The Mind Club Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus The Mind Club

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Zusammenfassung von The Mind Club

Name: The Mind Club
Rating: 3.6 (139 reviews)
Author: Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray

Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray

Who Thinks, What Feels and Why It Matters

3.6 (139 Bewertungen)

12 Min.

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What’s in it for me? Explore what it means to have a mind.

Imagine this scenario: you’re alone in a universe of mindless beings. Everyone around you only appears to have a mind – even your mother is really a zombie who merely simulates the behavior of a conscious creature.

Although it’s an outlandish idea, we can’t unequivocally disprove this scenario. But, somehow, we’re generally convinced that we’re surrounded by conscious, sentient creatures. So, how do other people convince you that they have a mind? How do you decide whether your dog, your unborn child or your wonderful new computer belong to the Mind Club? And is this always a question of in or out, yes or no?

These are just some of the questions that will be discussed in these blinks.

In these blinks, you’ll also learn

why some people can hit a CEO without being punished;
how the minds of God and Google are alike; and
the story of someone acquitted for murder thanks to his sleep lab results.

Minds are defined by two traits – but not all minds act the same way.

You’re part of a special club and you might not even know it. Chances are your neighbor and cat are as well, but your smartphone isn’t – at least not yet. This club is called the Mind Club, and it’s the group of all creatures considered to have a mind.

So, who qualifies?

Well, the authors conducted several studies in which participants were asked about the mental characteristics of various beings: a robot, a CEO, a family dog, a dead person and so on. They found that people generally attribute a mind to beings with two specific traits.

The first is agency, or the ability to think, act in a planned manner and control oneself. The second is the ability to experience emotions like happiness, to be conscious and to feel physical sensations, like hunger.

It’s that simple; if someone has these abilities, they’re in the Mind Club. But once in the Mind Club, people can be characterized by the relative strength of their agency and experience.

For instance, if you’re primarily characterized by your propensity for rational action, then you fit into the group of thinking doers. A prime example of this group are the CEOs of big corporations; they are generally considered to be thinking doers since they wield lots of power and have engaged in loads of planned action to get to where they are.

On the other side of the spectrum are the vulnerable feelers, those who primarily feel and experience, but are less apt when it comes to effective action.

Babies belong in this category. If they’re threatened and experience fear, they can’t plan to defend themselves and, therefore, their only response is to cry.

But these types aren’t immutable. A CEO could turn into a vulnerable feeler if, say, an illness rendered him entirely helpless.

We judge a person’s moral rights and responsibilities based on the mind they seem to have.

Whether it’s rich and poor or parent and child, certain concepts come in pairs and it’s impossible to understand one without its counterpart.

And this is exactly the case with morality. We understand moral acts as involving two parties: the moral agent, or the person who engages in the action, and the moral patient, the person who receives the action.

To ease the guilt of hurting others, people can convince themselves that certain people don’t think or feel.

Have you ever wondered how a soldier might appear to be a genuinely kind person when he’s at the park in his hometown, but then cruelly torture and kill civilians once he’s shipped overseas? Well, it’s largely due to a psychological phenomenon known as dehumanization, the process of denying that someone has a mind to validate the poor treatment we inflict upon them.

We do this to ease the guilt about the bad deed and numb ourselves to the pain we’re inflicting on others. For instance, to do such barbaric acts to other humans, that soldier has to convince himself that the unfamiliar people he is suddenly faced with aren’t human at all; he has to convince himself that they don’t think or feel like him or those he grew up with. Once he’s done that, he won’t feel guilty about hurting them.

We can’t be sure whether there’s intent behind an event, but there are upsides to assuming that there is.

Just as it’s impossible to say if your childhood cat died because it’s what God wanted, when dealing with humans, we can’t always tell if something was done by an intentional doer or an agent.

For instance, sleepwalkers might appear to be acting consciously, even in a planned manner; but in reality, they’re fast asleep. Just take Kenneth Parks, the gentle young man who killed his mother-in-law while he was sleeping.

People can disagree about whether someone has a mind but, ultimately, it’s our perception that decides.

Unless your best friends are philosophers, they probably won’t challenge the assumption that your older sister has a mind. But besides the more typical members of the Mind Club, like your sister, there’s another, more divisive class. They’re called the cryptominds and they’re only allowed entry by some gatekeepers.

People disagree about whether any given cryptomind has a mind at all. The group includes beings like God, animals and robots, along with dead and permanently unconscious people in persistent vegetative states.

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Worum geht es in The Mind Club?

The Mind Club (2016) is all about how we perceive beings as having a mind or not, and how this determination affects our moral judgments. These blinks explain what constitutes a mind as well as how and why we perceive minds the way we do.

Bestes Zitat aus The Mind Club

A mind is not an objective fact as much as it is a gift given by the person who perceives it.

—Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray

Wer The Mind Club lesen sollte

Psychologists, philosophers and scientists
Students of philosophy or neuroscience
Anyone interested in the field of ethics and the justification of brutal acts

Über den Autor

Daniel M. Wegner was an eminent psychologist, author of The Illusion of Conscious Will and recipient of, among many other awards, the 2011 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association.

Kurt Gray is a psychologist and a former student of Wegner’s. He has written various essays and op-eds, including “The Myth of the Harmless Wrong” for The New York Times.

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