Who Am I · ages 8–12
How do you know I'm not pretending?
Your friend says they are fine. Their face says otherwise. Who is right about what they are feeling?
You have never had direct access to anyone else’s experience. Everything you know about another person’s feelings arrives through their face, their words, and what you can infer — and you are confident about it anyway.
Mill suggested the reasoning we all use without noticing: other bodies are like mine, my body comes with feelings, therefore other bodies come with feelings. It is an argument by analogy, and it is weak in an obvious way. One example is not a pattern. Every feeling you have ever verified has been your own — which means the sample size for this inference is exactly one.
Wittgenstein thought this way of setting up the problem was already confused. If a word meant a private inner object nobody else could see, then the word could not be checked by anyone, including you. He compared it to everyone carrying a box said to contain a beetle: since nobody can look in another’s box, the beetle cannot be doing any work in the language. What “pain” means is public — limping, crying, saying ouch — and that is how you learned it.
There is a stranger consequence, and it is the reason this question matters beyond a puzzle. If all you have is behaviour, then you cannot in principle tell a person who feels something from something that behaves identically and feels nothing. You are also completely certain that your own case is the real one. Those two facts do not fit together neatly, and nobody has yet made them.
Try it
Try to describe the taste of a lemon to someone without using any word for a taste, or a comparison to anything else. Notice where you get stuck. That stuck place is the problem of other minds.
What do you think?
Do you think there is a right answer to this question?
Talk about it
- Do you know what anyone else is feeling, or only what you guess?
- What is it like to be a bat?
- Could something behave exactly like a person and feel nothing?
Yes, but… — the arguments people actually make
I know my friend is sad. I can see it.
You can see a face. That you then say 'sad' is a reading you are confident in because it usually works — not the same as knowing, and sometimes it is simply wrong.
If feelings are private, then nobody can ever know yours, so they don't exist.
Privacy is not the same as unreality. Nobody can check your memory of last Tuesday either, and you would not say Tuesday did not happen.
This is just a made-up problem for philosophers.
Then explain how you know a text message was sarcastic, or a painting is sad, or that your parent is tired. You do it constantly, and you never check.
What other philosophers think
- John Stuart MillArgued by analogy: other bodies are like mine, my body is accompanied by feelings, so other bodies probably are too. It is a guess, and he knew it.
- Ludwig WittgensteinCompared a private feeling to a beetle in a box that everyone carries and nobody can see — so it drops out of the language game entirely.
- Thomas NagelAsked what it is like to be a bat, and argued that no amount of knowing about sonar adds up to knowing what it is like. It is the founding question of consciousness studies.
If you want to go further
- What Is It Like to Be a Bat? — Thomas Nagel1974 paper. Ten pages, and it sets out the problem of consciousness that nobody has since solved.
- Philosophical Investigations — Ludwig WittgensteinThe beetle-in-a-box passage is in section 293.
Most of these were written for adults, which is why it is worth reading them with someone older.