A Beginner's Guide to Reality by Jim Baggott

Author:Jim Baggott
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780141042329
Publisher: ePenguin
Published: 2005-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

But does this necessarily mean that, once my neural pathways have been formed, my thoughts are anything other than entirely my own, independent of the features of the world around me? To accept otherwise is to argue that my mental content is not just internal, it is not just inside my head. To accept this is to accept that, in a very significant sense, mental content is also external – it is also outside my head. How can this be?

Let's start by looking back at the nature of intentionality. Remember that intentionality is simply the property of our thoughts always being about things. We could assume that it is the objects that our thoughts are about that determine the content of our thoughts from the ‘outside in’, with the direction world-to-mind. In other words, the objects are ‘out there’, wherever ‘there’ is meant to be, and these objects cause us to have the thoughts we have. In this case, when I have a thought about water, for example, my thought refers to an external physical body of water, in a river, or a lake, or a glass. When I think about water, I mean the external physical stuff that we happen to call water. This doesn't mean that my thought must be based on words or names; I might simply mean an entirely sensory image, a series of visual, somatic sensory, auditory and taste signals that I translate in my mind as an image of wet, splashy stuff, good for drinking, goes hard when it gets cold.

This is different from the situation in which the content of my thought is derived internally, or from the ‘inside out’, in the direction mind-to-world. In this case, when I have a thought about water, the content of this thought is directed outwards and all the reference and meaning is just in my head.

Suppose that on the other side of the sun, occupying the exact same orbit as the earth but diametrically opposed to it, there exists an exact duplicate of earth which we can call twin earth. This planet shares earth's orbit around the sun and spins on its axis in the same way that the earth does, so that its days, seasons and years are the same as we experience them on earth. It also has its own moon, a carbon copy of our moon.

We can never see twin earth using an earth-based observatory, because wherever earth is in its orbit around the sun, twin earth is always on the other side. Further suppose that twin earth is populated by exact duplicates of all of us: me, you, President George W. Bush, all living duplicate existences. Right now, on twin earth, your doppelgänger is sitting in an exact duplicate of your present location, reading these exact same words.

Now, if all your thoughts about objects here on earth are internally derived, then in some way they are all dependent on you, your brain and your mind. We would expect your doppelgänger on twin

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