McLennon J.G. Wilson, William Hopkins, et al. 2018. Chimpanzees Gesture to Humans in Mirrors: Using Reflection to Dissociate Seeing from Line of Gaze. Animal Behaviour 135: 239–249. Mitchell, Jason, Mahzarin Banaji, and Neil Macrae. 2005. General and Specific Contributions of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex to Knowledge About Mental States. NeuroImage 28 (4): 757–762. Nagel, Thomas. 2000. What Is It Like to Be a Bat? In The Philosophy of Mind, ed. Gao Xinmin and Chu Zhaohua, 109. Beijing: The Commercial Press. Pelphrey, Kevin A., Ronald J. Viola, McCarthy Gregory, et al. 2004. When Strangers Pass: Processing of Mutual and Averted Social Gaze in the Superior Temporal Sulcus. Psychological Science 15 (9): 598–603. Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Laila Craighero. 2004. The Mirror-Neuron System. Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (1): 169–192. Rodríguez, Ángel García. 2018. Direct Perceptual Access to Other Minds. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (1): 24–39. Roelofs, Luke. 2018. Seeing the Invisible: How to Perceive, Imagine, and Infer the Minds of Others. Erkenntnis 83 (2): 205–229. Sameen, Nehdia, Joseph Thompson, and Jeremy Carpendale. 2013. Toward a Second-person Neuroscience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (4): 393–414. Smortchkova, Joulia. 2017. Seeing Emotions Without Mindreading Them. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16 (3): 525–543. Sollberger, Michael. 2017. The Epistemological Problem of Other Minds and the Knowledge Asymmetry. European Journal of Philosophy 25 (4): 1476–1495. Tye, Michael. 2017. Philosophical Problems of Consciousness. In The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, ed. Susan Schneider and Max Velmans, 17–29. West Sussex: Wiley. Vaughn, Don, Ricky R. Savjani, Mark S. Cohen, David M. Eagleman, et al. 2018. Empathic Neural Responses Predict Group Allegiance. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 12: 1–8. Vrij, Aldert, Katherine Edward, Kim Roberts, Ray Bull, et al. 2000. Detecting Deceit via Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Behavior. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 24 (4): 239–263. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2000. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. Bu-lou Li, 139. Beijing: The Commercial Press.

Chapter 5

Comparative Perspectives on Solutions for the Problem of Other Minds

Abstract This chapter aims to establish a dialogue between contemporary research on the problem of other minds and classical Chinese philosophical theories. It first explores the idea, inspired by the recent discovery of the mirror neuron mechanism, that a direct exchange of experience may occur between the observer and the observed. Next, it analyzes the ways in which the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi and Confucian thinkers reflected on the problem of other minds, which are quite similar to the idea inspired by the latest research on mirror neurons. In these thinkers’ views, knowledge of other minds is the result of mental activity and what it provides is, to a large extent, something related not to epistemology but rather to a situational understanding of other minds from the perspective of value theory. I point out that this solution takes two aspects, humans’ innate nature and human experience, into consideration simultaneously. In terms of humans’ innate nature, the body of a human being is a body that represents the unity of man and nature, and it has something in common with the natural world, which lays a foundation for the perception of other minds. In terms of human experience, human beings have such actual needs as emotions, pursuits, and desires, and their behaviors need to conform to certain norms. It is in a body of this kind that the mind of human beings can be formed and enjoy the potential to develop. Effective interpersonal communication can thus be achieved. Keywords Other minds · Experience · Situation · Kind · Beings · Mirror neuron · Chinese philosophical theories

1 Introduction The perception of other minds lays the primitive foundation for a person’s moral sentiments towards others. But how do we understand another person’s thoughts? Can we perceive other people’s psychological states? If so, what is the basis and approach for this? The traditional solution to the problem of other minds has been analogical inference to other minds (Lavelle 2012). But exclusive stress on analogy is unduly sceptical about our cognitive capacities and overestimates our similarity to

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one another (Heal 2000). Knowledge about other minds is based on the causal inference of “mind-behavior,” which uses the principle of mental causation: a behavior is always accompanied by a mental state, and this causal relationship is regular and universal. If the general induction of the mind-behavior causation is indeed correct, and if others’ behaviors are similar to ours, then by analogy, such generalization also applies to others. Through such generalization, we will have reason to arrive at a specific inference regarding the mental state of a specific individual. The “mind-behavior” causal inference and the principles of psychological causation are commonly accepted. However, is there any reason to conclude that the similar mental states of any two individuals will result in similar behaviors? The regularities suggested by the principles of psychological causation do not fully apply to all psychological causal phenomena. What is more, mind and behavior perhaps have a many-to-many relation, rather than one-to-one. In other words, in response to a certain environmental stimulus, the subject will enter into many mental states at the same time, and then exhibit many behaviors. Rarely do people exhibit a one-to-one “mindbehavior” relationship. In addition, inferring other people’s mental states using the principles of psychological causation falls into the fallacy of circular reasoning, because when we conduct psychological causal inference, we must assume that the principles of psychological causation are applicable to the object. Only in this way can we infer the object’s mental states from the observation of his/her behaviors. If this precondition cannot be established, how can we apply the principles of psychological causation to people beyond ourselves? This is the very question that needs to be dealt with in the problem of other minds. I would like to point out that the view under discussion here differs from this conventional view, and that my paper is not directly arguing that the new view is superior to others, but rather is offering a philosophical alternative. This chapter aims to have a dialogue between contemporary research on the problem of other minds and classical Chinese philosophical theories. It will proceed as follows. I will first explore the idea, inspired by recent advances in cognitive studies, that a direct exchange of experience may occur between the observer and the observed (Sect. 2). I will then analyze the ways in which the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi and Confucian thinkers reflected on the problem of other minds, which are quite similar to the idea inspired by the latest research on mirror neurons. Zhuangzi’s interpretation of other minds entails the prioritization of experience relevant to the situation (Sect. 3). Meanwhile, the Confucian idea of extending oneself to others presupposes that all human beings belong to the same “kind” (Sect. 4). Finally, I will provide a summary and a discussion of some implications of my findings (Sect. 5). In my opinion, the aforementioned thinkers’ solutions take two aspects, humans’ innate nature and human experience, into consideration simultaneously. It is in a body of this kind that the mind of human beings can be formed and enjoy the potential to develop. Effective interpersonal communication can thus be achieved.

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2 Recent Advances in Contemporary Research on Other Minds In contrast with theory-theory, simulation theory argues that the same mental resources that are used in our own thinking, decision-making, or emotional responses are redeployed in imagination to provide an understanding of the thoughts, decisions, or emotions of another (Goldman 2012; Roush 2016; Short 2015). We are not only aware that others have different mental states, including desires, intentions, beliefs, etc., but are also able to form a general and accurate theory of others’ mental states, and use this information to predict and explain their behavior. However, how does imitation recreate the inner state of others in our minds? Since the end of the twentieth century, scientists have obtained evidence based on transcranial magnetic stimulation and positron emission tomography that primate brains, including humans’, have a type of neuron in the F5 area that is activated both when an individual performs an action and when an individual observes the same action performed by another individual. The neuron “mirrors” the action of another person; hence its name, “mirror neuron” (Lurz et al. 2018; Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004). Our understanding on the actions of others seems to depend on the neural structural activities that we also undergo when we perform the action ourselves. Because of this correlation, neuroscientists use mirror systems to describe neural networks that participate in action understanding. Mirror neurons enable us to empathize with others by imitating the inner state of others in our own bodies. Mirror neurons can be seen as dynamic parts of larger circuits, which support our understanding of the options and action potentials that we and perhaps others have in our affordance space (Brincker 2015). This mirroring and resonance also appears with pains and moods. Studies have shown that perceiving emotions also triggers neural mechanisms that play a key role in the generation of emotions, and many of the same brain areas are activated when the subjects mimic and observe facial expressions corresponding to various emotions. It has been verified in a series of experiments that both nausea and aversion activate similar insula areas, and the intensity of both is positively correlated with the activation of the insula. This is also supported by the experiments conducted by Vaughn et al. concerning pain: there is a common mechanism for feeling an emotion and perceiving the same emotion in others. Watching another person in pain activates brain areas involved in the sensation of our own pain (Vaughn et al. 2018). Rodríguez offers an argument for a non-relational conception of expression, and therefore for the view that we directly perceive people’s mental states via their expressive features (Rodríguez 2018). It should be pointed out that mirror neurons respond not only to the immediate reality of an action, but even in the absence of visual information. For example, mirror neurons are still activated even when presented with a sound or thought conveying the meaning of the action. The mirror neuron mechanism connects simple actions to the semantic network, allowing us to quickly and directly understand the actions of others. This direct perceptual capacity depends upon recognizing the way in which

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the other person is responsive to the affordances the environment provides (Kiverstein 2015). Similarly, the perceptions of emotions can also be directly projected to the mirror neurons. The shared neural mechanism seems to allow a direct exchange of experience between the observer and the observed. And if we adopt a certain kind of pluralism about social cognition then the mirror neuron system could play a role in social cognition even if it provides no access whatsoever to the minds of others (Borg 2017). It is widely believed that pain is the most intimate experience. We know the pain we experience—but how would we feel for others in their painful suffering? Nowadays, brain imaging technologies have led to the discovery of a network of areas called the “pain matrix” that becomes active when people experience pain. It can thus be concluded that the physiologically correlated aspects of pain are not private. However, subjective pain is not directly coupled to the physical properties that constitute the painful stimulus. When we are distracted, we do not find the pain caused by a very hot object unbearable, even if it remains burning hot. The feeling of pain can be strengthened by psychological suggestion. So how can we experience others’ feelings? By closely observing these brain areas when we empathize with others, it can be seen that certain areas related to the physical aspects of pain, such as the temperature of the object, the contact point with the skin, etc., are not active, while other areas, which are related to the psychological experience or subjective feeling of pain, do become active. Here, we share the psychological experience of pain rather than its physical aspects. The experience produced by “mirror neurons” offers an “internal perspective” by which we can experience what others go through. We do not first perceive others’ behaviors and then infer or assume that their behaviors are caused by some similar experience or internal state that leads us to perform similar behaviors. Instead, we see others as entire persons, that is, as intentional beings whose bodily gestures and actions can express their experience or mental states. Here, the living creature has both the characteristics of the first person and the third person: I can experience it from the first-person perspective, and others can feel it from the third- or second-person perspective. When I empathize with you, I treat myself as another person relative to you. We can establish a connection between the cognitive patterns of the first person (proprioception) and the third person (external feeling) in social interaction, and thus imagine our perceptions of each other—we are all involved in an intersubjective perspective. The body is the interface between the mind and perception. Without the body, we will not be able to have emotional interactions—we will never resonate emotionally with lifeless objects. We understand others through cycles of cognitive-behavior interaction, which is often carried out by our bodies—emotional understanding and resonance is gained through the gestures, expressions, movement, and interaction of bodies. In this sense, the inference of other minds works more like reading body language than mental states. The emotional communication between babies and parents embodies the most primitive form of intersubjectivity. Early infants’ social cognitive abilities do not develop continuously into four-year-olds’ belief attribution abilities (Fenici 2015). Newborns are ignorant of any concept or knowledge, so

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they cannot infer or understand others’ emotions by applying theories. Their way of imitating and responding to adults’ facial expressions is a direct physical interaction, which also exists in the emotional interaction among adults. For example, the tacit cooperation between two dancers relies on the interaction of body movements and eye contact. An opposite example is that patients with an impaired amygdala can neither experience fear nor recognize fear, which shows that experiencing fear and expressing fear—the two states that were previously believed to be independent— have an important commonality in nature. People unconsciously experience the feelings of others, not through indirect theoretical approaches but through direct emotional response and expression. By “direct,” I mean that the emotions of an individual and others occur through the same neural pathways without media (psychological causal inference or simulation process). The importance of mirror neurons in perceiving the intentions of others means that, through spontaneous and unconscious imitation, humans may, through direct projection mechanisms, activate the brain regions that elicit instinctual action responses, thus taking the first step in understanding others and building social relationships. At the same time, the human mind has the ability to understand other minds through imagination. We feel, through imagination, a sense of proximity and physical equivalence, which forms the basis of our understanding of other minds. This consists of two aspects: one is having the ability to attribute a cause to the mental state of oneself or others. One’s mental state includes beliefs, desires, intentions, thoughts, knowledge, concepts, attention, and all emotions; taking intention as an example, the average person can distinguish between a moving living being with an intention (such as humans and animals) and a moving natural object (such as stones and leaves) without intention. The other aspect is having a corresponding emotional response to the mental state of others. We not only attribute a cause to an individual’s mental state, but also involve in and respond appropriately to his or her mental state. In terms of experience, people are emotionally connected with each other and can appropriately respond to each other. Human beings can develop an understanding of other people’s inner mental state (such as deceptions and beliefs), respond to and express emotions, share ideas with others, and so on. Such empathy and resonance are the foundation of social behavior (Ferrari and Rizzolatti 2014). Of course, the mirroring mechanism of neurons cannot be used to explain all our knowledge of interpersonal relationships, but based on that, we can further understand more complex interpersonal behaviors.

3 An Interpretation of Zhuangzi on Other Minds: The Prioritization of Experience Relevant to the Situation While Western philosophers’ research on other minds was more meticulous, Chinese philosophers brought up the problem of other minds much earlier than their Western counterparts. More than two thousand years ago, Zhuangzi assumed that the fish he saw swimming freely in the water were happy. He judged the psychological state of

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the fish based on their behaviors, and then inferred that we might know others’ mental activities with the help of their behaviors and actions. Huizi asked him, “You are not a fish, how do you know what constitutes the enjoyment of fishes?” (Zhuangzi 2013). There are two meanings indicated by the question “how can you tell”: whether it’s possible to tell and by what means one can tell. The former refers to the possibility and authenticity of knowing, and the latter to approaches and methods. The question raised by Huizi is mainly about the possibility of “knowing.” Taking the privacy of psychological experience as his starting point, he believes that things in the world are differentiated and that “you” and “I” are two separate individuals, which makes it impossible for one to know the other’s psychological state. Obviously, what Huizi insists on is agnosticism or skepticism with respect to the problem of other minds. Although he admits the existence of other minds, he doubts whether other minds can be known, which is why he thinks Zhuangzi is unable to tell whether the fish are happy or not. But Zhuangzi retorts with his logic: “Since you are not me, how could you know that I cannot tell?” (Zhuangzi 2013). Now, considering that Zhuangzi and Huizi are separate individuals, Huizi is also unable to figure out whether Zhuangzi knows the fish are happy. In other words, Huizi claims that he cannot grasp the psychological state of Zhuangzi. Likewise, he should also be incapable of confirming if Zhuangzi knows the psychological state of the fish. But he does come to the conclusion that Zhuangzi cannot tell whether the fish are happy. Hence, a paradox occurs. In fact, this famous philosophical conversation from ancient China clearly brings up the question of the evidence for cognition, and also clearly traces this evidence back to the mind of the subject. The private language argument is noticeably present here and can be analyzed from the perspective of Wittgenstein’s theory. Huizi believes that private language does exist and is not transferable, which makes him skeptical about whether Zhuangzi really knows that the fish are happy. According to the theory that language objects feature commensurability, a private language may be converted into a public language in some respects. The experience of Zhuangzi and the “happiness” of the fish are public languages for talking about psychological phenomena which can be used to express the same feelings. In this way, personal experiences become commensurable. Obviously, what Huizi asks belongs to epistemology and will undoubtedly involve a noumenon if followed to its logical conclusion. What Zhuangzi answers, however, belongs to axiology; that is to say, the scene wherein “the fish are happy” derives from Zhuangzi’s experience when watching the fish. The fact that Zhuangzi replies to Huizi from the perspective of axiology rather than epistemology indicates the position that the experience of fitting with the object has priority over the inspection of the object’s noumenon. In this case, the purpose of Zhuangzi watching the fish is to relax. If the fish were only regarded as the object of watching, the purpose could never be achieved even if all the fish had been seen. To relax, in fact, is to change one’s mood based on what one has seen. What matters to the transition of the mood is forgetting the previous mood and gaining a new one. Here, the transition of the mood is completed through the experience of “watching.” After the “me” who needs to relax is forgotten in this process of watching, I can fully appreciate the scene before

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my eyes: the fish are swimming freely in the water. Otherwise, my mood would get stuck in a moment of the past forever. In contrast, when the mood is changed, the me that is watching the fish becomes a new “me.” That is to say, the extent to which Zhuangzi knows the happiness of the fish depends on the extent to which Zhuangzi perceives their feelings through his experience of watching them from the bridge or through his imagining of his own experience of “swimming” in the water as a human being in the past. In his view, humans share the same experience with other humans as well as creatures that are far away from them (including fish), because that which is called knowing is not a true idea in the minds of certain isolated experiencers. Instead, direct feelings regarding the situation are essential for “knowing,” and experience relevant to the situation is prioritized. Meanwhile, knowing is a kind of participation involving emotions that also become part of the experience. In other words, proximate context is integral to what it means to know—that is, that the how, what, who, and whence of knowing are implicated and mutually entailing (Ames 2015). Thus “knowing” can be interpreted as our expectations of, responses to, and shaping of the others whom we face. Zhuangzi not only retorts on the semantic level, but also expounds on his argument from the perspective of ontology. He proposes that heaven and earth were born together with “me,” that everything in the world is in unity with “me,” and that heaven and earth were originally one. For this reason, Zhuangzi does not perceive other minds from an external or separate perspective, nor does he analyze them through analogy, induction, or reasoning. Instead, his approach to a solution is to abandon “knowing” for a method of selfless immersion in and oneness with the situation. He attaches feelings to a scene and takes advantage of a scene to express those feelings; the “happiness of the fish” is an expression of Zhuangzi’s own happiness. In his view, the external forms of Zhuangzi and the fish are actually just physically manifested phenomena of the Dao (the underlying principle of the universe), so Zhuangzi can know the happiness of the fish. Similarly, in “The Butterfly Dream,” Zhuangzi proposes that phenomena are differentiated and distinct from each other, even while their essence cannot be differentiated. From the perspective of phenomena, Zhuangzi and the butterfly in his dream are two separately manifested things, but they are the same thing in essence, and this is called “Dao” or “Oneness”. Zhuangzi’s Dao can be physical or metaphysical; it can manifest in the form of Zhuangzi himself, or in the form of the butterfly. Though different in appearance, both Zhuangzi and the butterfly are physical manifestations of Dao. In this sense, a human body is a miniature universe: whatever exists in the universe exists in it as well.

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4 The Confucian Presupposition of Extending Oneself to Others: All Human Beings Belong to the Same “Kind” Confucianism, a philosophical school that has historically coexisted with Daoism, uses forgiveness and kindness to describe the meanings other minds recognize. Confucius assumes that if someone can stand in others’ shoes and think about a problem, then he or she is approaching “humaneness.” Mencius also points out that “The feeling of commiseration is the principle of benevolence (Mencius 2013). Confucianism takes forgiveness and kindness as a form of self-cultivation which refers to “extending oneself to others.” It means not only actively giving others what one likes, but also avoiding imposing on others what one would not choose for oneself. On the one hand, it entails the idea that “the man of perfect virtue, wishing to be established himself, seeks also to establish others; wishing to be enlarged himself, he seeks also to enlarge others,” according to The Analects of Confucius. On the other hand, it requires “What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others” (Confucius 2013). Confucius’ definition of forgiveness and kindness has been further developed by later Confucian scholars. The Confucian solution to the problem of other minds uses the presupposition that all human minds have something in common as the logical premise of its arguments. This presumption is based on the fact that all human beings belong to the same “kind.” Specifically, all “humans” share a common taste for cuisines, a common preference for sounds, and even a common mind, by virtue of belonging to the same kind. The idea of “extending oneself to others” is indicative of the Confucian discovery and consciousness of the existence of the human “kind.” Regardless of whether this method can be implemented at a given time, its epistemological value is unquestionable. However, the inference here is based on the common goodness of all people. The psychological reasoning concerning other minds that we carry out is effective only when this premise holds true; otherwise, the behavioral model of extending oneself to others cannot be accepted. Then comes the question of why people have this common goodness and what its inherent basis may be. Chinese Confucian philosophers have tried to answer this question from the perspective of human nature. First, Mencius proposes the idea that human nature is inherently good, so a person can extend himself to others because goodness is their common essence. By “goodness,” Mencius means Confucian moral norms including humaneness, righteousness, manners, and wisdom. In Mencius’ view, extending oneself to others means handling the relationships between people according to one’s own nature, i.e. the human nature. Mencius’ theory, however, shows aprioristic tendencies, and thus cannot provide the inherent basis needed to justify the rationality of extending oneself to others. As a result, Neo-Confucian philosophers in Song dynasty propose a new explanation. They start from the relationships created among all things in the universe and divide human nature into two parts, “natural nature” and “temperamental nature,” viewing people as a combination of cosmic order and vital energy. In terms of its origin, human nature is derived from that of nature; human nature is natural nature concretely

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manifest within people. For Neo-Confucians, people share a common essence with each other and with all things, namely the natural law that is a fixed part of human nature. Thus, to extend oneself to others is to treat oneself and others in accordance with the requirements of this natural law. Neo-Confucians’ theory of human nature in Song dynasty provides evidence and standards for this model of behavior. In doing so, it limits the subjectivity afforded to people in handling relationships, especially in terms of forcing their own views on others, and thereby possesses some positive meaning. However, for Neo-Confucians, behaviors which can be applied to others in this model must be those involving facts or reasoning, not those involving desire. Because natural law is supremely good while desire is the lowest form of evil, one must eliminate evil and preserve the good by “preserving natural law and eliminating desire.” This interpretation imparts a noticeably ascetic undertone to the practice of extending oneself to others. At the same time, natural law hangs over everything in the universe; its existence is external to people. In ontological terms, this external nature also creates a logical gap between the natural law and the behavioral model. Therefore, although the Song dynasty NeoConfucian theory of human nature is more self-consistent than Mencius’ theory of humans’ original goodness, the former is still unable to persuasively explain the inherent basis for the behavioral model. The externality of natural law has encountered criticism from philosophers of the Confucian School of the Mind. Wang Yangming, the main representative of this school of thought, believes that the inherent basis for extending oneself to others is not implanted externally, but rather produced internally (Wang 2011). In his view, the mind is equivalent to natural order; the mind and this order are unified. That which is called natural law is not an externality diametrically opposed to humans, but is actually the human mind itself. In Wang Yangming’s thought, the “self” in “extending oneself to others” does not refer to an individual’s emotions or preferences, nor to an absolute principle external to humans. Instead, it is the fixed moral conscience common to all people, which is the concrete manifestation of the natural law in the human mind. It is neither knowing-that nor knowing-how, but a third type of knowing which makes a person disposed or inclined to act accordingly (Huang 2017: 65–94). Based on this theory, extending oneself to others is no longer a matter of passive compliance with an external absolute; rather, it is the internal awareness of human self-improvement. However, from this perspective, extending oneself to others evolves into a form of purely psychological self-cultivation and thus is similarly distanced from real life. Moreover, it is still impossible to avoid heavy undertones of asceticism. This explanation has been criticized by many enlightened thinkers. Dai Zhen of the early Qing dynasty believed that reason and desire cannot be separated from each other, as the principles of reason exist in desire. Extending oneself to others does not mean thinking from others’ perspective on the basis of a supposedly intrinsic natural law, nor is it derived from a conscience inherent to human nature. Instead, it is a matter of defining a limit on the common feelings shared between oneself and others; the role of reason is to improve the desire itself (Dai 2010). “Feeling” here refers to consideration of others in relationships by mentally putting oneself in their position

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on the basis of one’s own needs, so as to satisfy the similar desires of both oneself and others. “Reason” refers to moral norms such as humaneness and righteousness. Only those feelings which conform to reason are sufficiently appropriate and rational to be applied within this behavioral model. Reason provides rational rules for feeling; in terms of this definition, the goodness of human nature is essentially the rational development and improvement of natural human feelings and desires. In his attribution of human nature to natural human desires, Dai Zhen emphasizes that desire is necessary for reason to exist and that reason and desire cannot be separated. In this way, the evidence for extending oneself to others is founded in people’s rational, natural desires, thereby demonstrating an orientation that is centered on real life. But even though goodness is a nature that everyone has, it may be much weaker than the innate instinct for self-preservation and the concomitant desire for self-love. For example, intrinsic compassion may be lost easily, while the human will to live and the impulse of self-love are very strong and can be maintained without conscious guidance or cultivation. Therefore, this question still needs to be answered: Given that other minds are originally external to one’s own mind, why can other minds, as external objects, be confirmed according to one’s own mind, which exists internally? So how can we find this fundamental concept? In the Confucian view, the knowledge of other minds is knowledge about temperament, which distinguishes itself from the perception of the external, objective world. The Confucian theory of mind understands the cognition of other minds as a projection of meaning: other minds, from their existence to their meanings, are the result of mental activities. In real life, the fact that humans show their understanding for others depends on the fact that humans can feel and experience pain with the mind and body themselves. If one has the strong desire to seek fortune and avoid misfortune, other humans, being of the same kind, must share the same desire, which means that the correspondence among humans that is based on self-love is a spontaneous and true natural feeling from the heart. In addition, while deeming humans valuable, Confucianism also assimilates them into the myriad things on earth in a modest way. Humans thus exist with everything else in oneness. Here, “oneness” can be interpreted not only as the notion that every creature is involved with and owns one another, but also as the idea of a closelylinked world community or universal family. Such oneness also develops from one’s own mind and body. By following and creating meanings, we manage to read the expressed meanings of other minds in a specific situation. Overall, the Confucian line of reasoning about “extending oneself to others” in handling relationships is, in fact, a manifestation of “treating others in accordance with natural law,” as well as the concrete implementation and application of this mode of thought on a practical level. From the standpoint of denotation, differences exist between “treating others in accordance with natural law” and “extending oneself to others,” but in terms of connotation and essence, these two models are actually in agreement. Both take the view of people as existing in the context of the world or society, because it is precisely the existence of this world and of others that provides a strong guarantee for the value, meaning, and rationality of individual beings. Clearly, both “treating others in accordance with natural law” as a way of

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thinking and “extending oneself to others” as a practical approach share a common fundamental goal: to answer the questions of human existence and of how people can lead better lives.

5 Discussion and Conclusion In this paper I have analyzed the ways in which the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi and Confucian thinkers have reflected on the problem of other minds, which are quite similar to the idea inspired by the latest research on mirror neurons. Compared with contemporary Western scholars, Chinese philosophers pay more attention to the value dimension of other-mind understanding. In their views, the knowledge of other minds is the result of mental activities, and what it provides is to a large extent not something related to epistemology but rather a situational understanding of other minds from the perspective of value theory. However, the classical Chinese philosophical sentiment that all things exist as one has been supported by research on mirror neurons; it is no longer viewed merely as some sort of mystical experience or consciously created mental outlook, but rather is a form of lived experience that is rooted in the body and has a physical-psychological basis. For these Chinese thinkers, humans are not the only subjects capable of feeling pain: all things (animals and even plants) can feel pain. As the “most intelligent of all creatures,” the “intelligence” of humans is founded on their heightened sensitivity to the pain experienced by all other creatures on earth. All living beings are capable of feeling pain, but Confucians affirm that humans alone are capable not only of being aware of and concerned about their own pain, but also of recognizing and being concerned about the pain of others. All members of the animal kingdom, the biosphere, and the human community alike collectively form a “communion of subjects” relative to “me,” rather than a “collection of objects” (Tu 2010). The more deeply and acutely humans can feel the pain of others, the richer the assortment of subjects or species in the universe that are capable of feeling pain becomes. Despite pointing at subjective aspects of social order, the “mind” which serves as the intrinsic foundation for knowing others’ minds actually possesses a visibly objective basis. Of course, any human experience should not simply be ascribed to the level of biological activity. Much as love should not be reduced to a series of adrenal, hormonal, dopaminergic, and endorphinal reactions, Confucian sentiments regarding the oneness of other beings should not be reduced to the activation states of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are just the neural basis for our ability to know other minds; in real life, this basis can only be put to use through individual life experiences, value identification, and rational thought. Although all “humans” belong to the same kind in terms of their species, there are many situations in which they differ from each other in emotions, beliefs, ideas, or other aspects. Other minds are not purely spiritual or material entities; rather, they are the subjectification of ethical substance as recognized by one’s own mind. Both “treating others in accordance with natural law” and “extending oneself to others” demonstrate reachability and universality

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among different individuals. In short, the nature and humanity are different things with some degree of heterogeneity, but by applying human ethics to natural law and natural law to human ethics, a coherent understanding of the relationship between the two can be reached. Although originating from distant times and ancient cultures, the thought of Zhuangzi and Confucian philosophers on the problem of other minds is in astonishing agreement with the implications of contemporary theories regarding other minds, and offer profound inspiration for our future studies. In dealing with the problem of other minds, these two Chinese philosophical schools have integrated human innate nature with human experience. In terms of human innate nature, the body of a human being is a body that represents the unity of man and nature and has something in common with the natural world, which lays a foundation for the perception of other minds. In terms of human experience, human beings have actual needs such as emotions, pursuits, and desires, and their behaviors need to conform to certain norms. On the one hand, they are built on categorical concepts such as good, evil, and a sense of duty. On the other hand, they are closely related to the will and faith of human beings. And such principles would have to be understood with reference to an actual life of virtue, to which one has access through rituals (Fan 2014). It is in a body of this kind that the mind of human beings can be formed and enjoy the potential to develop. Thus, effective interpersonal communication can be achieved. This way of thinking can help us obtain certain clues for revising our understanding of the perception of other minds, thus diversifying and improving our solutions to this problem.

References Ames, Roger T. 2015. ‘Knowing’ as the ‘Realizing of Happiness’ Here, on the Bridge, over the River Hao. In Zhuangzi and the Happy Fish, ed. Roger T. Ames and Takahiro Nakajima, 261–290. Hawai‘i: University of Hawaii Press. Borg, Emma. 2017. Mirroring, Mind-Reading and Smart Behaviour-Reading. Journal of Consciousness Studies 24 (5–6): 24–49. Brincker, Maria. 2015. Beyond Sensorimotor Segregation: On Mirror Neurons and Social Affordance Space Tracking. Cognitive Systems Research 34–35: 18–34. Confucius. 2013. The Analects: Wei Ling Gong. Trans. James Legge. Chinese Text Project, retrieved from https://ctext.org/analects/wei-ling-gong/ens. Dai, Zhen. 2010. Revised Edition of Dai Zhen’s Complete Works, 77–80. Hefei: Huangshan Shushe. Fan, Ruiping. 2014. Taking Confucian Thought Seriously for Contemporary Society: Rejoinder to Lauren Pfister, Ronnie Littlejohn, and Li Chenyang. Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 13 (3): 413–420. Fenici, Marco. 2015. Social Cognitive Abilities in Infancy: Is Mindreading the Best Explanation? Philosophical Psychology 28 (3): 387–411. Ferrari, Pier Francesco, and Giacomo Rizzolatti. 2014. Mirror Neuron Research: The Past and the Future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society b: Biological Sciences 369 (1644): 1–4. Goldman, Alvin I. 2012. Theory of Mind. In Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Cognitive Science, ed. Eric Margolis, Richard Ian Samuels, and Stephen P. Stich, 410–412. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Heal, Jane. 2000. Other Minds, Rationality and Analogy. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74 (1): 1–19. Huang, Yong. 2017. Knowing-That, Knowing-How, or Knowing-To? Wang Yangming’s Conception of Moral Knowledge (Liangzhi). Journal of Philosophical Research 42: 65–94. Kiverstein, Julian. 2015. Empathy and the Responsiveness to Social Affordances. Consciousness and Cognition 36: 532–542. Lavelle, Jane Suilin. 2012. Theory-Theory and the Direct Perception of Mental States. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3 (2): 213–230. Lurz, Robert, et al. 2018. Chimpanzees Gesture to Humans in Mirrors: Using Reflection to Dissociate Seeing from Line of Gaze. Animal Behaviour 135: 239–249. Mencius. 2013. Gong Sun Chou I. Trans. James Legge. Chinese Text Project, retrieved from https:// ctext.org/mengzi/gong-sun-chou-i/zhs?en=on. Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Laila Craighero. 2004. The Mirror-Neuron System. Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (1): 169–192. Rodríguez, Ángel. Garcia 2018. Direct Perceptual Access to Other Minds. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (1): 24–39. Roush, Sherrilyn. 2016. Simulation and Understanding Other Minds. Philosophical Issues 26 (1): 351–373. Short, Tim. 2015. Simulation Theory: A Psychological and Philosophical Consideration, 89. Hove: Psychology Press. Tu, Weiming. 2010. The Global Significance of Concrete Humanity: Essays on the Confucian Discourse in Cultural China, 346. New Delhi: Munshirm Manoharlal Publishers Private Ltd. Vaughn, Don A., Ricky R. Savjani, Mark S. Cohen, David M. Eagleman, et al. 2018. Empathic Neural Responses Predict Group Allegiance. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 12: 1–8. Wang, Shouren. 2011. The Complete Works of Wang Yangming, 159. Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe. Zhuangzi. 2013. The Floods of Autumn. Trans. James Legge. Chinese Text Project, retrieved from https://ctext.org/zhuangzi/floods-of-autumn/ens.

Chapter 6

The Limits of Mind: An Epistemological Perspective

Abstract In contemporary epistemology, internalism and externalism have always been regarded as two important and opposite categories, and neither picture of knowledge is satisfactory. I aim to analyze the theoretical dilemma they pose and the crux of their failure, and offer an alternative line of research that could settle the discussion from the perspective of the philosophy of mind. That is to say, whether the justification of knowledge depends on the external world, which makes it true, or depends on the internal state of the subject, it is confined to the static framework of rationality vs. experience or logic vs. fact. Therefore it seems that we have to choose one or the other. However, this framework itself is problematic when it treats certain epistemic results in absolutes. The complete justification of knowledge starts from the original form of cognition, which requires inquiry into its origin and the tracking of the levels and trends of its development. I argue that due to the limits of our mind, our perception about the external world is, in a sense, a world model beginning with inner beliefs. But the model will be adjusted and modified continuously according to the deviation between forecast and reality. Along these lines, if we can find out the ways in which internalism and externalism work on the different levels and contexts of the epistemic process, they will no longer be mutually exclusive in many respects, but rather in unity or accord. Keywords Justification · Knowledge · Belief · Perception · Model

1 Introduction How do we make sure that we know everything exactly? If we know something, do we know for sure that we know it? What are the requirements for one to grasp a certain type of knowledge? Is knowledge a state of mind or just a form of belief? Can we have access to real knowledge about the external world? Or does it rest on the phenomenal level? The rise of this discussion coincides with the rebirth of contemporary epistemology, in which internalism and externalism are two opposing ways of explaining these debated issues. Internalists claim that the epistemic status of a belief is entirely determined by factors that are relevantly “internal” to the believer’s

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perspective on things: for example, they must be cognitively or introspectively available (Feldman 2014). Externalists deny this, asserting instead that the features which make a belief justified may include such things as the reliability of the process by which the belief is formed, features which need not be available to the agent (Greco 2014). However, both internalism and externalism are obsessed with the absolute understanding of knowledge, which is confined to the stationary framework of rationality vs. experience or logic vs. fact. This makes justification almost impossible to achieve, which I call the myth of justification. In my opinion, as long as we continue to maintain this understanding, the traditional debate will not end and the gap between the two sides will not be bridged. I propose another way of thinking about these conflicts by questioning and analyzing the presuppositions of the debate over internalism vs. externalism, even if we still adopt the way of the justification of belief as a solution. This chapter proceeds as follows. First, I will examine the dilemma of internalism and externalism respectively Sects. 2 and 3), and then go on to reveal the common reason for both failure, that is, they fail to realize that whether a belief is justified or not must be partly determined by the state of perception itself, not just by our belief about the perception. On the other hand, if we take perception as a kind of description, only the object satisfying the description becomes the object being perceived (Sect. 4). Afterwards, I will explain the view that justification is a kind of relationship, which imposes requirements on both the justifier and the justified. Besides, justification is not a one-off event, but a continuous and dynamic process. I will argue that knowledge is a self-correction of model-dependent experience, a continuous construction. Along these lines, internalism and externalism will no longer be mutually exclusive in many respects, but rather in unity or accord (Sect. 5). I will close with a brief summary of primary results (Sect. 6).

2 The Dilemma of Internalism According to internalism, the most fundamental foundation of knowledge lies in one’s strong commitment to his/her belief. It is completely based on something in the mind, and its meaning can be grasped through the introspection or reflection of the subject. For instance, I know that I have a toothache, I know I am happy, and so on. Such beliefs are self-evident without any justification. Generally, the intrinsic state that can be grasped includes perception or memory. For instance, I have a belief that “a book is on the table”, and I believe it is true because I see the book on the table and the perception of ‘seeing’ itself provids justification. Internalism prioritizes the internal state of the subject as the starting point of epistemology. This is because from its perspective, the cognitive subject has a certain capability for thorough belief perception, reflection, and examining his belief. The idea behind internalism is that whether a belief is justified depends on whether it is acquired or supported by the correct cognitive process. The correctness of the cognitive steps is the intrinsic property of knowledge. We can change anything in the situation except

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the internal state without affecting the answers to the questions about which beliefs are justifiable. Different accounts of the structure of justification form various branches of internalism. According to the principle of inferential justification: To be justified in believing P on the basis of E, one must not only be (1) justified in believing E, but also (2) justified in believing that E makes probable P (Fumerton 2015). In the same way, belief E needs another belief C as a justificatory reason. In doing so, we will face the Epistemic Regress Problem and must end up with certain beliefs that are self-evident and verifiable as true beliefs. The emergence of foundationalism can be considered as a way to prevent this regress argument. Foundationalism holds that the direct response to sensory input constitutes simple belief about the world, from which we can deduce the more complicated ones that cannot be acquired by way of a single sensory input. Since those simple beliefs that come directly from sense constitute the basis of cognition, they do not have to justify themselves, or rather, they are in a way self-defensive. These are so-called basic beliefs that justify other beliefs, but their justification does not come from other beliefs (Bonjour 2017). It comes from states that are not beliefs, referred to as the Given. But what kind of beliefs can be counted as basic? Is it about the proposition of material objects or a description of one’s own perceptual experience? Moreover, what are the characteristics of beliefs that make them foundational? Furthermore, how is the justification of basic beliefs effectively transmitted to basic beliefs? Confronted with the difficulties of foundationalism, we naturally assume that there is no such thing called foundational knowledge at all. If this is the case, what will the structure of justification look like? Since there is no distinction between foundational and “non-foundational” belief, so there will be no difference between the upper and lower level. All beliefs directly or indirectly support each other, forming a cohesive network. In saying so, we are supporting the knowledge system of coherence theory. Coherentism refutes the basic beliefs advocated by foundationalism which is based on the myth of the “given” and regards basic beliefs as “given” materials. The “given” is something that is taken from an act of self-justifiation. These things are the unmoved mover of empirical knowledge and are presupposed as “knowledge on the spot”. Obviously, foundationalism considers observable particulars and sequences as materials and as the preexisting objects of knowledge. However, what we can perceive is only the particulars. The existence of sense materials does not logically entail the existence of knowledge. Perception is not knowing, and the perception of sensory content does not constitute knowledge, be it inferential or non-inferential (Sellars 2005). In coherentism, basic beliefs have to be justified, so how to guarantee justification without infinite regress? The only way forward is to start within the belief system, and with the relationship between certain empirical beliefs and others. Coherentism takes justification as the coherence between the beliefs in the same belief system. That is to say, a belief is justified if it can be supported by certain beliefs in its belief system. Nevertheless, the problem of infinite regress has not been avoided. Therefore, coherentism responds with two metaphors. In its view, the reason for the infinite regression is that we view the structure of belief justification as a linear means of

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explanation. To prevent it from regressing, we may modify the linear statement (Bliss 2014). One modification is to regard the justification of belief as a ring structure. Here, coherentists choose the word ‘ring’ over ‘circle’ in order to emphasize that the justification of belief is not a vicious circle, but a virtuous and useful one. The other way is to consider it as a net structure: every point on the net is directly or indirectly associated with every other point. Whether a belief is justified depends on whether it can be placed in the network and whether or not it plays a certain role in this structure (Krag 2015). No matter which structure is used to illustrate the justification of belief, coherentism emphasizes that one belief has a coherent relationship with other beliefs. But what is a coherent relationship? Generally speaking, the most basic requirement of coherentism is the principle of logical consistency among all beliefs. This requirement, however, is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for the justification of belief. There is no direct or close relationship between coherence and belief justification. Or, when faced with criticism, coherentism can make some corrections—e.g. by claiming that, at least when a belief is justified, one must perceive the connection between it and the other beliefs. We can still keep an open mind on whether the perception proposed here is inferential or non-inferential. The perception of the relation between one belief and other beliefs is also a belief in itself. If coherentists claim that this belief is non-inferential, they will no longer be coherentists, but foundationists. However, if the belief is inferential, it will once again be challenged by the dilemma of infinite regression. Therefore, it boils down to a question of whether such a knowledge system is a circularly supportive one and whether it has made the mistake of engaging in circular argument. Another criticism of coherentism directly targets the ‘optional consistent system’. A theory allows for many consistent belief systems. One belief is not consistent with this system, but can be consistent with another belief system. Eventually, all beliefs in systems are consistent, and they are respectively justified. Coherentism does not tell us how to choose among incompatible systems of coherence beliefs. Each explanation or theory competes with many other competitors. For instance, astrology can sometimes be as coherent as astronomy; the same rule-boundedness applies to the physics of Ptolemy and of Einstein; and even dreams and fantasies can be coherent. Countless belief systems can be consistent and mutually supportive, but how can we possibly decide which one is true or closest to the truth (Klein 2014)? If we fail in our judgment, it is unlikely that we will justify our beliefs. Can coherentists provide any additional criteria for distinguishing between effective and non-effective systems? If not, how do we make a judgment among them? Perhaps coherentists have to accept a set of basic beliefs or a priori propositions, but if they do, it will no longer be coherentism. Furthermore, belief in the coherentist system of knowledge is not guaranteed to be true. The believed-in coherent system is just the best coherent system so far, and is thus temporarily seen as true. Suppose our beliefs can extend to incorporate all beliefs, and that there is only one best coherent system at this time; we then consider all beliefs in this system as true. However, will this scenario ever come true? It seems highly unlikely as it is hard to imagine that all possible beliefs are mastered and

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that the current web of beliefs works the best. Even if one day, we are satisfied by our theoretical explanations for all things observable, there are still things in the world that have not been discovered or observed. Therefore, we cannot claim that the current belief system which may cover all beliefs is the best or the unique one. Finally, in coherentism, the defense of beliefs depends on a set of beliefs that internally connect with each other by providing mutual support. As for the relationship between beliefs and the external world, it has nothing to do with coherence. Since a coherent belief system can be separated from experience and reality, only other beliefs will have an effect on the justification of this belief. That is to say, if a consistent belief system is completely isolated from the external world, it is still able to justify every belief in the system. So a consistent belief system is obviously against the ultimate end of cognition in that the justification of knowledge is based only on the belief system rather than on the facts. According to the theory of coherentism, knowledge cannot lead to the truth for lack of the standard of connection with the external world. This standard is the non-inferential observable belief that comes from the external input.

3 The Dilemma of Externalism Contrary to internalism, externalism holds that a belief counts as knowledge as long as it is justified through a reliable process. Even if one is unaware of the reliability of the process, he/she can still claim that he/she has knowledge. Externalism does not seek the internal justification of consciousness or belief, but looks outward, arguing that the reason for a belief to become knowledge lies in some connection between the belief and the external state that makes belief true. The reliability of a cognitive process is a probabilistic problem. A good case in point is color perception. The color perception of human beings living on the earth has developed into a very reliable type of cognition, but if we live in an environment where the color of the light source is erratic, color perception may be unreliable. Here, the correctness of the cognitive process involved in color perception is not intrinsic to color perception itself, but is determined by the relationship between the process and the environment. In light of externalism, a belief is justified, if and only if it is well-formed. That is to say, for S to believe in P, the justified evidence must be responsible for this belief by filling a proper role in the causal relationship. According to this theory, the reliable process of cognition can be reduced to a specific psychological process, which does not merely depend on the logical state of the proposition or its relationship with other propositions. Even the logical proposition of “eternal truth” is no exception to this. If it moves through an inappropriate psychological process, it remains unjustified. As a result, the reliable process is not only limited to the outside world, but also involves specific psychology (Beddor 2015). In short, what qualifies a belief as knowledge or justification is its reliable connection— which refers to the process and method of argumentation— to the truth.

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Then, what kind of process can provide such a justification? And what cannot? In general, the former includes perception, memory, introspection, and a variety of rational reasonings. The latter includes imagination, speculation, beliefs based on emotion formation, blind faith in authority, and so on. What is the difference between the two? The answer would be reliability—the former often generates true beliefs, whereas the latter tends to the opposite (Goldman 2012). Suppose that one sees Jenny and believes that Jenny is coming to work today. This is due to the fact that perception has a certain reliability—seeing is believing. But sometimes people would make mistakes by seeing or memorizing. If on the contrary Jenny was photographed, it would be easier to convince people that she really came to work today, for this process and way of making beliefs is more reliable than eyewitness testimony. Similarly, take another example: we suppose we predict, groundlessly, that it will rain tomorrow and it happens to rain the next day whereas a weather forecaster, after reading the weather data that day, also precisely predicts the rainfall of the next day. What is the difference between the two cases? Or, what makes the two predictions different? The answer still lies in reliability. Externalism seems to have avoided many long-standing problems in epistemology. However, difficulties remain in explaining the characteristics of knowledge in terms of natural processes determined by or attributed to psychological and physiological properties. Firstly, reliabilism defines the justification required by knowledge in terms of a reliable cognitive process, but there is no sufficient explanation of how the process of cognition is reliable. What counts as reliable? And what is the probability that it can produce true belief—85%, 95%, 99%? In addition, many situations, such as perception and reasoning, belong to a reliable cognitive process. So which one is more reliable? To followed up with another question: since the same thing appears in our real world and in the world of imagination, with both having a reliable way of forming convictions, how then do we explain the difference between the real and imagined worlds? Secondly, there is the question of whether the cognition process with varying degrees of reliability makes the “true” something that differs in degrees, and varies according to changing reliability. Thirdly, although the process of generating beliefs is reliable, the justification of these beliefs is not rooted in the reliability of the perception process, but in whether the interpretation of the perception is consistent with the facts. For instance, when we perceive something, we may see surely, but we may not be able to figure out what exactly it is. We may clearly see a light spot in the air, but not know whether it is the spot of the aircraft or something else. What’s more, there is the possibility of fallibility in the formation of beliefs—perception can be deceiving, people may misread or mishear. For a percipient, the process of forming beliefs is reliable, yet the beliefs it produces may be false. When judging the reliability of a cognitive process in a specific example, we should consider each event in its context. If it makes sense to talk about the reliability of cognitive processes, it should produce an uncertain probability of true beliefs which fits each event given in the current situation. But the current situation can go on being specific indefinitely, including the true value of belief generated by cognitive process. Reliability approaches to justification fail even to assert a necessary and sufficient condition for justification, much less a correct condition, if they do not identify the

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bearers of reliability (Conee and Feldman 2004). Moreover, for a particular event, the probability of uncertainty is the same as the probability of objective justification— both are either 1 or 0, depending on whether the belief is true or false. It follows that the principle of reliabilism implies an absurd conclusion: a belief must be true in order to be justified. We assume that the reliability under a general condition accords with the present situation. Suppose a belief P is the product of the cognitive process M. Supposing the current situation is a general type of situation C, in which case M is reliable, we may thus tend to regard P as justified. For example, M might be color perception, and situation C might include seeing things in white light. But what if the current situation is a more specific type of situation C*, in which case M is unreliable? Suppose that C* may include seeing things in very dim white light. In other words, in evaluating M, it is unnecessary to consider all the details, but we cannot ignore the features of the current situation which could possibly make M unreliable. This shows that we should regard P as being justified if and only if (1) there is a description of the current situation C, such that M is reliable in type C and (2) there is no more specific description of C* in the current situation, making M unreliable in type C* (Ghijsen 2016). The essential problem here is that when we try to evaluate individual beliefs by reliability, we encounter the problem of direct inference once again. That is to say, there is no way to evaluate objectively individual beliefs that lack true values. Reliability is an uncertain probability, and usually probability theory associates physical probability with relative frequency. The relative frequency freq (A / B) is the ratio of the B that is actually A in which A and B are properties. And according to the new viewpoint of realism, the connection between freq (A / B) and prob (A / B) is merely cognitive from the view of epistemology; that is, observing the relative frequency in the real world provides us with evidence to believe in their probabilities. The physical probabilities described in all these theories are uncertain probabilities, which relate properties rather than attach them to propositions or events. However, what ultimately proves useful for process reliabilism is objectively definite probability. The latter is a mixed physical/cognitive probability deduced from uncertain probabilities through ‘direct reasoning’. So-called reliable cognition is the process or tendency of truth transmission, which is a high ratio of true beliefs to false beliefs. But is this the whole meaning of truth transmission? Perhaps, if a property is a necessary condition for the advancement of knowledge in a certain field, then even if it forms very few true beliefs we can still consider that property to be truth transmissible. Such an intellectual property may lead people to make mistakes many times before acquiring the truth. But as long as they can discover new and reliable cognitive processes that will ultimately enhance human knowledge, it will be satisfactory. From the above analysis, we can see the crux of the failure of reliabilism. Firstly, reliabilism misrepresents the relationship between justification and truth. Specifically, the criterion of justification is referential, which we consider to be, or may be, a sign of a truth belief. However, reliabilism equates the criterion of justification with anything that actually shows the truth. Secondly, the process of belief forming is an external characteristic. It can make the justification and can be separated from the

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subject. According to Haack’s classification, A’s S-evidence about P refers to a set of states that causally cause A to believe or not to believe P. In contrast, A’s C-evidence about P refers to the set of contents (propositions) that can be in a logical relationship with A’s belief P. Generally speaking, C-evidence can make A’s evidence about P better or worse, but what constitutes C-evidence depends on which S-evidence (sensory-introspective state) of A causes A to believe P. Our criteria of justification focus on the causes of beliefs and on the S-evidence of the subject (the empirical and belief states that support one’s beliefs in cause and effect). Although the S-evidence consists of the state that is perceived by the subject, the subject may be completely unaware of the process of belief formation (Haack 2009).

4 Perception vs. Belief About Perception The first query about internalism is the voluntarist presupposition that the subject can decide after deliberation what to believe or not. Feldman discusses the merits of versions of doxastic voluntarism, the thesis that we form beliefs voluntarily (Feldman 2004). He concedes that we do have a kind of indirect control over our beliefs. However, is the state of belief subordinate to the direct control of the will? Any perception is related to the facts, and we cannot claim the existence of an internal state without being aware of it at all. Imagine if I saw a book in front of me; did I believe that ‘there is a book’ is subordinate to my choice or decision? Besides, the notion of internalism’s justification seems too rigid. According to the requirements of direct accessibility, only a conscious state can be qualified as a determinant of the justification. If so, at some point those beliefs in people’s minds are almost unjustified(Hill 2014). This is because in most cases, people’s beliefs are not active, but rather are in the form of bits of information stored in memory to be recalled later. Strict internalism limits justificative factors to conscious states. Therefore, those beliefs are usually considered to be defended, but most of them actually cannot be realistic states of mind or presently provide a basis for justification of belief (Madison 2016). What’s worse, the infinite regression will not stop. Suppose we do get some basic beliefs, and suppose that what makes the basic beliefs a non-inferential proof is some cognitive attribute E. Then, according to the theory of internalism, A’s basic belief P can only have recourse to E. Afterwards we are forced to further acknowledge that A has every reason to believe that his belief contains E, which is also required. However, once it is agreed, regression becomes inevitable. In other words, any kind of belief is conditionally justified. The most important reason behind this failure is that it fails to realize that the rationality of cognition is not simply determined by one’s beliefs, because the justifiability of belief is associated with both beliefs and non-beliefs in terms of perception and memory. Foundationalism stems from the idea that all the beliefs that are justified ultimately come from the evidence we perceive, which are known to us in the form of beliefs. In fact, the beliefs we form in perception are almost always about the objective properties of physical objects, but perception is seldom conscious of how

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things are presented in front of us. When I walk into a room, I am convinced that ‘the curtains are blue’, but I don’t realize that ‘a blue-red rectangular shape appears in the upper right corner of my view.’ I can think that way, but doing so usually involves a conscious shift of attention and a reorientation of my thinking. Usually these ideas do not automatically appear in perception. Perception usually does not give rise to beliefs about sensory experience, so the basic beliefs assumed by foundationalism do not exist. This constitutes the background of coherentism. Coherentism rightly abandons the basic belief hypothesis and does not give any special status to perceptual belief, but it also rejects the non-belief appealing to perceptual state and memory state, making it impossible to accept perception and memory. Let’s then look at the reasons for the failure of externalism. Externalism requires that a belief that counts as knowledge must be justified through a reliable process. Although externalism does not seek the internal justification of consciousness or belief, it argues that the reason for a belief to become knowledge lies in some connection between the belief and the external state that makes belief true. In light of externalism, a belief is justified, if and only if it is well-formed. That is to say, for S to believe in P, the justified evidence must be responsible for this belief by filling a proper role in the causal relationship. Unfortunately, when we try to evaluate individual beliefs by reliability, we encounter the problem of direct inference once again. That is to say, there is no way to evaluate objectively individual beliefs that lack true values. Reliabilism misrepresents the relationship between justification and truth. Specifically, the criterion of justification is referential, which we consider to be, or may be, a sign of a truth belief. However, reliabilism equates the criterion of justification with anything that actually shows the truth. Why are neither the intrinsic nor extrinsic answers satisfactory? The crux of their failure lies in the fact that justification is a kind of relationship, which imposes requirements on both the justifier and the justified. For one thing, perception is the basic source of our knowledge about the world, and it is impossible to justify a belief by focusing on beliefs about the state of perception. This means that the justification must be partly determined by the state of perception itself, not just by our beliefs about perception. Just imagine I know I have a book in front of me, not because of my belief that a book is presented in front of me, but because of the very fact that a book is presented in front of me. Perceptual state directly allows the perceptual judgment of physical objects without beliefs about perceptual state. That is to say, it is a direct transmission from perceptual impression to beliefs about the real world, and it is not necessary to take a belief about the internal state of the subject as a medium. The reason is probably that there is usually no need to form a belief about perceptual impression: when beliefs are useful, we can form them; if not, especially when they are not in use, they will consume our limited cognitive resources in a meaningless way. For another, if we take perception as a kind of description, then only the object satisfying the description becomes the object being perceived. What we perceive can never be something or the state of affairs itself, but just a certain aspect of it. Therefore, the perceptual content often has a certain perspective reflecting that aspect. Take change blindness as an illustration. Change blindness is a perceptual

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phenomenon where observers fail to notice visual changes, sometimes very extreme ones. A famous and often-repeated experiment to demonstrate change blindness is the basketball game scenario, where observers are asked to watch a short clip of a basketball game. Often, the experimenter provides a task, such as counting passes or falls. Most observers fail to notice that a person in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the court, gesticulates, and then leaves again. It also reminds us that we need to pay attention to perception vs. belief about perception. A person with a certain perceptual experience may not necessarily have the corresponding perceptual beliefs; while a person with a certain perceptual belief does not necessarily have the corresponding perceptual experience. How does experience justify belief? There are different ways experience might support beliefs about the external world—which concern a range of features of experience that might explain its ability to justify beliefs, including its phenomenal character, its contents, and its status as attentive or inattentive (Siegel and Silins 2015). A “conscious state of mind” is a state of mind in which a subject knows something. When a subject is aware of something, he/she must be conscious, and a subject with a certain consciousness may not be truly aware of certain things or facts. When we are aware of some things or facts, we are not necessarily aware of our own state of mind or physical state. A particular example for this is when a drill is running continuously outside, causing someone in the room who is concentrating on something else to become suddenly aware of the harsh noise, it can be said that this person has phenomenal consciousness before he heard the noise, but that only after he notices the noise does he have access consciousness of the noise. Here, “access consciousness” is the result of state, and its content is prepared to be used as a precondition in reasoning or as a rational control of action (Block 2008). Similarly, there is the “blindness” phenomenon: patients with defects in their visual cortex can point to a target correctly, although they claim they do not see it, as if to say, ‘I did not consciously see anything in that blind spot.’ This phenomenon makes us more clearly aware of the difference between conscious vision and unconscious recognition. It seems that people are aware of their psychological state not because of their consciousness, but the role that this psychological state plays in the process of subjective consciousness (Carruthers 2017).

5 Self-Correction of Experience Basing on Models In contemporary epistemology, internalism and externalism have always been regarded as opposite categories. They both grasp important aspects of knowledge, but neither of them is satisfactory because they are stationary, necessitating an eitheror choice between them. In fact, if the two propositions are placed in an appropriate analytical framework, then there is no real tension between them. I shall sketch some interesting effects that may hopefully come from the combination of the two. In my opinion, knowledge is as rational as science in its refined and expanded form precisely because it is a self-correcting work that allows any view to be tested without driving all the claims to the wall.

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Regardless of whether the justification of knowledge depends on the external world, which makes it true, or depends on the internal state of the subject, it is confined to the static framework of rationality and reality. However, this framework itself is problematic when it treats certain results of cognition in absolutes, because the conceptual schema related to human cognition is a dynamic process. Internalism and externalism only take into account cognition at a higher level or the final results of cognition. Meanwhile, the complete justification of knowledge should begin with the original form of cognition, investigate the origin of various types of cognition and trace their levels and trends of development. It needs to take the object as its basis and limit, and regard cognition as a kind of continuous construction. Knowing typically involves a relation between the agent and the external environment. It is impossible for us to isolate the cognitive subject from the world unless we claim that our experience does not involve the objective reality in the world, nor does it provide us with the empirical representation that “the world is like this”. The reason why perceptual experience has such a status for belief justification lies in the nature of perception. This nature can be understood according to the functionalism of the theory of evolution: perception, as an organ function necessary for survival, is to provide information about the world. In our perception of the world, as observers, we have no way to remove ourselves from said perception of the world. Our perceptions are processed by our senses, and their conscious content is influenced and modified by subjective intentions. Therefore, they are not directly formed but it is more like they are formed under a lens which constitutes the structure of interpretation in our brain. Although the processing of information from the senses into the brain is controlled by a bottom-up passive sensory mechanism, the mechanism used to process informational stimuli at the perceptual level is the result of top-down instructions from the brain to the senses. It reflects the ability and freedom to integrate series of events into units. Our judgment of the world is based on our sensory abilities, and we can only feel certain forms of stimulation. The ground of the epistemic force of perceptual states lies in properties of the perceptual capacities that constitute the relevant perceptual states. The knowledge and ability that we need for acquiring perception is inherent in our brain, which has evolved over millions of years, before becoming strong a priori hypotheses. For instance, from the viewpoint of physics, an image is made up of single points called pixels, but why do we see a whole object instead of many points? This is because visual cortical neurons are insensitive to light dots, and different cells react to different patterns or colors. These different graphic features and colors are called “categories”, and other sensory systems have their own corresponding categories. As a product of evolution, categories dictate what we can perceive—we only perceive objects that match the categories we possess. Our experience of the world can only be acquired through the categories that are compatible with nature; our innate sensory conditions and abilities limit our knowledge of the world. This means that our perception of the outside world actually begins with our inner a prior belief, which is a world model of the spatial location of objects. The brain discovers the things of the external world by constructing models of the world. As a concomitant phenomenon of construction, we come up with surprising illusions

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that the brain uses to automatically fill in missing information in the absence of any sensory signals. Let’s see the case. A place where there is no light receiver in our eyes is called a blind-spot, which means there are no visual cells there. But the optic nerves that transmit sensory signals are gathered to this spot of the retina. Therefore, if an object’s image happens to fall on it, no vision will be formed. However, by capitalizing on signals from the nearest region around the blind spot, our brains will compensate for the lost information and get them into this visual region (Frith 2007). In this sense, it can also be said that perception is an illusion that is consistent with reality. Of course, it is very likely that hallucinations and delusions lead us to form false beliefs about the world around us. There are research results that support such a mechanism in which-against a backdrop of an expected standard-related photos help people generate pseudo-evidence to support claims (Newman et al. 2015). Why does this happen? The reason is that this behavior is in line with the brain’s expectations. In other words, the brain will look for support for the “correctness” of a thing. When something meets the brain’s need for support, the brain will take it as evidence, thus forming the conclusion that since there is evidence, it is probably true. Thus there is a distinction between phenomenal evidence and factive evidence (see Schellenberg 2017). The former can be understood as determined by how our environment sensorily seems to us when we are experiencing. The latter is roughly understood as necessarily determined by the environment to which we are perceptually related such that the evidence is guaranteed to be an accurate guide to the environment. Both evidence have rational source which lies in employing perceptual capacities that we have in virtue of being perceivers. According to the capacity view, notions such as justification and knowledge are to be understood in terms of the mental capacities employed. It is because a given subject is employing a mental capacity with a certain nature that her mental states have epistemic force. Further, the developed capacity view argued that perceptual experience has epistemic force in virtue of the epistemic and metaphysical primacy of the perceptual capacities employed in perception (Schellenberg 2017). This brings to the key question about justification. If it is believed that knowledge must be infallible, then the so-called justification is to prove that a certain proposition is definitely true. However, the view that takes infallibility as an element of knowledge is hardly recognized by contemporary philosophers. Moreover, justification is conditional in nature. Whether we are discussing inferential justification or non-inferential justification, justification must be based on certain conditions. Inferential justification depends on other background knowledge, while non-inferential justification relies on the conditions under which experience can be established. If knowledge is believed to be fallible, then the so-called justification means that there is a reasonable basis to believe that a proposition is true, but it does not rule out the possibility of mistaking a false proposition as a true proposition (i.e. a false proposition can also be justified). Meanwhile, as long as our perceptual experience is related to the objective reality, there is at least the possibility of being true; and as long as this possibility is retained, we must admit that we can we can gain access to the world in good cases, and thus knowledge can be acquired.

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When we understand justification in the context of ‘knowledge is fallible”, it means that justification is not a one-off event, but a continuous and dynamic process. The actual situation is indeed like this. Our epistemic ability and epistemic results are mutually conditional. On the one hand, epistemic practice is not the agent’s response to the external world, but rather a complex interaction between agent and its environment. The agent not only “re-represents” the external world, but also constructs it. On the other hand, epistemic practice is a continuous process with trial and error rather than a linear accumulation. As stated earlier, the brain discovers the things of the external world by constructing models of the world. The brain interprets our sensory input and predicts what signals will be received through this model. Of course, this prediction will make errors when compared with the actual signals, but the model will continue to make adjustments and modifications accordingly, a process which goes on until the error is minimized. That is to say, although what we perceive is not the world itself, but the model of the world in our minds and its prediction of the external world, this does not affect our perception of the world. When the model we use successfully explains an event, we tend to give it the value in terms of “true”. It makes no sense to ask whether the model is true as long as it fits our observations. If there are two theories or models that are consistent with the observations, we cannot think that one is more real than the other; instead, we can choose the one that is simpler in the case under consideration. This is what is called model dependent realism. Every scientific theory comes with its own model of reality, and it may not make sense to talk of what reality actually is (Hawking and Mlodinow 2013). The argument which has led us to this conclusion is doubtless less strong than we could wish, but it is worthwhile to consider briefly its general character and validity. Suppose when I walk out of the room without seeing the table, how could I know that the table still exists? We can indeed build a model in which the table disappears when I leave the room, and reappears in the same spot on my return. But the model will be very awkward: if the ceiling falls down just when I go out, or when I enter the room next time, and I find that the table has reappeared, but is broken and covered with the wreckage of the ceiling, what should we do? We simply construct a model of the table in situ, which is consistent with our observations and which makes our experience of the world seem simple and direct. The self-correction of experience basing on models also illustrates in what sense the original form of knowledge is possible. The role of the model is to express the nature of different concepts. It is impossible for us to perceive an object without a certain concept or conception. Instead, we can conceive an object that we don’t perceive. It should be emphasized that we should not confuse the concept of the object that we acquire solely from external senses with the concept of science. The latter is the concept of the same object when people reach the stage of intellectuality. It comes from the attention paid to their various properties or different parts, their mutual relations, and their overall relations. Besides, perception usually has a clearer and more stable concept of the object than does the memory or imagination. However, the concept of the object provided by the senses may or may not be clear. This suggest that our cognitive processes can appeal to general internal states and accept a naturalistic internalism. As McDowell put it, if sensory experience is to provide the

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solution—in particular, if it is to provide the answer to sceptical challenges—it must therefore meet two criteria. First, it must itself be “receptive”—i.e., appropriately constrained by external reality. Second, it must be the kind of thing that can enter into a logical or rational relationship with belief—it must already be “conceptual”, in other words (Price and McDowell 1994). Anything we get from nature has been conceptualized, and one of Kant’s greatest ideas is to regard judgment as the smallest unit of experience (Brandom 2015). That is to say, experience has already involved the application of concepts. Objects (concepts) have long resided in our conceptual space, so we can take the initiative to grasp objects and make them obey our understanding. As has been recognized, in perception, we not only have a more or less clear concept of the perceived object, but we also have an irresistible conviction in its existence (Reid 2010). The conviction of a truth may be irresistible, but not necessarily in a direct way. As for the existence of clearly perceived objects, we have a direct belief that we can distinguish between the object of pure imagination and that of real existence. People seldom think of a reason to believe in what they see and our trust in the senses before we are able to reason is no less than after we have done so. The construction of our perceptive abilities determines that we deduce other truths from the existence of things we know clearly, but does not itself derive from any principle. Moreover, any belief in the existence of a certain thing seems to presuppose the concept of being. Everything that people clearly perceive is invariably endowed with “being”. So far, my strategy incorporated the advantages of both internalism and externalism. It can be seen as externalistic in terms of content and internalistic in terms of access. Content Externalism carries the implication that our mental states necessarily depend on particular objects and events that exist in our external environment for at least part of their content. Epistemic internalism is committed to sameness of justificatory status between subjectively indistinguishable counterparts, not sameness of content of their justifiers (Madison 2016). The combination of the two perspectives implies that we possess rationally grounded anti-skeptical knowledge and also allows for a degree of epistemic modesty, by conceding that perceptual knowledge never amounts to knowledge that is absolutely certain. Such attempt is also beneficially inspired by epistemological disjunctivism. As defended by Neta and Pritchard, epistemic justification can be—and in paradigmatic cases of perceptual knowledge actually is—both factive (i.e., entails that the belief is true) and reflectively accessible (i.e., can be known by reflection alone) (Neta 2007; Pritchard 2015). Likewise, Williamson believes that cognition enables agents to achieve their goals by adjusting their actions appropriately to the environment (Williamson 2006). Such adjustment requires what is internal to the agent to be in some sense in line with what is external; that matching depends on both internal and external sides. Along these lines, neither externalism nor internalism can fully explain knowledge and confirmation. Internalism and externalism are not so much simple categories as two perspectives about knowledge and confirmation. Fundamentally, since both are applicable to different epistemological practices, there is no opposition between them. If we do not view internalism and externalism as mutually exclusive, but rather find out the ways in which the internalism and externalism work at different levels

References

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and in different contexts of the epistemic process, then they can achieve integration or coherence in many ways.

6 Discussion As stated above, it is almost impossible for us to achieve justification in the static framework of rationality vs. experience or logic vs. fact. To get rid of this myth, we must notice that justification is a kind of relationship, which imposes requirements on both the justifier and the justified. We should also realize that justification is not a oneoff event, but a continuous and dynamic process. I provid such an epistemological approach, which, while affirming the internal epistemic state of the agent, absorbs the external factive elements as the basis for judging perceptual knowledge. It can be seen as externalistic in terms of content and internalistic in terms of access. Content externalism ensures that it is solid from ontological point of view, while justificatory internalism ensures that it is appropriate and finite as a result of rational enterprise. This approach, not only like externalism, uphold the essential connection between justification and truth, but also like internalism, respects the finite rationality of the justifier as the cognitive agent.

References Beddor, Bob. 2015. Process Reliabilism’s Troubles with Defeat. The Philosophical Quarterly 65 (250): 145–159. Bliss, Ricki. 2014. Viciousness and Circles of Ground. Metaphilosophy 45 (2): 245–256. Block, Ned. 2008. Consciousness and Cognitive Access. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 108: 289–317. Bonjour, Laurence. 2017. The Dialectic of Foundationalism and Coherentism. In The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, ed. John Greco and Ernest Sosa, 117–142. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. Brandom, Robert B. 2015. From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars, 171–173. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carruthers, Peter. 2017. Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness. In The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, ed. Susan L Schneider and Max Velmans, 288–297. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. Conee, Earl, and Richard Feldman. 2004. The Generality Problem for Reliabilism. In Evidentialism: Selected Essays in Epistemology, ed. Earl Conee and Richard Feldman, 135–165. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Feldman, Richard. 2004. The Ethics of Belief. In Evidentialism: Selected Essays in Epistemology, ed. Earl Conee and Richard Feldman, 166–197. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Feldman, Richard. 2014. Justification is Internal. In Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, ed. Matthias Steup and Ernest Sosa, 337–350. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Frith, Chris. 2007. Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World, 135. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. Fumerton, Richard. 2015. What the Internalist Should Say to the Tortoise. Episteme 12 (2): 209–217. Ghijsen, Harmen. 2016. The Puzzle of Perceptual Justification, 93–123. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Goldman, Alvin. 1986. Epistemology and Cognition, 88–95. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Goldman, Alvin. 2012. Reliabilism and Contemporary Epistemology: Essays, 38. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greco, John. 2014. Justification Is Not Internal. In Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, ed. Matthias Steup and Ernest Sosa, 325–336. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Haack, Susan. 2009. Evidence and Inquiry: A Pragmatist Reconstruction of Epistemology, 95, 147. New York: Prometheus Books. Hawking, Stephen, and Leonard Mlodinow. 2013. The (Elusive) Theory of Everything. Scientific American 22 (2): 90–93. Hill, Christopher S. 2014. Meaning, Mind, and Knowledge, 290–291. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Klein, Peter D. 2014. No Final End in Sight. In Current Controversies in Epistemology, ed. Ram Neta, 102–110. New York: Routledge. Krag, Erik. 2015. Coherentism and Belief Fixation. Logos and Episteme 6 (2): 187–199. Madison, Brent. 2016. Internalism in the Epistemology of Testimony Redux. Erkenntnis 81 (4): 741–755. Neta, Ram, and Duncan Pritchard. 2007. McDowell and the New Evil Genius. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2): 381–396. Newman, Eryn J., Maryanne Garry, and Christian Unkelbach. 2015. Truthiness And Falsiness of Trivia Claims Depend on Judgmental Contexts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition 41 (5): 1337–1348. Price, Huw, and John McDowell. 1994. Mind and World. Philosophical Books 38 (3): 169–181. Pritchard, Duncan. 2015. Epistemological Disjunctivism. Analysis 75 (4): 589–595. Reid, Thomas.2010. Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. Trans. Difei Li, 12. Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press. Schellenberg, Susanna. 2017. The Origins of Perceptual Knowledge. Episteme 14 (3): 311–328. Sellars, Wilfrid. 2005. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. In Logic and Language-Selection of Classic Articles in Analytic Philosophy, ed. Bo Chen, 675. Shanghai: Orient Publishing Center. Siegel, Susanna, and Nicholas Silins. 2015. The Epistemology of Perception. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Perception, ed. Mohan Matthen, 782. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williamson, Timothy. 2006. Can Cognition Be Factorised into Internal and External Components? In Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science, ed. Robert Stainton, 291–306. Oxford: Blackwell.

Chapter 7

What Makes Consciousness ‘Conscious’?

Abstract The Higher-order theories of consciousness seek to discover the necessary conditions for the formation of ‘being aware’ mental states. There have been many controversies about them since the birth of the theories. This chapter reexamines higher-order theorists’ core ideas and propositions, explicates the essence of higher-order representation (HOR) to consciousness interpretation, and analyzes their predicaments and challenges they face. It dissects the targetless problem, the trickiest of its kind, and interprets strategies to respond to it, in an effort to provide possible perspectives and ideas that can further the exploration of ‘phenomenal consciousness’. I propose an approach to the problem based on intentionality, which calls for adjusting the structure of intentional relations and requires an additional condition to distinguish the corresponding characteristics of many first-order states. Keywords Consciousness · Higher-order theories of consciousness · Experience · Representation · Intentionality

1 Introduction What is the essential difference between the state of phenomenal consciousness and the state of non-consciousness? Why is the simple act of pressing a finger sometimes deemed as a generation of a conscious experience, whilst the complicated process of keeping the body in balance while walking or playing the piano intently is sometimes considered unconscious? The answer provided by the Higher-order theories of consciousness is that the former is accompanied by a higher-order representation while the latter is not. What is the higher-order representation view of consciousness? There is a firstorder truth or accuracy-aimed representational state: the first-order judgment occurs along with the conscious experience. It does not concern experience itself, but the object of experience. For example, when I see a red apple, I am in a state representing a certain external state of affairs that ‘something is red’. But the higher-order judgment is a more straightforward judgment about the conscious experience. For example, I have a feeling of red, I have a headache or I experience certain emotions, etc. The so-called higher-order consciousness means that our consciousness of our © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 D. Fei, Beyond the Brain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9558-3_7

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thoughts or actions is not in the state of experience, but a meta-thought about our own mental state. The representative theories are inner-sense theory, actualist higher-order thought theory, and dispositionalist higher-order thought theory, all of which purport to offer reductive explanations of phenomenal consciousness and are considered to face problems (Carruthers 2017). Consciousness can be passive—it is the external focus of attention on an object presented to the eye when we pay attention to other things; consciousness can also be active—it is the ability of the mind to turn our perspective from the outside into the inside and observe our own behavior and inner workings when we gaze upon or closely observe an object. When we let the information of feelings freely access our state of consciousness and do not focus our attention on a certain object, the consciousness is open, natural, and effortless. For example, when we roam the street or enjoy sightseeing, we are in this state. In contrast, when we deliberately try to find an object amid the constantly incoming flow of feelings we receive, our consciousness has to make an effort to do so. For example, when we try hard to recall or remember something, or when we imagine a scene or immerse ourselves in thought, or when we make plans or predict the results of the plans, or when we calculate things or make a choice from a list of items, our consciousness has to make an effort to do so. Higher-order theories of consciousness attempt to explain the qualitative character of conscious experience through the representational relationship between higherorder consciousness and first-order consciousness. Although there are still disagreements regarding the question ‘What is a representation?’ among scholars—some believe that a representation refers to awareness while others believe it refers to a thought, they all uphold the basic belief that consciousness is a representational relationship, where high-order consciousness represents first-order ones (Gois 2010). Top-down attention can be directed to a specific location in space or to a specific characteristic or a particular object at a random location in the entire visual field. A certain form of selective attention serves as a necessary condition for the formation of conscious awareness—only those objects that I pay attention to will affect my thinking; without selective attention, experience will be chaotic. Various versions of higher-order representation (HOR) explain the phenomenal consciousness through the representational relation between the higher order mental state and the first order mental state, of which the most famous ones are the actualist HOT theory (cf. Rosenthal 2012) and the dispositionalist HOT theory (cf. Carruthers 2017). According to HOR theories, mental states are not conscious in virtue of representing, but in virtue of being represented. In other words, they are conscious because they are themselves the representational contents of higher-order representations. However, HOR theories have encountered a series of objections, the most tough of which is based on the targetless case, that is, it is possible for a higher-order thought to represent a certain first-order mental state which doesn’t even exist. This chapter proceeds as follows. First, I will re-examine HOR theorists’ core ideas and propositions, explicate the essence of HOR to the analysis of consciousness (§2), and then go on to describe the predicaments and challenges they face (§3). After critically examining the targetless problem, the trickiest of its kind, and the various strategies to address this problem, in an effort to provide possible perspectives and

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ideas that can further the exploration of ‘phenomenal consciousness’, I will propose an approach to the problem based on intentionality, which calls for adjusting the structure of intentional relations and requires an additional condition to distinguish the corresponding categories of many first-order states (§4). I will close with a brief summary of primary results and a suggestion for the future research consideration (§5).

2 The Essence of HOR to Consciousness Interpretation Higher-order theories of consciousness hold that consciousness is a person’s awareness or representation of his own internal mental state. A state of a subject, or an event occurring within the subject, is a conscious state or event, as opposed to an unconscious or subconscious state or event, if and only if the subject is aware of being in the state or undergoing the event (Carruthers 2017). Armstrong explains this in terms of the following example: a man has been driving for a long time, during which he has been immersed in thinking or talking so much that he has paid zero attention to his driving behavior. He cannot even remember anything when asked about the red light he has just passed by. However, though he was unconscious during driving, he still managed to execute many complicated operations such as speeding up, slowing down, pulling up, and avoiding running into pedestrians and other vehicles (Armstrong 1999). Throughout the driving process, the subject is certainly conscious in a sense as he sees red lights, road conditions, and other vehicles, but these states of consciousness are unconscious in another sense because there is no higher-order state to represent them—the subject does not perceive the fact that ‘he is driving’ during his driving. Higher-order theories interpret consciousness based on the Transitivity Principle. We know that ‘awareness’ involves ‘the thing that that one is aware of’, or a particular object. For example, we will not say ‘I am aware’ as an independent statement, as it will only provide a complete meaning when we point out the object involved. This is the transitive consciousness, or the awareness of a particular object or its certain quality. In contrast, state consciousness does not involve awareness, and it does not require the indication of the involved object to complete the meaning of a statement. We use state consciousness to refer to all characters of the mental state. This intransitive consciousness does not involve any object; it is conscious or awake, instead of unconscious or asleep. Based on the distinction between the two types of consciousness, David Rosenthal proposes the transitivity principle: a mental state is conscious, if and only if the subject is aware of itself being in this mental state in some proper way. In other words, the state of consciousness is the state that we are conscious of. Applying this principle, we may explain consciousness in this way: a mental state is conscious because it is the object of a higher-order thought or perception. For simplicity I will work with the HOT version, but nothing seems to hinge on that. That is to say, if there does exist a second-order judgment on a certain first-order state, then the first-order state is a conscious content (Rosenthal 2012).

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What a person is conscious of is the object of transitive consciousness that occupies his mind no matter what he has learned or known. Obviously, anything a person is conscious of in his perception is something that is perceived by him; nevertheless, not everything that one perceives can become something he is conscious of. The transitivity principle explains ‘what makes a mental state conscious’, and provides a distinctive interpretation of qualia. Qualia refer to the sensations a subject has when he is in a conscious mental state, or the mental characters of the mental state that the subject is aware of. According to the higher-order thought theory, these mental characters are presented subjectively as the result of ‘being thought’. When a mental state is unconscious, the first-order mental state is not perceived by the subject, thus the mental characters are not perceived by the subject and are not possible to be presented subjectively; when the mental state becomes conscious, the first-order mental state and its mental characters are perceived by the subject, and then the subject’s being aware of these psychological properties constitutes the subjective presentation of the latter. That is why qualia exist in a conscious mental state. Thus, the higher-order theories propose the following Phenomenal Principle: qualia are completely determined by the way higher-order thoughts represent the first-order mental state. Normally we believe that qualia come into existence when we have sensory experience, but the higher-order theories emphasize that qualia are determined by the contents of the higher-order consciousness. Therefore, high-order consciousness is a mental state of a perception-like type. How is that possible? The answer is that the learning of the concepts related to sensory experiences normally allows us to be conscious of the more detailed distinction between the characters of the sensory state. From the perspective of the higher-order consciousness theories, the subject is aware of the mental characters through higher-order thoughts, and the mental characters of the first-order mental state actually have nothing to do with the phenomenal characters we are talking about here. The subject’s awareness does not make the subject aware of the mental characters of the first-order mental state by presenting them; instead, it provides something similar to a description, which need not be accurate, allowing something added, something deleted, or something altered in it. Consciousness and its qualitative characteristics are instantiated in the higher-order representation. For example, when I see a tomato, only if I am simultaneously aware of the tomato—which is higher-order awareness—can it be said that I consciously perceive a tomato. In other words, the essential difference between an action done in a conscious state and an action done in an unconscious state lies in the higher-order consciousness about these actions. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand how conscious events occur, because consciousness is not something that exists independently from higherorder consciousness. Our brain has a function that is dedicated to explaining the various conditions it perceives. When the brain begins to tell me that I have a body, I have feelings and intentions, I can think and make judgments, I can analyze gains and losses, and I can make plans for the future… All these interpretations turn into ‘mine’, which are told to me by ‘me’. It is at this point that I become conscious. The brain in charge of making interpretations is part of me in the first place. Therefore, I

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not only have feelings, but also believe that I have feelings. Consciousness comes into being by way of interpretations; that is the central message of higher-order theories. The mind can be in a conscious state without paying attention to the consciousness itself; instead, the attention may be wholly directed to the external object to which the mind’s operation is directed. For example, when a person gets angry, his attention turns to the person who offended him and the environment in which the offense occurred, but anger, the mood itself, is not the object of his attention at all. The products of perception, memory, and imagination form the content of conscious experience while it is the processed object that is perceived, not the course of processing. In fact, the brain can’t deal with all the input signals. It has to sort through the excessive information it encounters, and the final choice is made at the expense of ignoring the unattended parts and taking only a small proportion of information for further processing—attention plays an important part here (Koch 2012). Take a common situation in daily life: a person who is preoccupied with reading does not pay attention to the noise outside the window, but finally takes notice of it. It is a good example of the distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness in the mental state. Phenomenal consciousness refers to subjective experience or qualia (cf. Ivanov 2017); access consciousness includes the processing of all sensory or perceptual information, which is accessible to thinking, verbal report, control of behavior, and even lucid dreaming. (cf. Pantani 2018) In this regard, the person in this case always has phenomenal consciousness towards the noise, but does not necessarily have access consciousness; only when he takes notice of the noise does he acquire access consciousness (and may find that he has been listening to the noise for a while). There is a dissociation between conscious perception of an object and attention to that object. Attention is a voluntary act that requires proactive initiation and can last with the willingness to do so; in contrast, consciousness can be active as well as passive, and it cannot last and has to constantly change among various ideas.

3 Challenges, Retorts and Responses The higher-order theories of consciousness are regarded by some as a physicalist approach to mind, but they in fact don’t entail physicalism of mind because they do not assert that the higher-order consciousness’ representation of lower-order consciousness is a physical process of cause and effect. Nonetheless, such theories still face many problems, and their core principles have also been disputed. First, these theories deny the possibility that creatures without higher-order consciousness may still have consciousness, and cannot explain certain mental states such as meditation, which don’t seem to involve any kind of thinking. As one type of representation theories, the higher-order theories of consciousness affirm that phenomenal characters of any mental state rely on its intentionality. However, some emotional states (such as shyness) don’t represent or relate to any state in particular— they are innate of experience, including the awareness of what you feel, which belongs

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to higher-order perceptions; but what is represented is merely what is intended, rather than the whole content of experience. The problem is that, when we attend to mental states such as pain, love, sadness, and other related feelings, their content seems to be non-propositional (Colomina 2013). While certain versions of higher-order theory can adequately respond to the standard argument, they fail to explain the fineness-ofgrain that phenomenally conscious experience appears to have (Picciuto 2017).As an example, the issue of what taste represents is categorically more complicated (Lycan 2018). Mechanisms posited by higher-order theories are not sufficient to account for all of the different ways in which consciousness is unified (Friesen 2014). The physical world can be distinguished by representation and reality, and all we can observe is the phenomena of things. But there is no such distinction between representation and reality when it comes to consciousness, because the qualitative perception that a qualia presents to the subject is the nature of the qualia. When a subject is perceiving an object, the object is how it’s perceived. Although the object of our perception is exactly what it’s perceived, to perceive the object does not ‘present’ any object as a concept in our minds, neither does it represent the object or quality that is finally perceived—that is when the conception and belief, the operations of cognitive faculties, come in. It is intuitive that our introspective access to consciousness is infallible in idealized circumstances. The nature of perception is what’s perceived and can only be what we perceive (Reid 2009). In other words, there is no such object called ‘pain’, or the behavior of feeling the pain. Instead, there is only the subject’s experience of feeling the pain, which is accompanied by some kinds of representation maladjustment. When you have a toothache, the sense of sharp pain is the qualitative character of the toothache itself. The feeling of pain seems to be the nature of the pain. It can’t be that we just imagine having pain or think about its causal relation without the sense of pain. For the qualia, representation is reality. Second, according to the principle of transitivity, mental states are conscious only when the subject is aware of them. But Dretske argued that there are many circumstances mental states are conscious without the subject being aware of those states (Dretske 2006), which in fact does not pose a threat to the principle because it determines what kind of mental state can be regarded as conscious from the perspective of the first-order representational theory; meanwhile, it has been neglected that the prerequisites of being perceived by the subject do not include that the subject must perceive a first-order mental state as a specific fact. Even so, higher-order theories must predict there to be some brain areas (or networks of areas) such that, because they produce (the right kind of) higher-order states, the disabling of them brings about deficits in consciousness; nevertheless, no such deficits are to be found (Kozuch 2014). Thirdly, the transitivity principle holds that the sufficient condition for a mental state to be considered conscious is when the subject is aware of himself/herself being in a specific mental state. Given that the higher-order theories point out that the subject’s perception is the key to consciousness while the mental state, as the object, does not matter that much, we can still get the same result regardless of what the object is. In other words, since that the subject ‘is aware of’ the first-order mental

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state makes it conscious, it can be deduced that subject ‘being aware of’ an object makes the object conscious. Then, does a rock become conscious after it has been given awareness by a subject? Rosenthal argues that those asking this very question misunderstand consciousness as defined in the transitivity principle—only when the idea that ‘consciousness is the inner nature of mental states’ is adopted, would the objection above become reasonable. And in the opinion of these opponents, the nature of consciousness is based on the first-order mental state itself. However, according to higher-order theories, consciousness is about a relation, which is composed of the subject’s awareness, mental states that the subject is aware of, and the relation between the subject and mental states. Thus, the perception or thoughts of a rock doesn’t make it, or any material object alike, become conscious, since such objects themselves are not (loworder) mental states. What the higher-order theories talk about is the consciousness of mental states, so the ‘the problem of the rock’ misses the point. Fourth, in order for lower-order mental states to become conscious, they need to have the representation of higher-order mental states, which would inevitably get stuck in a loop. The reason is that the conception about consciousness exists only in the case where the external objects can be perceived by something else inside, which will lead to a problem of infinite regress. Intentionality can only work when there is a receptor somewhere in the human body. Therefore, consciousness only exists when the connotation of the meaning is perceived by something in the body, which is like there is a homunculus observing a person’s thoughts in that person’s brain. The problem is: this homunculus needs another homunculus to observe his thoughts. Thus, there would be countless homunculi, which creates an infinite regress. In response to this problem, higher-order theorists have offered a plausible answer. They maintain that higher-order representation itself doesn’t need to be conscious, and for mental states, consciousness is not internal or essential, which means not only that lower-order mental states are unconscious by nature but also that higher-order mental states do not have to be conscious, and thus no infinite regress would occur. The fifth is the trickiest problem. As mentioned above, higher-order theories of consciousness try to explain consciousness and phenomenal character by clarifying the higher-order representation relationship between higher-order thoughts and firstorder mental states. However, there could be misrepresentations in representational relationship. One case may be a mismatch, such as illusion; and another is that the object represented doesn’t actually exist, such as hallucination. Here, I’m drawing a general analogy, for some misrepresentation represents an item or collection not fully accurately, while others fail to represent any item. Accordingly, there should be such misrepresentations in the higher-order representational relationship. The latter, known as “the targetless problem”, seems to totally negate higher-order theories of consciousness. Block points out that in a targetless case, in terms of ontology, the subject has merely one higher-order thought; and according to the transitivity principle, that higher-order consciousness is not represented by a consciousness of a much higher order, so it is an unconscious mental state. But according to the phenomenon principle, a quale is completely determined by higher-order consciousness. So, although the first-order mental state is missing, it still has phenomenal

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characters, which leads to a self-contradictory conclusion. Since the prerequisite for qualia is that the subject must have a corresponding conscious mental state, without which phenomenal characters cannot exist. On the one hand, if a lower-order state of mind is absent, nothing would become a conscious object; on the other hand, if the higher-order representation exists, the subject must be conscious. So obviously there is a contradiction (Block 2011). In real life, the targetless or mismatch case does exist. For example, if a patient’s arm was injected with an anesthetic, later when he watches another person getting the injection on the arm, he would feel like that he is also being injected with the anesthetic, and there seems to be no real difference between their consciousness. This is so when the high-order consciousness, that is, the representation of pain still exists, but the object represented, the low-order conscious pain itself, already disappears. In other words, the patient still has ‘access consciousness’. Thus, the high-order representation is not necessarily accompanied by the access consciousness. In fact, the misrepresentation argument hinges on how we understand two related notions that are ubiquitous in discussions of consciousness: those of what-it-is-like-ness and there being something it is like for a subject to be in a mental state (Farrell 2017). The key idea here is that, when I think I’m having an experience of what something is like to be from my point of view, I’m making a judgment based on my own experience. It also applies to how I determine whether I have consciousness or not. But the highorder theories of consciousness reject such directness, which means the phenomenal consciousness does not play a constitutive role when I am making the judgment. But this leads to ‘the problem of the rock’, and it doesn’t matter whether the low-order state exists. In addition, a phantom limb patient may still feel the pain in his leg even after having the entire leg amputated, so what event corresponds to this feeling of nociception? The nerves of each limb in the human body, when converging in the brain, transmit information to their respective cerebral cortex areas, which then receive the information and transmit it to a higher level of consciousness center of the brain, making people feel the presence of limbs. After a sudden loss of a limb, however, the neurons of individual areas have lost the information input, but can still send disordered messages to the higher consciousness center, which will still determine the information from the area as coming from a certain limb. So what actually happens is that the sciatic nerve in the spine has been stimulated, triggering neuronal firing in the brain, which in turn provides the person with the experience of feeling the pain in his leg, even though there is no event that actually causes the ‘pain’. If the causal power of an entity can be inherited in both physical and psychological manners, it seems that all real causal behaviors can be covered by lower-order descriptions based on physical attributes and physical causal powers. Thus, we can’t help but wondering: is psychological causality somehow different from physical causality, or is it simply independent of the latter? It is possible to pay attention to objects of which one is not conscious (Mole 2014). Neurological case studies have shown that subjects can make simple identifications or responses even when they do not have corresponding phenomenal characteristics. For instance, the area of the brain associated with vision (the primary visual cortex)

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of blindsight patients is damaged and thus does not have the qualia that normal people have under the same conditions. There is one type of patients whose eyes are not damaged, and who possess normal retinal photoreceptors and optic nerves that normally transmit signals; but they don’t have any visual experience because of the malfunctioning of the visual area in the brain. For lines positioned in the scotoma (blind spot), patients claim that they can’t see them at all, yet when they are asked to guess at simple attributes such as the direction, color, shape and position of the lines, they can show certain ability of discrimination, the accuracy of their description being much higher than pure guesswork. They maintain the capacity to represent other visible properties in the scotoma, and thus retain the luminance-lacking phenomenal character of these properties (Peebles 2017). In another experiment, a blindsight patient successfully completed a task requiring him to walk down a long, cluttered corridor and try to avoid obstacles (Hesse2012).Recent research suggests that affective blindsight patients with visual cortex damage can correctly guess whether an unseen face was depicting a fearful or happy expression (Striemer et al. 2019). It can be inferred from these cases that the visual information may bypass the primary visual cortex and be transmitted directly into brain areas with higher order functions. Activities in the retina and other primary visual structures affect accessconscious visual perception in an indirect (rather than direct) way by influencing the responses of areas with higher order functions. Thus, retinal damage can cause blindness to an adult, but this does not eliminate the possibility of retaining some kind of conscious visual experience and the person will still maintain visual imagination, visual memory, and visual dreams. In contrast, damage to certain areas of the visual cortex (higher-order areas) can eliminate all aspects of visual perception, imagination and dreaming. (Edelman et al. 2001) All these phenomena pose threats to the higherorder thought theory.

4 A more Plausible Approach The Targetless case is considered to be a key counterexample to the higher-order theories of consciousness. The cause of this predicament lies in the three elements of the high-order theories of consciousness: the transitivity principle, phenomenon principle and obvious truism (OT). For the subject (S) and time (t), if S has qualia, there should be a mental state (M) that meets the following two conditions: (1) S is in M at t; (2) At t, M has consciousness, which is a precondition for the fact that the subject has a conscious mental state. In the targetless case, the transitivity principle implies the proposition that the subject doesn’t have a conscious mental state, while the phenomenon principle and obvious truism (OT) imply the opposite, which is that ‘the subject has a conscious mental state’(Kriegel 2012). Kriegel claims to explain why subjective character misleadingly appears irreducible, thereby neutralising the apparent irreducibility of consciousness. McClelland argues that although Kriegel’s self-representation credibly demystifies subjective character, it cannot explain why qualitative character also appears irreducible (McClelland 2016). This means that

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the high-order thought theory is untenable because it contains two major principles whose assertions conflict with each other. The easiest way to solve this contradiction is to reject any one of the three principles. For example, we can reject the transitivity principle, which will indeed avoid the contradiction, because without this principle, the proposition that ‘the subject does not have a conscious mental state’ would not ensue (Brown 2015). However, it is the transitivity principle that enables high-order thought theory to explain the subjective qualities of feelings. Thus, if the principle were rejected, the high-order theory would no longer be able to explain the phenomenon that it aims to explain. In contrast, a less costly option is to reinterpret these three principles to sustain the core of the higher-order thought theory, which is what Weisberg has adopted. In his view, the transitivity principle indicates that high-order representation involves two things– high-order thoughts and first-order mental states, the former representing the latter. Therefore, if the first-order mental state does not exist, the high-order representation does not exist, either. The fundamental reason that the targetless case has invited challenges is that the opponents misunderstand the transitivity principle. If the principle is clarified and its original meaning is re-explained, there will be no such contradictions. Weisberg attempts to clarify the transitivity principle with intentional relation, saying that the transitive relation itself does not change with or without the intentional object. The high-order thought has a high-order representational relationship with merely intentional object, which is simply the creation of belief. Thus, even if there is no first-order mental state, the subject still has a conscious mental state. In this way, the paradox proposed by Krieger can be resolved without rejecting any principle (Weisberg 2013). Therefore, the introduction of ‘merely intentional object’ solves the problem of the lack of representational relationship between high-order thoughts and first-order mental states in the targetless case. However, if there is a genuine relationship, its relata (relational terms) must be real matters or objects—because in general, the relationship is always something-to-something. In this light, the high-order representational relationship proposed by Weisberg between consciousness and phenomenal characters is a kind of false relationship. As discussed above, the strategies proposed by Brown and Weisberg both fail to solve the targetless problem, but it doesn’t mean that the higher-order thought theory is not plausible. In fact, the shortcomings of the solutions adopted by each contributor to avoid the predicament, to some extent, also suggest a few clues to the answer. First of all, the transitivity principle and the idea that consciousness connotes a relationship cannot be rejected. The perceptual experience of earthly creatures is representational (Brogaard 2017). Second, the pure intentional object is not actual. So, the relationship between the higher-order thought and pure intentional object is not a substantive one between consciousness and phenomenal characters. This calls for adjusting the structure of intentional relations, because not all first-order cognitive states correspond to conscious experience, and there may be some firstorder judgments about the world that do not correspond to experience at all. Thus, this theory requires an additional condition to distinguish the corresponding categories of many first-order states. To this end, a plausible approach is to constrain the role of those states.

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The crux of the matter is the nature of intentionality. Intentionality stands for or represents things that are external to the mind. However, the object of thought described by intentionality does not exist in reality. Such objects only exist internally with intention or only exist in the subject of thought intentionally. Some intentional mental states (such as beliefs) have a mind-to-world direction of fit, and representations can still occur even if there is nothing for such states to relate to— representations can exist in the absence of the object being represented (Searle 2007). Intentionality for Husserl covers just a region of conscious contents—that it is essentially a relation between act-processes and presented content, and the side of act-processes contains non-representational contents (Van Mazijk2017). For example, although unicorns do not exist, I can still conceive of them. That is to say, these mental states have certain inherent characters that exist as they are, even if a world that is independent of the mind does not exist. Say, I see a curly rope and scream, ‘Snake!’ In a sense, what I ‘saw’ is the rope, and my experience is ‘related to’ the rope—the rope is what my visual experience actually relates to through mental representation. In another sense, what I ‘saw’ is a snake. As a stimulus from a distance, the rope is related to my mental representation. I am afraid of it because I thought it was a snake. My visual experience has the intentional character that is ‘related to’ a snake, even if it is actually related to a rope, or even when there exists no proper stimulus from a distance at all. Thus, the intentional relation is about the way mental states ‘connect’ with the world. It doesn’t try to explain how mental states are actually related to the world, but how mental states possess the phenomenal characters that can be related to everything. In nature, the intentional characters are inherent rather than derived, and determine which object to relate (Mcintyre 2014). The information content of a certain conscious state is not necessarily directly related to the outside world but only related closely to the appearance of the conscious state. And it can still construct a conscious scene even without the external input. The most obvious example is dreams. In this period we entertain conscious experiences. However, the neural correlated area of cognitive access is strongly deactivated during sleep (Sebastián 2014).When dreaming, we are conscious, not of the outside world, but of the experience in the world in our dreams. People are not capable of introspection when dreaming. But dreams are very similar to waking consciousness. People usually can recognize visual objects and the environment; and even their sleep talking is often coherent. Dreams can also generate information, and under certain circumstances, the conscious states in dreams even can determine the behavior at that time. For example, patients with rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder will act upon particular conscious states they experience in their dreams, which is often the case with people with schizophrenia. That is to say, the causal role that mental states play in behaviors often relies more on how the world is presented to our mental states, rather than what the world actually is. Although intentionality stands for or represents things that are external to the mind, the mental states have certain internal characters that exist as they are even if a world that is independent of the mind does not exist. When one has a feeling, the feeling is conscious, which means that the feeling is a conscious experience given to

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one. The givenness does not result from objectification or the fact that the feeling is treated as an object by (internal) cognition—the feeling is not given as an object, but as an experience of the subject. When intentional experiences are being experienced, they are not presented as objects; they can neither be seen nor heard. These intentional objects are not objects in the external world, but the things that are thought of among them. The special meaning of intention is a kind of meaning that belongs to multiple modes that are only meaningful to such things as ‘meanings’. We can focus our attention on our experiences and then see them as an object of the internal cognition, all of which happen only when we reflect on them; the object here does not refer to the object itself but the object that is given. When inquiring into the manner of being given and the pattern of validity in a comprehensive and consistent way, I realize that this conscious life is completely a life that is being intentionally accomplished. Thus some parts of the life world and all of its changing presentational content can regain meaning and validity, while some parts have already gained meaning and validity (Husserl 2001). The qualitative characters of experiences depend on the object’s properties and attributes that are ‘experienced’, that is, the phenomenal properties are the attributes of the represented objects, so the differences in ‘feeling’ are actually differences in intentionality. Another approach to understand intentionality and mental states is based on the reference theory. The relationship between reference to reality and knowledge has been the focus in the fields of metaphysics and epistemology. While Husserl appealed to the mental acts to deal with it in phenomenological tradition, Frege concerned himself with the reference problem in analytical philosophy tradition. In philosophy of language and philosophical logic, intentionality poses the problem—and familiar puzzles—of intensional contexts; the problem is to specify the semantics and logic of intensional contexts (i.e., typically, linguistic contexts for which either existential generalization or substitutivity of identicals seems to fail). Graham Priest formulates and defend the metaphysics and its corresponding semantics and logic of non-being. The possible world strategy provides a kind of logical argument approach to the non-being problem. The actual world definitely has inexistence in its domain, yet not only do these objects not actually exist, they possess their characterizing properties in other worlds (where they exist, if these properties are existence-entailing properties). And by thinking of the golden mountain one grasps a certain individual (‘primitive intentionality’) (Priest, 2016, p. 142), which does not actually exist and yet exists in other possible worlds in which that individual is also a golden mountain. According to Priest, one can hold that objects have the properties characterizing them not in the actual world, but in other worlds, those (partially) described by the relevant representation: i.e. worlds that ‘realize the way agents represents things to be’ (Priest, 2016, p. 85). There are not only possible worlds, but also impossible worlds, i.e. worlds containing contradictory states of affairs, and even open worlds, i.e. worlds that are not closed under entailment. Therefore, even impossible entities can be said to exist, and stand in relations to other things, in a certain sense. A round square, for instance, exists in some mathematically impossible worlds, though it fails to exist in any possible world.

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Studies of reference have shown that proper names and natural kind terms can still play a referential role even when the speaker’s knowledge of the object is incomplete or defective. For example, for those who have not studied chemistry, they do not know what the object with the chemical structure H2 O is, but they clearly refer to H2 O when they talk about water. Reference depends not only on the speaker’s description of the background of relevant words, but also on the relationship between the speaker and the object a word refers to. This relationship is determined by the context, and is not a pure cognitive relationship. Intentional mental states, such as beliefs, desires and intentions, are considered to contain a non-eliminative element of relationship. That the intentional content refers to the intentional object is about determining affairs or events in a given state in virtue of one or more modes of presentation, that is, in any possible ways (Burge 2013; Chen 2016). Crane explains this in detail. He proposes that the content should be regarded as the object of the intentional relation, and that intentional content refers to a certain level of the intentional object, or more precisely, the level to which the intentional object is intended (Crane 2017). According to this view, the existence of intentional content and that of the intentional object are independent of each other, which means that the existence of the first-order mental states does not affect how the higher-order thought represents the subject’s (first-order) mental states. In other words, a higher-order representational relationship between the higher-order consciousness and its content still exists in the targetless case. And for the higher-order theories of consciousness, the existence of higherorder representational relationship actually means that the subject has a conscious mental state. A person’s lack of first-order mental state does not mean that he does not have a conscious state of mind. It requires the content of the higher-order attitude to match that of the first-order perception. (Edwardset al. 2018). In this way, the contradiction posed by the targetless case can be eliminated and the higher-order representation will avoid the accusation of being a fake relationship. This also involves the understanding of intentional content at the epistemological level. In other words, it is a direct transmission from perceptual impression to consciousness about the real world, and it is not necessary to take the belief about the internal state of the subject as a medium. Although it may follow from externalism that intentional object differs from intentional content in terms of the mental states and the facts to which one has reflective access, nonetheless this difference disappears once we focus upon narrow mental content (Pritchard 2016). And what we are concerned about is not the broad mental content but the narrow one to which the intentional content belongs. In making this distinction, we adopt the epistemic strategy which does not depend on a prior determination of the broad content of the expression or state. If the intentional content is taken to be the explicit and acrosscontextual content that is an abstraction of the original object, then the higher-order theories can be effectively defended.

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5 Conclusion Higher-order theories of consciousness hold that a conscious mental state needs to be represented by another mental state. The strategy of their argumentation is as follows: first, they take consciousness as awareness, then define awareness by representation, and finally interpret conscious states as the re-representation of higher-order representation. This approach supports our common sense to some extent by providing an intuitive explanation of unconscious experiences such as sleepwalking, blindness and absent-mindedness. However, the criticism it is confronted with reminds us of the need to further clarify the nature of the objects being represented. Higher-order Theories of consciousness regard the state of being conscious as the representational relationship between different mental states, but there is a lack of reasonable interpretation of the object of representation, which is the key to higher-order representation. In this paper, I have critically analyzed Brown’s and Weisberg’s methods and given an improved version. This is followed by a description of the nature of intentionality and a detailed discussion of how the special meaning of intention is understood. I have proposed a better solution to the targetless problem. We’d better consider what is mentioned in the transitivity principle as a relation between a HOT and its content, rather than as an intentional object. In this way, the contradictions derived from the targetless case can be better resolved. That is to say, even in the absence of targets, the subject can still have a conscious state of mind. This model also avoids the Kriegel’s blame that representation is a fake relationship, since the existence of the content of higher-order thought is not affected by the existence of first-order mental states. From this I have defended the basic idea of higher-order representation theory which claims that if a mental state is a phenomenon consciousness then it is (or tends to be) the object of some higher-order representation. Phenomenal consciousness is the property of mental states, and it is merely what the subject experiences as “something that is like to be”. What it is like to have a conscious experience is customarily referred to as the experience’s phenomenal character. We can answer that question by explaining a state’s phenomenal character in terms of its representation. It is not difficult to see that the higher-order theories of consciousness have provided useful enlightenment for contemporary study of consciousness. But their explanations about the hard problem of consciousness are controversial. The debates around them reflect not only divergence of positions but also those of terms. The relationship between language and consciousness is regarded by some philosophers (such as Wittgenstein) as the relationship between form and content. From this point of view, consciousness is intrinsically related to language, and it itself has a linguistic dimension. Nevertheless, the higher-order theories represent a creed or direction that seeks to offer an exploratory framework to explain ‘what makes a certain mental state conscious’, although many details in these theories are yet to be worked out.

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References Armstrong, David Malet. 1999. The Mind-Body Problem: An Opinionated Introduction, 118–122. Boulder: Westview Press. Block, Ned. 2011. The Higher-order Approach to Consciousness is Defunct. Analysis 71 (3): 419– 431. Brogaard, Berit. 2017. Perception Without Representation? On Travis’s Argument against the Representational View of Perception. Topoi 36 (2): 273–286. Brown, Richard. 2015. The HOROR Theory of Phenomenal Consciousness. Philosophical Studies 172 (7): 1783–1794. Burge, Tyler. 2013. Cognition Through Understanding, 131. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carruthers, Peter. 2017. Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness. In The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, eds. Susan L. Schneider and Max Velmans, 288–297. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. Chen, Bo. 2016. Socio-historical Causal Descriptivism: A Hybrid and Alternative Theory of Names. Croatian Journal of Philosophy 16 (46): 45–67. Colomina, Juan. 2013. Problematizing Tye’s Intentionalism: The Content of Bodily Sensations, Emotions, and Moods. Journal of Mind and Behavior 34 (2): 177–195. Crane, Tim. 2017. The Unity of Unconsciousness. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 117 (1): 1–21. Dretske, Fred. 2006. Perception Without Awareness. In Tamar Szabo Gendler and John Hawthorne, ed. Perceptual Experience, 147–181. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edelman, Gerald, and Giulio Tononi. 2001. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination, 142–143. New York: Basic Books. Edwards, James, and Dimitris Platchias. 2018. Epistemic Warrants and Higher-Order Theories of Conscious Perception. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (2): 343–364. Farrell, Jonathan. 2017. Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness and What-it-is-Like-ness. Philosophical Studies 175 (3): 1–19. Friesen, Lowell. 2014. Higher-Order Thoughts and the Unity of Consciousness. Journal of Mind & Behavior 35 (4): 201–224. Gois, Isabel. 2010. A Dilemma for Higher-order Theories of Consciousness. Philosophia 38 (1): 143–156. Hesse, Constanze, Alison R. Lane, Lina Aimola, and Thomas Schenk et al. 2012. Pathways Involved in Human Conscious Vision Contribute to Obstacle-avoidance Behaviour. European Journal of Neuroscience 36 (3): 2383–2390. Husserl, Edmund. 2001. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. Bing-wen Wang, 289, 246. Beijing: The Commercial Press. Ivanov, Ivan V. 2017. Observational Concepts and Experience, 15–30. PhD Dissertation, University of Warwick. Koch, Christof. 2012. Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, 61. Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Kozuch, Benjamin. 2014. Prefrontal Lesion Evidence against Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness. Philosophical Studies 167 (3): 721–746. Kriegel, Uriah. 2012. Précis of Subjective Consciousness: A Self-Representational Theory. Philosophical Studies 159 (3): 443–445. Lycan, William. 2018. What Does Taste Represent? Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (1): 28–37. McClelland, Tom. 2016. Can Self-Representationalism Explain Away the Apparent Irreducibility of Consciousness? Synthese 193 (6): 1755–1776. Mcintyre, Ronald. 2014. Husserl and the Representational Theory of Mind. In Historical Foundations of Cognitive Science, ed. John C. Smith. Trans. Jianfeng Wu, 138. Beijing: Science Press.

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Mole, Christopher. 2014. Attention to Unseen Objects. Journal of Consciousness Studies 21 (11–12): 41–56. Pantani, Martina, Angela Tagini, and Antonino Raffone. 2018. Phenomenal Consciousness, Access Consciousness and Self Across Waking and Dreaming: Bridging Phenomenology and Neuroscience. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17 (1): 175–197. Peebles, Graham. 2017. Representationalism and Blindsight. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (3): 541–556. Picciuto, Vincent. 2017. Keeping It Real: Intentional Inexistents, Fineness-of-Grain, and the Dilemma for Extrinsic Higher-Order Representational Theories. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (4): 555–575. Priest, Graham. 2016. Towards Non-Being: the Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality, 85, 142. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pritchard, Duncan. 2016. Epistemology, 83. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Reid, Thomas. 2009. An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, 85. Trans Difei Li. Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press. Rosenthal, David. 2012. Higher-Order Awareness, Misrepresentation and Function. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences 367 (1594): 1424– 1438. Searle, John Rogers. 2007. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Trans. Yetao Liu, 8, 17. Shanghai: Shanghai Century Publishing Group. Sebastián, Miguel Ángel. 2014. Dreams: An Empirical Way to Settle the Discussion Between Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Theories of Consciousness. Synthese 191 (2): 263–285. Striemer, Christopher Lee, Robert L. Whitwell, and Melvyn Goodale. 2019. Affective Blindsight in the Absence of Input from Face Processing Regions in Occipital-Temporal Cortex. Neuropsychologia 128: 50–57. Van Mazijk, Corijn. 2017. Some Reflections on Husserlian Intentionality, Intentionalism, and Nonpropositional Contents. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47 (4): 499–517. Weisberg, Josh. 2013. A Problem of Intimacy: Commentary on Rocco Gennaro’s The Consciousness Paradox. Journal of Consciousness Studies 20 (11–12): 69–81.

Chapter 8

Social Shaping of Emotions

Abstract As the result of social conventions through the medium of attitudes, emotions embody internalized social values and are involved in some given ethical orders, and the experience and expression of emotions complies with and depend upon cultural and faith systems. The selective expression of emotional activity is a prescriptive response to a specific situation, in other words, to evaluate specific situations, take action, and explain individuals’ own subjective experiences and physiological changes appropriately in accordance with given social rules. The “appropriateness” of emotions is the result of constantly reconstructing primitive emotions to meet social expectations. Keywords Emotion · Social shaping · Social convention · Emotional rule How are emotions created? For thousands of years, numerous philosophers, biologists, and psychologists have been seeking the answer from their own perspectives. Since William James proposed his theory, much progress has been made in modern theories of emotion. Yet, research at the early stage mainly focused on aspects such as physiological changes, subjective experiences, and expressive behaviors, while emotions were regarded as simple, unconscious, and non-cognitive phenomena. During the second half of the twentieth century, more importance was attached to cognitive elements of emotions, such as motivation, evaluation, and attitude. In fact, as early as ancient Greece, Aristotle argued that emotions were caused by people’s cognition, or in other words, people’s explanation and evaluation of events. This view is closely related to the new direction of emotion studies—the social construction theory of emotions. This paper elaborates on the social construction of emotions to explore not only the social nature of emotions, but also the formation and expression of emotions in social activities, especially the way emotions are involved in a given social culture and its corresponding ethical order.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 D. Fei, Beyond the Brain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9558-3_8

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1 Main Ideas of the Emotion Social Construction Theory The social construction theory of emotions is largely influenced by George Herbert Mead’s ideas on interpersonal communication. Mead believes that the behavioral meaning of any individual is determined by others, and a community is “the generalized other.” By this way of generalizing others, the social process or community enters an individual’s mind as a determining factor (Mead 1972).The attitudes of those individuals who have participated in the same social process will affect their own behavioral choices. Hence, the experiences and behaviors of individuals are constructed by the experiences and behaviors of their community. Mead’s theory has influenced studies on the interdependence of society and individual actions. Additionally, Montesquieu’s analysis of political forms and the sociological basis of civil law has also shed new light on cross-cultural studies on the relationship between individuals’ personal experiences and the religious beliefs, politics, and social ideologies in specific cultural systems. Ever since the linguistic turn in philosophy that occurred in the twentieth century, language has no longer been the fundamental issue in traditional philosophical discussion, but has become a starting point and basis for reflection on philosophical traditions. Following this trend, studies on the expression of emotions and the corresponding cultural differences began to mushroom. The so-called social construction of emotions denotes that emotions are always experienced, or understood and named, through social and cultural processes. It is believed that emotions are not instinctual behaviors or responses, but gained through learning (Lupton 1998).The social construction theory of emotions has been developed under the framework of cognitive theories. The cognitive theory deconstructs emotions into a series of physiological changes, feelings, and behavioral responses caused by beliefs, desires, needs, and expectations. Taking the sentence “M is very angry with S” as an example, “angry” can be explained as follows. The object of “anger” is S’s behavior; M’s belief is that S has conducted such a behavior directly towards him/her; M’s evaluation is that S’s behavior offends him/her; and M’s desire is to take revenge on S. All these above-mentioned elements constitute the emotion “anger.” From the cognitive viewpoint, what distinguishes one emotion from another, or another emotional process, is people’s different cognition of events. The social construction theory has further developed this view. It argues that emotions are induced by attitude, which incorporates beliefs, judgement, desires, etc., with the content determined by the cultural beliefs, morality, and values of a given community. In other words, an individual’s attitude is a part of the beliefs, values, norms, and expectations of the culture he or she lives in. Through the interpretation of situations and social conventions, an individual will gain a culturally appropriate emotional attitude (Armon-Jones 1985). Emotions are not innate responses. The experience and expression of emotions depend on a given culture, just like language. This theory poses a huge challenge to

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the traditional view of emotions—especially reductionism and naturalism. Reductionism holds that high-level emotions are formed by or derived from low-level or simple emotions. High-level emotions represent a complex state of mind, while lowlevel emotions are driven by instincts and physiological responses. For example, Descartes asserted that there were six primitive and fundamental passions, namely wonder, love, hate, desire, joy, and sadness; all the other passions either are derived from different combinations of these six passions, or fall into one of the six categories (Descartes 2000). According to the reductionist view, there is no difference between human beings and animals in terms of emotions, which are all physiological responses. Naturalists also believe that, despite the differences in forms, all emotions are natural responses with a common core—physiological responses, which precede or transcend the social culture. But generally speaking, emotions will not suddenly come out of nowhere. Emotional responses may be triggered by many factors such as stimuli in the environment, physiological changes felt by individuals, and the corresponding cognition. Emotions can be regarded as the result of an organism’s monitoring of its own body, inner thoughts, and the external environment. These processes and mechanisms have also demonstrated the complexity of emotions—experiencing physiological changes alone is not enough for people to understand the occurrence and existence of emotions. Hence, while acknowledging some views of naturalism, the social construction theory limits the scope of natural emotions, arguing that the experience and expression of emotions are determined by culture, and can be gained only in a specific social environment. In other words, the social construction theory does not deny the physiological nature of emotions, but stands against the view that emotions are always triggered by physiological responses. Furthermore, this theory acknowledges the interpretation of social conventions. The relationship between social stimuli and the physiological process of emotions is just like a key and a lock: a specific social stimulus (key) is paired with the given physiological process (lock), which then produce the corresponding emotion. Different social conventions cause different physiological processes, which will then trigger different emotions (Robinson 2004). From the perspective of the social construction theory, if sociocultural factors can determine emotional attitudes, which constitute emotional responses, then they can also determine the experience of emotions. In short, sociocultural factors construct emotions. According to the social construction theory, the realization of social functions is the root cause behind the social construction of behaviors. Emotions are constructed because they assume the function of maintaining the existing society—culturally appropriate emotions have the function of limiting or prohibiting unreasonable attitudes and behaviors, and also supporting and acknowledging values within the culture. In other words, the construction of emotions plays a significant role in social containment, regulating individuals’ responses to situations and giving them certain responsibilities (Neu 2004). For instance, reprehensible behaviors will make people angry, and the purpose of getting angry is to correct immoral behaviors and reset the widely-accepted behavior norms. Anger has a positive psychological and social function, empowering people to fight unfairness and injustice. Emotions play

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a temporary role of script or schema for social composition. For example, the social construction of anger can be described as follows. The society constitutes the script and defines the features of anger—according to the current social rules, anger begins with people’s experience of purposeful immoral behaviors and ends with the appearance of apologies and compensations. The social consensus refers to the appropriate causes of anger and the appropriate anger responses. It shows that emotions are affiliated with social containment by nature, and social rules are the main reason for emotion transfer. By regulating and controlling socially dissatisfactory behaviors, emotions promote and reinforce the formation of prescriptive attitudes regarding politics, morality, aesthetics, religion, and so on in a given society. For example, fear has the function of protecting social values. At the very beginning, the response of fear was associated with specific fables, as those fables usually mirror the scope of feared objects, such as illness or tigers. At the same time, fear is related to the moral system, whose rules include sharing, reciprocity, and respect. According to this belief, if someone violates one of these moral rules, the objects of fear in fables will re-appear. To avoid that situation, people have to make sure everything they’ve done is moral. Here, fear plays the social function of maintaining the moral system (Tappolet 2009). In addition to anger and fear, guilt, sympathy, anxiety, etc. are also moral emotions. Since moral emotions showcase compliance with social conventions and support towards moral rules, how do immoral emotions and inappropriate emotions play their roles in social functions? The social construction theory holds that these emotions also mirror the attitudes appropriate to a given cultural background. Take jealousy as an example. Feeling jealous means that the envied objects have the features sought after by many people within a community, or some desires in line with the sociocultural expectations, such as the desire for a specific personality (an individual wants to be a benevolent, considerate, and brave) and the desire for a role (an individual wants to be a professor, a businessman, or an engineer etc.). In displaying these personalities, an individual will have some social values; otherwise, he or she will be condemned. Individuals’ desire for these socially acknowledged values will force them to make constant efforts in this regard. If they fail in this process, they are likely to engage in destructive behaviors and produce negative emotions (such as jealousy). It needs to be pointed out that the explanation of emotions’ functions requires emotions to be somehow related to the subjects’ responsibility. In other words, once an emotional attitude is acquired, the subject has the responsibility to adopt and express that attitude in a given environment. In this way, emotions can strengthen social values, which will in return reinforce the responsibility that subject needs to assume, thus to command or control individuals’ emotional responses (Graziano and Tobin. 2013). For example, in the early days of the First World War, the British government promoted patriotism when recruiting soldiers to encourage them to fight bravely. Emotions such as pride and bravery experienced by those soldiers reduced the cruelty of war, dwarfed other desires (direct self-protection) and responsibility (family responsibility), or suppressed other emotions (sympathy). This was because they believed that protecting their homeland and country was the responsibility they

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had to shoulder, as citizens, especially as males. Those soldiers’ emotions were in line with the social expectations during that period.

2 Value Internalization and Convention Emotions’ meanings are realized through the sociocultural system. During the construction process, emotions have to stay consistent with the beliefs and values in the cultural system, which showcases the above-mentioned social functions of emotions. Emotions incorporate internalized social values, and there is an automatic and reliable link between socially appropriate emotions and social values (Jasper and Owens 2014). Emotions appropriate to the socially acknowledged norms and rules are considered reasonable because only those behaviors in compliance with social conventions will be accepted by others and will not be morally or legally punished. In this way, people will be pushed to express their emotions as expected within the society or adjust and control their emotions until these emotions become “reasonable.” According to the view of rationalist ethics, obligations are absolute commands, which are the source of inner morality, while emotionalist ethics regards the functions and joy of moral behaviors, i.e., the happiness brought by morality, as the motivation of moral behaviors. The former argues that moral discourse should demonstrate objectivity and consistency in the reasonable judgement of moral issues; while emotions are an innate temperament featuring instability and uneven distribution, and cannot initiate or participate in such judgement process. The latter holds that moral discourse stands for a function of nature, which is to express speakers’ emotions and stir up others. Both of them agree that, from an ontological point of view, emotions precede moral judgement and behaviors. Yet, the rationalist view argues that emotions should not be included in moral judgements, while the emotionalist view regards emotions as a necessary condition for moral judgement. However, according to the constructivist theory, from an ontological point of view moral sentiments such as guilt and sympathy do not precede moral judgement because people’s understanding of certain moral rules is a prerequisite for feeling moral emotions. In this view, these emotions are not the cause or condition; instead, emotions depend on people’s own understanding of moral rules and discourse. In other words, moral emotions include moral attitudes and the subjects’ responsibility. Only when social conventions and moral rules are understood correctly and behaviors are evaluated and judged as moral or immoral, can moral emotions be generated (Hutchinson 2008). It can be concluded that the most important feature of the constructivist theory of emotion is the prescriptive claim. Emotions are seen as a set of socially-agreed upon responses that people generate in a given situation, which enables individuals to achieve appropriate behaviors that are socially acceptable. Prescriptive meanings have been embedded in cultural contexts, and the characteristics of emotions are thus interpreted in cultural contexts and confirmed by the reactions of group members. The

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existence of emotions reflects the individual’s adherence to cultural values because during the process of socialization environmental and cultural factors are internalized as part of the individual’s personality characteristics, which in turn permeate emotions, i.e., the individual’s emotional expression in a given situation is consistent with social conventions. Social conventions facilitate an individual’s acquisition of culturally appropriate emotions and subsequent emotional control and regulation (Lively and Heise 2014). People play their roles in society, and the performance of each role has long been determined by the culture of the society. For instance, men are expected to be more responsible and stronger, while women are expected to be gentler and more considerate, and each person’s behaviors and emotions should match the social role he or she plays. Femininity is associated with traits such as gentleness, shyness, and quietness, which represent the ideal image of a female in adulthood; masculinity is associated with self-driven capability, careerism, and strength, and self-control and confidence are characteristics of mature men. Emotions are the temporary embodiment of social roles, which can be viewed as the metaphorical “plot” of a play, in which the characters are social roles and the plot is the cultural system (Illouz, Gilon and Shachak 2014). That means, emotions are part of the culture. Then, what is the basis for social conventions? It is the commonly accepted experience from daily life. Since emotions have the social function of communication and display, there are usually some agreed-upon and widely accepted standards of emotional expression in different cultures for the emotional responses that should be shown in a given situation (Greenspan, Patricia 2009). For instance, a guest at a wedding is expected to express joy, and if he or she cries in sadness, it is inconsistent with the festive context, and may even lead to some misunderstanding or association. These social-emotional experiences that people acquire through daily interactions with each other form an important basis for nonverbal communication in groups that share the same culture. The occurrence and expression of emotions partially comes from the expectations of the society, for example, whether certain emotions are permissible, whether they are socially acceptable, and so on. People in some Western countries celebrate and laugh at funerals when speaking of the deceased, rather than grieve and cry over the loss as people do in Eastern countries. For them, it’s more about memorializing the good times and praying for the soul of their loved one in heaven. Tahitians are seldom aware of sadness and loneliness, and they have few words to describe grief. When a major mourning event occurs, they tend to use words related to exhaustion, illness, and physical discomfort to describe the experience of grief; although they have many words to describe anger and shame, they often cover up their anger with a smile rather than expressing it. Social conventions change historically, and emotions show consistency within social–historical conditions. Some emotions, such as antisemitism and racism toward people of color are undoubtedly condemned morally, but they were justified in the social and cultural context of the Nazi era and racial segregation era in the United States. That is, each person has his or her own instinctive reactions, but whether and how they should be expressed is governed by cultural values and norms. These

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norms are reflected in the meaning of emotions, rules governing emotions and the acceptable ways to express them, which are recognized by the dominant culture. That said, the so-called convention does not mean that emotions can be fully accounted for by culture, but rather suggests that culture has become an integral part of emotions. Although emotions are felt and expressed commonly through the transmission of social standards, individual’s past life experiences also have a specific impact on emotional experiences. This means that people constantly modify their feelings and interpretations of emotions in response to their life experiences, so distinct upbringing and life experiences allow each person to feel the world as he or she perceives it and gradually build up his or her own emotional experiences and feelings—emotions are at the same time a confluence of personal life experiences and are unique.

3 Paradigm Transformation and Emotional Re-Construction As mentioned earlier, emotions are based on social conventions, and only when such conventions are possessed and understood can emotions be expressed appropriately, so how do we reach the agreed upon social conventions? It is known that a newborn baby only cries and laughs, and those primitive emotions are the basic building blocks for a more complex system. Adult individuals, on the other hand, express complex emotions that are culturally appropriate to the needs and expectations of society. This is the result of their constant modification, enrichment, or refinement of emotions according to emotional “standards” that accumulate and change over time, and in this sense, culture undoubtedly creates the paradigm scenario. Studies on the function and development of infant laughter provide a good picture of the development of paradigm scenario. Infants have an innate ability to laugh. In the initial stages, laughter is purely biological and does not involve any meaningful communication, but after three months, infants learn to use laughter as a means of gaining attention and care from adults. The necessary reinforcement comes, of course, from the feedback provided by interactions with the caregiver. Later, the caregiver’s facial expression becomes the signal for what the infant can expect to do or feel. The infant will follow the caregiver’s gaze and expect to learn from him or her how to respond. From the results alone, the reaction of laughter exists at every stage, but the situations that elicit it are different. Once toddlers seem to have a sense of subject presence, they start to become aware of different participants in the same situation. Because there are different roles participating, they will feel differently from each other. Gradually, toddlers can understand that one person’s behavior causes another person’s sadness, and learn that certain types of events typically elicit certain emotions. They also learn that people can act out or “fake” emotions they don’t really feel, and are aware that certain stories lead to

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certain emotions. As the repertoire of emotions becomes more complex, the learning of scenarios continues. It can be said that emotions are acquired responses, and that individuals continue to internalize social rules and morals as they grow up, and that the process of internalization is a process of social construction. Education plays a key role in this respect by teaching how to identify emotional responses, how to categorize and name emotions, and how to produce the corresponding emotions in a given paradigm scenario. The essence of education is to teach children to experience a particular emotion, to learn to have the correct emotion, and to continually improve their language skills so that emotional skills become more and more sophisticated, which is a critical part of ethical education, and the key to which is the appropriate expression of emotions. The social experience of emotions that people acquire through their daily interactions with each other forms an important basis for nonverbal communication in the same culture. The Indian wolf child Kamala is a typical case. Kamala’s only way of emotional communication was howling. Although she has human genetic and physiological structure, she grew up in a wolf pack, and failed to understand the rules and culture of human society, and therefore couldn’t have human emotions. Emotional differences exist across ages, and there are ideal emotional paradigms for a given age (i.e., some emotions are reasonable at a given age), and these paradigms are realized and solidified with the help of normative group behaviors. For example, loudness, rudeness, and temper tantrums are associated with loss of self-control, and these emotions are often manifested among children. In childhood, crying is criticized but forgiven because it is consistent with the child’s emotional profile, whereas in youth, crying is considered childish behavior. As individuals mature intellectually and increase self-control and social sensitivity, they gradually form emotions such as melancholy, sadness, etc. This shows the fact that some emotions can only be experienced at a certain age, and virtues such as integrity and prudence are associated with certain stages of life (e.g., adulthood). In conclusion, emotions are associated with maturity levels, and social conventions influence these levels, with individuals’ emotions at different ages depending on the different roles they play in the society (Schmeichel and Inzlicht 2013). This also suggests that emotions develop in the direction of social conventions, and are constantly controlled, dissipated and transformed, tending toward greater maturity and rationality. The constraints of social conventions mean that people in a society cannot freely express their innate emotions—to avoid punishment or to be welcomed, people tend to conceal themselves and display emotions that go against their will but will satisfy society. This is the appropriateness of emotions, and also the embodiment of emotional strategy, which demonstrates the most important interpersonal function of emotions. With continuous learning from scenario paradigm, people acquire display rules that specify the types of emotions that should be generated under a given situation and the behaviors that are appropriate for a given emotion, potentially instructing the individual whom to express emotions to and when (De Sousa, Ma and Shen 2005). These rules govern the emotional expression of real feelings, which are either mitigated, exaggerated, or hidden, and they are culturally specific. Generally speaking, in cultures that emphasize individuals, emotions reflect the inner

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world of an individual, and are used to define the uniqueness of the individual as the emotions belong to the particular individual; in cultures that focus more on collective interest, emotions are mainly used to express objective facts and emphasize the fundamental correlation and interdependence between each other, and emotions seem to bind people together. Individualistic cultures are more receptive to the expression of pride while in collective cultures, people’s good feeling is mostly accompanied by interpersonal exchanges. For example, Japanese are more likely than Americans to mask negative expressions with a smile. Japanese are good at restraining themselves, especially from showing anger in unfamiliar situations, and tend to express emotions that are socially acceptable, such as shame, pity, and calmness, whereas Americans are straightforward in their expression of emotions, showing more nonsocially agreeable emotions, such as pride, annoyance, and excitement, as they take pride in their straightforwardness. But why is it that some people easily express their emotions while others have difficulties, even though they share the same culture or social conventions? This involves emotion management and regulation. Emotion regulation is the process of making certain changes in physiological activities, subjective experiences, facial expression and behaviors to moderate emotions through certain strategies and mechanisms. The changes include weakening, removing or cover up current emotions, and activating or camouflaging needed emotions, i.e., the process of inhibition, maintenance and enhancement of emotions. Emotion management is the ability to improve the connection between emotions and behaviors, and produce pro-social behaviors through selfcontrol of emotions. Although individuals acquire many emotional display rules as they grow up, it requires cognitive coordination to apply these rules and make the right connections between emotions and display rules. Cognition mediates the processing of emotional display rules, and each individual processes display rules differently, so they are internalized into cognitive schemas in different ways (Ben-Ze’ev 2003). This can be used to explain emotions that are not normal or not socially agreed upon; for example, someone is afraid of empty places and believes that these situations pose a threat to him or her. He or she forms a link between his or her false belief and emotion, a link that is not innate, but exists in his or her belief due to specific influence by some situations or events in his or her life. According to Freud’s interpretation, childhood experiences have a great impact on an individual’s future life. Some traumatic events can cause psychological shadows of lifetime, and if the traumatic events are not correctly incorporated into the cognitive schema, the individual would develop emotional distortions. In summary, emotions are not only reactions that are agreed upon, but also acquired responses. It is a slow, gradual, and cumulative process in which rules are constantly created, reconstructed, or prohibited, and changes in display rules cause changes in emotions. In terms of the level of expression, emotions are divided into social emotion and hidden emotion; the former is more in line with social expectations and prone to social display, and the latter is in line with one’s real feelings. Social conventions are passed on, transformed and changed, and people perceive a certain level or different parts of emotions in different spatial and temporal contexts, thus

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generating their own feelings and reactions, which is what makes emotions so elusive and difficult to control.

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