Non-Personal Minds

Summary

Abstract:

Persons are creatures with a range of personal capacities. Most known to us are also people, though nothing in observation or biological theory demands that all and only people are persons, nor even that persons, any more than people, constitute a natural kind. My aim is to consider what non-personal minds are like. Darwin's Earthworms are sensitive, passionate and, in their degree, intelligent. They may even construct maps, embedded in the world they perceive around them, so as to be able to construct their tunnels. Other creatures may be able to perceive that world as also accessible to other minds, and structure it by locality and temporal relation, without having many personal qualities. Non-personal mind, on both modern materialist and Plotinian grounds, may be the more usual, and the less deluded, sort of mind.

Persons, People and the Impersonal

Persons, in the sense I intend, are creatures with a range of ‘personal’ capacities. They are capable, in appropriate circumstances, of recognizing other individuals and their own reflections, of remembering their very own past and imagining their very own future, of deliberately communicating with others, of thinking about what to do, of holding themselves and others to account for what they do or fail to do, of formulating theories to explain what others do and what happens in the impersonal world. Probably they can also find incongruities amusing, form particular attachments, reconsider their own goals and motives, tell outrageous lies and imagine what the world would be like without them.