Response to Anthony Ryle

Dear Editor

Anthony Ryle makes many excellent points in his letter and there is much more in it that accords with my own point of view than he seems to think. His final paragraph about the way ‘we know ourselves through the eyes of others’ reminded me of a couple of paragraphs from an earlier draft of my paper and gives me an opportunity to reclaim them from the ‘delete’ file:

Last summer I had an curious experience while waiting in the foyer of a busy shop in Milan where the rest of my family were shopping. With this paper on my mind, I had drifted into thinking about various problems to do with

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consciousness when I began to notice that several people had walked right past me, coming very close but completely ignoring my existence - acting as if I were not there, in fact. Maybe there was no more to this than the different way that Italians measure personal space or perhaps the fashionable Milanese merely regarded the middle-aged English tourist as a person of no account. Whatever the reason, I found myself with an eerie feeling of doubt about whether I was there. That is, I had just a whiff of what it is like to feel unreal, to doubt one's own existence.

This brought home to me the fallacy of the debate about whether we can know that other minds exist (the so-called ‘zombie’ argument). In this situation, I instinctively felt, not that they were ‘zombies’, but that I was! That is, I realized that we only develop the sense of having a mind, of realizing that we are experiencing the world, through being recognized as being in the world by other minds. There is a nice example of this in the sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf when the four members of the crew go through a reality distorter that makes three of them unaware of the existence of the fourth. When they refer to ‘the three of us’, the fourth member desperately and frantically exclaims, ‘What do you mean, the three of us!? It's the four of us, the four of us!’ That is what the existential dread of non-recognition is like.