In the first episode of 'Inside the Animal Mind' Chris Packham discussed dolphins and their sense of echolocation. He claimed that, "...the dolphin's echolocation is an extremely powerful sensory tool which allows its mind to build up a picture of the world" and then posed the kind of questions that philosophers are often tempted to ask:
"...what does a dolphin actually do, mentally? What does it think with all of that echolocation? Does it turn it into a visual image? We don't know. We may never know."
-- What is it like to be a dolphin?
There is something peculiar about these claims and questions. Packham suggests that perception is something that the mind does and that it involves forming mental pictures. But these presuppositions are questionable. The human sense of sight is not a sense that essentially involves forming 'visual' pictures in our mind. It is the sense which allows us to see things. It is possible to form mental images of things, and we might be prompted to form mental images of things by what we see, but then again we might not. Seeing things does not involve mental pictures at all.
Similarly the dolphin's sense of echolocation is the sense which allows it to echolocate things. It does not involve mental pictures of any sort - whether 'visual' or otherwise.
My mind does not perceive things and I do not use my mind to perceive things. I perceive things. - Similarly with dolphins.
If someone were to ask me 'what is it like for you to see things?' I would be a bit baffled and 'what is it like for a dolphin to echolocate things?' is similarly baffling.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03tcpjv/Inside_the_Animal_Mind_You_Are_What_You_Sense/
Isn't it differently (not similarly) baffling -- because I can't echolocate things.
ReplyDeletePerhaps you could - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpxEmD0gu0Q . Would the question make any more sense if you learnt how to do this?
DeleteI'm not sure that echolocation counts as an additional sense (I'm having some doubts now about what I've said above). I don't think that the blind man who can ride a bike has acquired an additional sense.
I'd be interested to hear from you how much you think is right in what I've said above - and why/why not.
DeleteIn some sports, there is special equipment that allows the blind to participate. Usually this involves pieces of equipment that are usually silent making sounds, e.g., a golfball and the hole. Suppose that a sighted player is blindfolded and plays with someone who has never had sight. I'd expect the sighted player to try to form a mental image of the visual appearance of the fairway, green, etc. It doesn't seem meaningless to ask whether the blind player does something comparable, although it might be impossible to answer. It seems to me that the question about the dolphin is akin to this.
ReplyDeleteI think that what Packham said is a bit unclear.and there are a couple of different questions here. Perhaps I'm being a bit unkind to him in attributing the view to him that I have. My target was the view that perceiving consists in having mental representations or that perceiving involves mental representations essentially - something like a kind of sense data theory.
ReplyDeleteBut it isn't clear that Packham is committed to that. Packham could perhaps grant that the dolphin perceives things and that it might not conjure up any mental images in doing so but that nonetheless it's ability to form mental images is dependent on it's ability to perceive using echolocation (the echolocation, "allows its mind to build up a picture of the world"). So - you might ask - can the blind player form a mental image that is something like the image formed by the blindfolded player? (As opposed to 'does the blind player's perception (hearing the sounds made by the equipment) consist in/essentially involve mental representations?'
The question 'what does it think with all of that echolocation?' is difficult to make sense of. Presumably he's got some model that involves thinking in perceptions or copies of perceptions or something along those lines. What kind of answer to it might be possible?
ReplyDeleteSuppose that instead of "picture of the world" he had said "map of the world," and then had asked whether that map took the form of a visual image. Would that seem problematic in the same way?
ReplyDeleteSo, we're imagining him saying, "...the dolphin's echolocation is an extremely powerful sensory tool which allows its mind to build up a map of the world. Does that map take the form of a visual image?"
DeleteIt's still unclear. Does '...its mind build[s] up a map of the world' mean that the dolphin builds up a map of the world (in its mind)? And what would that mean?...that it has a mental image of a map? What evidence have they gathered that demonstrates this?...that the dolphins find their way back to places they've been before? - Why do they need a map? Can dolphins read maps?
Does it just mean that they can remember their way to places? When I've walked around in a town for a while I get to know where things are but I don't build a map or a picture of the world and I don't recognise things by comparing them with mental-image-memories.