Hoffman.es@PARC-MAXC.ARPA (11/02/83)
Sorry it took me a while to track this down. It's something I recalled
when reading the discussion of awareness in V1 #80. It's been lightly
edited.
--Rodney Hoffman
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>From Richard Rorty's book, "Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature":
Personhood is a matter of decision rather than knowledge, an acceptance
of another being into fellowship rather than a recognition of a common
essence.
Knowledge of what pain is like or what red is like is attributed to
beings on the basis of their potential membership in the community.
Thus babies and the more attractive sorts of animal are credited with
"having feelings" rather than (like machines or spiders) "merely
responding to stimuli." To say that babies know what heat is like, but
not what the motion of molecules is like is just to say that we can
fairly readily imagine them opening their mouths and remarking on the
former, but not the latter. To say that a gadget that says "red"
appropriately *doesn't* know what red is like is to say that we cannot
readily imagine continuing a conversation with the gadget.
Attribution of pre-linguistic awareness is merely a courtesy extended to
potential or imagined fellow-speakers of our language. Moral
prohibitions against hurting babies and the better looking sorts of
animals are not based on their possessions of feeling. It is, if
anything, the other way around. Rationality about denying civil rights
to morons or fetuses or robots or aliens or blacks or gays or trees is a
myth. The emotions we have toward borderline cases depend on the
liveliness of our imagination, and conversely.