Radu Bumbăcea is a postdoc at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, working on a project on empathy, broadly construed. He is interested in philosophy of mind, ethics and aesthetics.
A post by Radu Bumbăcea
The perfect mind-reader. When you go to the office in the morning, your colleague is already there: after saying hello, she scans you for a few seconds, tracks your eye and then says ‘oh, so you are still musing about the cactus that we got rid of three weeks ago.’ This colleague of yours is a perfect mind-reader: she picks up on all the possible cues, puts them together almost instantaneously, and is able to realise what you feel, no matter how discrete you are trying to be.
The prospect of such a colleague might make one eager to work from home. But why? What could have gone wrong with the practice of understanding others, usually much praised?
1. A matter of privacy?
One possible response as to what is wrong with the colleague above is that she does not respect our right to privacy. Even though she does not plant cameras in our house, listen in to our phone calls or access our medical record, she seems to enter a place where we do not want her to be—our mind.
Describing how the colleague ‘enters our mind’ depends on the kind of mind-reading we are talking about. If she merely attributes us emotions, desires and thoughts without getting a grip on their phenomenology, then there might be an intrusion, but not a complete one. By contrast, she might try to get some access to the phenomenology of our mental life. One way would be to try to simulate our situation and then have an emotional reaction to that situation (Currie and Ravenscroft 2002), but in this case it is not clear why, if the colleague has the emotion herself, she intrudes—if we have an identical emotion to someone else, we do not intrude in her mind. Yet I have argued, in previous work, that one can imagine an emotion of a person S, and thereby gain an insight into its phenomenology, without having that emotion oneself (Bumbăcea 2024). Imagining an emotion consists in forming a representation of that emotion that gives some access into its felt aspects (a bit like a picture of a mountain gives some access into how the mountain looks). Insofar as our mind-reading colleague imagines our emotions in such a fine-grained way, the intrusion seems even more a breach of privacy—almost as if she planted a camera in our mind.
Now, if one believes that any infringement of privacy necessarily involves some bad physical action in the gathering of information (Thomson 1975), this won’t hold water: our colleague does not literally enter our mind, she merely imaginatively reconstructs what happens in our mind based on observations that she acquires in a perfectly decorous way. And indeed, neuroethicists assume that if there is anything to the idea of ‘mental privacy’, it has to do with toying around with people’s neurodata and not with garden-variety mind-reading (Brown 2024).
But if we adopt a control-based account of privacy, which says, roughly, that we have a right to control how certain important bits of information about us flow (Marmor 2015; Menges 2024), then people can break our right to privacy without performing any wrong physical actions. If a judge is privy to a list of phone calls made by someone as proof in a case, she should not start making all sorts of inferences about the caller’s private life based on the time and length of various calls, if these are not relevant for the case. Doing so would be a breach of privacy. Now, given that our emotions, thoughts and desires are very important to us, and facts about them are personal information, wouldn’t imagining these mental states be an invasion of privacy? Wouldn’t the perfect mind-reader wrong us by making the information flow from our mind without asking our permission?
Yet the conclusion that the mind is a private space and that mind-reading should not happen without explicit permission from the owner seems way too strong a conclusion though. Leaving aside the fact that a lot of mind-reading is low-level and automatic (Goldman 2006), the practice is too integrated in our social life. Just imagine that mind-reading were always a breach of privacy, unless explicitly allowed: one could not sit in the armchair late in the evening, pondering over the events of the day with a glass of wine, without constantly sending texts like ‘sry to disturb do you mind if i imagine what you felt today when boss called you names??’.
So there has to be a sense in which just by participating in social life, we waive our right to privacy over some of our mental states and thereby open ourselves to being, to some extent, mind-read by others. To see how this might work, let’s imagine that I declare something as simple as ‘I like philosophy’. What are you supposed to do? First, while one should not be excessively suspicious, you might take into account the possibility that I just want to look intellectual, so you should not take my word as final. More importantly, believing that I like philosophy is not very informative, as this might refer to vastly different mental dispositions: I might like it as an intellectual game, as an inquiry into the key questions in the world, or as a forlorn attempt to save my soul. It is then plausible that by uttering ‘I like philosophy’ I thereby allow you to imagine what I feel about the departmental talk today, this or that thought experiment, and Descartes and Heidegger in order to understand really what I meant—in order to understand which mental disposition I referred to. It might be the case that some behaviour and non-verbal cues give similar licenses, yet the question remains what would not be a license. If everything we do in public gives such a license, then the perfect mind-reader does nothing wrong.
2. A matter of virtue?
There is also a second approach to the question of mental intrusion, according to which what the perfect mind-reader does wrong is not so much breaking a right of ours, but rather not having a virtuous attitude towards something so intimate as our mental states. We might suspect perhaps that she sees deducing our mental states as an intellectual game. Or that she uses our mental states, even our deepest emotions, as an object of entertainment, almost like an artefact that can amuse one on a lazy Saturday afternoon museum visit.
This suggests that in order to see which instances of mind-reading are virtuous and which are not, we should look at what motivates the mind-reader. Supposing that the mind-reader starts with some vague idea about the mental states of another (e.g., ‘S is sad now’, ‘S is optimistic’), she might develop her understanding further in two ways: either she can try to attribute or imagine more occurrent mental states; or she can imagine an emotion in greater detail, and thereby get a better grip on its phenomenology (Bumbăcea 2024). Assuming that this effort at further understanding, like many actions, is often motivated by an emotion of the mind-reader (Deonna and Teroni 2012), an emotion that encapsulates her involvement in the situation, the virtuousness of the mind-reading depends on the virtuousness of the motivating emotion. Let’s take an example: suppose that Carl has drifted apart from his friend Marion and he is sad, his sadness being directed primarily at their no longer playing tennis together. If we are disappointed that his sadness is directed at something which seems not too profound an expression of friendship, this disappointment impels us to imagine his emotions in further detail, only to discover that he sees their playing tennis as symbolising their enduring friendship over time. This exploration seems to involve a positive involvement in Carl’s life on our part. By contrast, if we are just in need of a melodrama and, as a substitute thereof, imagine Carl’s emotions in great detail, driven by morbid curiosity, our interest seems to be morally problematic.
Finally, as part of our involvement in other people’s lives, we might hope that we are invited to partake in some of their mental life, and we might feel slightly uncomfortable imagining certain emotions of theirs without being (implicitly or explicitly) invited, almost as if we wandered in a friend’s house without being invited there. We might hope that they invite us to imagine what they are feeling by partly sharing it with us, an act that is possible only under the assumption that we don’t already have access to their mental states (cf. Moran 2005). It has even been argued that God, qua potentially perfect mind-reader, voluntarily limits his knowledge and understanding of our minds in order to give us the occasion to share our thoughts with Him (Falls-Corbit and McLain 1992). Our perfect mind-reading colleague would then, unlike God, be insensitive to all these rich aspects of human relationships.
References
Brown, Cohen Marcus Lionel (2024). Neurorights, Mental Privacy, and Mind Reading. Neuroethics 17 (2):1-19.
Bumbăcea, Radu (2024). Imagining emotions. Erkenntnis.
Currie, Gregory & Ravenscroft, Ian (2002). Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Deonna, Julien A. & Teroni, Fabrice (2012). The emotions: a philosophical introduction. New York: Routledge.
Falls-Corbit, Margaret & McLain, F. Michael (1992). God and Privacy. Faith and Philosophy 9 (3):369-386.
Goldman, Alvin I. (2006). Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marmor, Andrei (2015). What Is the Right to Privacy? Philosophy and Public Affairs 43 (1):3-26.
Menges, Leonhard (2024). The right to privacy and the deep self. Philosophical Quarterly:1-22.
Moran, Richard (2005). Problems of sincerity. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105 (3):341-361.
Thomson, Judith Jarvis (1975). The right to privacy. Philosophy and Public Affairs 4 (4):295-314.