Imagine that you are at the end of your life – your body begins to shut down, your organs start to fail you, and the fear of losing who you are forever. However, a magical company comes along with the ability to transplant your mind into someone else’s body. Who would you be if that came to be? There are many different philosophical nuances to navigate when exploring this question, as it relates closely to the dilemma of the nature of self – whether you are the sum of your thoughts, or whether or not your body actually constitutes an important and inexorable part of you. I believe that, in the end, there is a mind-body dualism present in people that helps to define us by our intelligence, our thoughts, and our minds. The philosophies of figures such as Descartes and others have helped me to understand that the mind that goes in the body constitutes one’s identity, not the body in which it is currently housed.
According to Rene Descartes, there is a problem of understanding or accepting the presence of the minds of others. It is entirely possible for us to know what is going on inside our own minds, but nearly impossible to know for sure if others have the same kinds of thoughts that we perceive. From our perspective, there is no way to concretely know what other people are thinking, or even if they are thinking at all. In order to determine what someone else's thoughts are, we have to rely solely on behavior and instinct, as well as speech. There is a kind of substance dualism that is present in this problem of other minds; given the theory that minds and bodies are independent of each other, what way is there to connect someone's actions to their thoughts? After all, people may just be operating on autopilot, like machinery; always responding in a designed way to stimuli. Descartes states that ideas are modes of thought, which makes them all equal - no matter who is carrying the thoughts, that makes them no less real than the ones that are personally experienced and noticed (Meditation III). In fact, he argues that we can be more sure of our own thoughts than we can of other people's physical bodies - "Nevertheless it still seems to me, and I cannot prevent myself from thinking, that corporeal things, whose images are framed by thought, which are tested by the senses, are much more distinctly known than that obscure part of me which does not come under the imagination" (p. 153).
In order to address the problem of other minds, Descartes simply reasserts the ability to know one's own mind. "I think, therefore I am" is one of Descartes' more fundamental quotations, and it directly handles the confirmation that, indeed, one exists as an individual due to their ability to recognize their own thoughts (Meditation II). The only way, really, for Descartes to determine the consciousness and thoughts of others is to ascribe mental states to others through inference. When one learns what 'angry' is, they can recognize it in other people as what they would do themselves when they were angry. While they cannot truly know for sure exactly what they are thinking, a reasonable inference can be maintained that the person being observed doing those things is angry.
Another solution to the idea of other minds is the concept that Descarted believes that only human animals actually possess minds; therefore, it can be reasonably inferred that, if one is a human being, they have a mind. According to Descartes, "whatever else I may be, I know only that I am a thing that thinks" (Meditation II). All it takes is one thought or idea to be understood, or a single judgment made, and one can qualify for being a real person. The wax argument is a large component of Descartes' assertion that the 'I' is most important, and can be definitively determined by the idea that we can figure out whether or not a piece of wax was removed from a honeycomb. The intellect is thought to be key to the process; our senses can deceive us, and our imagination can lead us astray with flights of fancy (Meditations II).
Rene Descartes, in Meditations, argues that one can be reasonably certain of one's own existence and reality, as well as access to your thoughts and emotions, but there is no way to reasonably be sure of the thoughts of others (Meditation II). There is no definitive way to dip into another's mind to read their thoughts; all that can be reasonably done is ascribe mental states to others in order to infer their emotional state, assuming they have these thoughts. Because you are only aware of your own thoughts and your own mind, even if you were to be swapped into someone else’s body, it stands to reason that the mind is all that matters to constitute a complete human being. “I think, therefore I am” is the operative phrase in this scenario; since it emphasizes thought and consciousness as a determinant of identity, the body is a secondary concern in terms of what constitutes who you are.
Works Cited
Cottingham, J. ed. Meditations on First Philosophy With Selections from the Objections and Replies (revised ed.). Cambridge University Press, 1963.
Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy. 1963.
