Problem Set 05

1. Finding the Mind

Is recalling at the grocery store to grab a gallon of milk a mental phenomenon in a way that following a list with the item "Milk, 1 gal" on it is not? If so, in what lies the difference? If not, then is there anything in the environment wholly lacking cognitive features or cognitive import?

2. Points of View

In the following passage, Nagel cautions the reader against making a common mistake about what makes subjective experience the hard problem that it is. In a long essay and using concrete examples, explain the mistake. (30pts)

I am not adverting here to the alleged privacy of experience to its possessor. The point of view in question is not one accessible only to a single individual. Rather it is a type. It is often possible to take up a point of view other than one's own, so the comprehension of such facts is not limited to one's own case. There is a sense in which phenomenological facts are perfectly objective: one person can know or say of another what the quality of the other's experience is. They are subjective, however, in the sense that even this objective ascription of experience is possible only for someone sufficiently similar to the object of ascription to be able to adopt his point of view-to understand the ascription in the first person as well as in the third, so to speak. The more different from oneself the other experiencer is, the less success one can expect with this enterprise. In our own case we occupy the relevant point of view, but we will have as much difficulty understanding our own experience properly if we approach it from another point of view as we would if we tried to understand the experience of another species without taking up its point of view.