The Mind Club

The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why it Matters

Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray (Viking, 2016)

    'The problem of other minds' is one of the age-old philosophical conundrums. Renee Descartes was pretty sure that he had a mind, and you do, or you wouldn’t be here now, but what about dogs, or fish, or fruit flies? What about computers like Watson, the Jeopardy champion? In The Mind Club, Dan Wagner and Kurt Gray bring psychological research to bear on the philosophical question of just what it means to have a mind.

     The premise of the book is that we have two different senses for the concept, whose relationship is complex. On the one hand, there’s an interior state of experience, having to do with sensations, emotions, and 'what it’s like' to be you. Experience is not directly accessible to others, but we can imagine it much more readily in a dog than in a fruit fly. We can even picture it more easily in dead people than we can in robots.

    On the other hand, the exterior aspects of mind are termed agency. By this, Wegner and Gray mean the ability to set goals and make things happen in the world, whether scratching our noses or erecting skyscrapers. Fully functioning people have both, of course, but the edge cases are instructive. Small children are high in experience and low in agency, which gives rise to the moral imperative not to harm them. If parents (and the village) do their job, children grow up to have agency, as well, acquiring the moral imperative not to harm others.

    Such complementarity seems to be baked in to these concepts, which often appear as two sides of a coin. "Thinking doers are active minds with moral responsibility that do actions, minds like corporations and God. Vulnerable feelers are passive minds with moral rights that have actions done to them, minds like puppies, medical patients, and babies. This division of doer and feeler should feel intuitive because it is as ancient as human thought."

     Indeed, Aristotle divided the moral world along the same lines, naming the active party the agent, and the victim or recipient of an action the patient. "Linking mind perception to morality not only explains the enduring hilarity of kids injuring unsuspecting adults but also allows you to predict your moral outrage about almost any infraction. Tough man (high agency) punches kitten (high experience)? Immoral. Kitten (low agency) scratches tough man (low experience)? Not immoral."

     The implications of this framework run throughout the book, as they do throughout family life, our systems of charitable giving, and the justice system. "When someone is cast as a victimized moral patient–a vulnerable feeler–it is difficult to simultaneously see him or her as an agent responsible for wrongdoing. This explains why defendants on trial often testify to the suffering or abuse they experienced in their lives, such as in the case of Lorena Bobbitt."

      The Mind Club is dense with research: each chapter cites fifty or more articles or books; but the writing is witty, and moves right along. In the end, it crosses from psychology back to philosophy: "We are forever a point of view: even if we lose our memories, meditate away our desires, and quiet our constant quest for mental control, we are still a source of perception. But recognizing this fact provides the secret to transcending ourselves as much as we possibly can. By understanding that we perceive the world instead of understanding it directly, we can realize not only that the self is fragile and that free will is an illusion but also that other minds can be both more and less than they appear."

Any Good Books,

January 2020

Power Concedes Nothing

Power Concedes Nothing: The Unfinished Fight for Social Justice in America

Connie Rice (Scribner, 2012)

    Connie Rice had a path of high achievement set before her from infancy. Her parents met at Howard College, where her mother trained as a teacher. Her father had an exemplary Air Force career, which exposed Connie and her two younger brothers to a great variety of human environments, while shielding them from most of the racial hardships that other Black kids faced in the sixties. What could have been disruptive was embraced as adventurous: "On top of [her mother's] relentless academic tasks, she dunked us in whatever the new local culture offered–ballet, piano lessons, new food, painting, crafts, ceramics, horseback riding, archery, bowling, swim teams, drama, skiing, county fairs, high tea, or square dancing." That sounds manic, verging on comic, but it led to the kind of confidence that permitted Connie twice to walk into a new school and become class president.

    Within the Black American Princess bubble, there were also experiences that foretold what she'd use all that preparation for. Reading Anne Frank's diary, as a ten-year-old; navigating between terrible schools (Anacostia, San Antonio) and great ones (London, Shaker Heights); winning the debate championship of Texas; and spending one high school summer watching the Watergate hearings. "Every day, after scouring the newspapers for behind-the-scenes analysis, I stood at the ironing board, glued to the television. At first the Judiciary Committee's hearings, a cross between a constitutional show trial and a suspense-filled soap opera, were riveting enough."

    When, in due course, the immortal Barbara Jordan rose to be recognized, Connie Rice had a new heroine. "When she cross-examined a witness, challenged her colleagues on the committee, or parried with lawyers, I felt I was watching Elizabeth I incarnated as a black congresswoman from Texas." Jordan's full-throated defense of the Constitution, and her indictment of Richard Nixon's corruption, struck a chord in Rice that would propel her to law school and the work of social justice.

    But first, at her mother's urging, Radcliffe College. (Rice was one of the last people to be admitted to Harvard by accident, as the colleges proceeded toward their merger.) She studied Government, made some good friends, and took up martial arts. Her Tae Kwon Do was so strong that she took three years off to pursue it, medaling at the national championships, before going on to NYU.

     In her second summer there, she interned with the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund on death penalty cases. Here was an education! And one that seemed more significant than third-year classes, though she did enough to finish school. "Death row had ripped off law school's Socratic mask and shown me the sordid underbelly of our warped bar of justice." Rice moved on to a clerkship in Federal court, and even a year or so in a major law firm, just to show she could do it, before winding up in Los Angeles in the west-coast branch of the LDF.

     That's where the real story in this memoir begins, as Rice brings all this experience to bear on the violent culture of the gang-ridden streets, the violent culture of the Los Angeles Police Department, and the stultifying intransigence of government bureaucracy. Sometimes the work is on an individual level, as when she is enlisted to help a fugitive surrender without getting shot by the police on his way in. Other times, she makes herself heard with lawsuits, including one that resulted in the LA school district building 140 new schools, making up a deficit of thirty years without new construction.

     On whatever scale, the work is legal, it's political, and it's always personal. Her mission is to look out for the people deemed too poor for decent education, too down-and-out for police protection, too insignificant for elected officials to notice them. "I've learned that suing cops earns their respect but helping them to change earns their trust. I've learned to make adversaries into allies and, when necessary, to sue my friends and even my own board members, because it doesn't matter who holds it–power concedes nothing without a demand."

Any Good Books, December, 2019