Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

1. THE ANTIPODEANS Far away, on the other side of our galaxy, there was a planet on which lived beings like ourselves—featherless bipeds who built houses and bombs, and wrote poems and computer programs. These beings did not know that they had minds. They had notions like “wanting to” and “intending to” and “believing that” and “feeling terrible” and “feeling marvelous.” But they had no notion that these signified mental states—states of a peculiar and distinct sort—quite different from “sitting down,” “having a cold,” and “being sexually aroused.” Although they used the notions of believing and knowing and wanting and being moody of their pets and their robots as well as of themselves, they did not regard pets or robots as included in what was meant when they said, “We all believe …” or “We never do such things as….” That is to say, they treated only members of their own species as persons. But they did not explain the difference between persons and non-persons by such notions as “mind,” “consciousness,” “spirit,” or anything of the sort. They did not explain it at all; they just treated it as the difference between “us” and everything else. They believed in immortality for themselves, and a few believed that this would be shared by the pets or the robots, or both. But this immortality did not involve the notion of a “soul” which separated from the body. It was a straightforward matter of bodily resurrection followed by mysterious and instantaneous motion to what they ref...

09-03-2020. 71.