that endless regression is a great point against any objections to eliminative materialism… but even supposing there was some mind ‘in there’, some private theater of qualia inaccessible to everyone else and which only you can experience, how could you talk meaningfully about any of it?
i’ve always found wittgenstein’s point particularly insightful when he criticizes the common sense phrase: ‘i know i am in pain’. at first glance this should seem perfectly right… but then he says ‘we can’t speak of knowing outside of the context of doubting, therefore to say ‘i know i’m in pain’ is entirely senseless.’ wait what? let’s think about what he means here. so i can’t doubt i’m in pain - it hurts like hell… there’s no denying that - and i could say ‘i know i’m in pain’, but only under one condition; if i did not use the word pain as a representation of some content of experience, but rather simply to convey a sense in which the meaning could be used, and understood as such. so i’d be notifying others that i’m having a kind of experience. if not, the other would not be able to know the thing the word represents… and yet for other things i observe through inductive experience of which i speak about as ‘knowing’, e.g., ‘the milkman is here’ (something i could doubt… i may be hallucinating or a brain in a vat, etc.), the thing the statement represents can be experienced by the other. see the subtle difference between the statement ‘i know i’m in pain’ and ‘i know the milkman is here’? qualia… or as nagel put it, that problem of ‘knowing what it’s like to be a bat’, is a non-problem. even the bat can’t know what it’s like to be a bat, because there is no ‘bat’ in there that can be known or doubted. he can be a bat, and know he’s a bat, but there is no amount of private experience of the inner cartesian bat that would lead him to believe he, and only he can ‘know’ what it’s like to be a bat. for what about being a bat and a bat’s experiences can be doubted outside of inductive bat propositions made with a representational language? see what i mean? the same batesian dualism eventually stands to be critiqued by a battgenstein.
you can extend this little drill to demonstrate how the difference between representational meaning and use-meaning has caused so much trouble in philosophy. take the word ‘mind’. mind as something separate from the body, or an additional quality added to the body, or something the brain ‘produces’ and ‘has’… and then to speak about it with the same predication i would use to describe things in the world; the mind is free, or the mind is determined, or the mind is mad, or the mind is lost, or the mind is big, etc. i can know such expressions only as metaphor which become meaningful once i attribute to the expressions particular behaviors… which are ostensible uses of meaning that i learn through language/culture. but i can never know of something separate from these behaviors… something that exhibits such qualities as a thing might exhibit a shape or color or movement, etc. the mind as a ‘container’ of concepts. another senseless notion.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x86hLtOkou8[/youtube]