The ‘Other Minds’ Problem.

It is easy to assume that the people around you have a mind just as you do but it is very difficult to prove. We make the assumption based on the ideas of physical similarity and predictable behaviour. However it is not technically ‘rational.’
• I seem to have a mind, in here behind my eyes. I know this although I can understand that there are ‘materialist’ arguments against it that suggest it is nothing more than complex electrical events in the brain.
• Other people seem to be identical to me in most ways – they may differ in age, gender, size, race, ability and so on but in most ways they seem to behave more or less like me.
• They have the same basic equipment – brain, body, senses like mine. This can be proved by surgery (!) or by CAT scan or MRI (Computer Assisted Tomography and Magnetic Resonance Imaging – two techniques like an x-ray but they show soft tissues like the brain).
• They communicate with me but not always logically as a machine would – they seem to be thinking and communicating creatively.
• Other people seem different but they are different in similar ways.
• Other people seem to respond to stimuli in the same way that I do – for instance
.....they respond to pain in the same way;
.....they get angry over similar things like being teased;
.....they get flushed and confused when they see that hottie in the canteen;

Therefore it is reasonable for me to assume that they are very much like me – that they have a mind and that they think creatively (though lots of them seem to be really stupid!). They solve problems rather than just relaying information and they display irrational emotions.
The entire ‘science’ of Psychology is based on this sort of argument. The idea of Empathy where you can put yourself in the mind of another and understand their motivation and behaviours as if they are your own is central to this paradigm (view of the world).

However -

The trouble is that while it is an obvious or reasonable assumption, it is not rational to assume that other people have minds in the sense of having a purely logical argument. The points above are good arguments but they are not proof! A rationalist demands that incontrovertible proof be provided by a process of logical argument. If there are good, logical, alternative explanations then the claim fails.

Problem 1 – You are arguing from a single example – yourself. You only know of one mind, your own, and now you about to assume that every one of the six billion people on the planet is just like you. Some arrogance that is! That’s equivalent to saying that because the first flower you ever saw was a pink rose, then every other flower anywhere must be a pink rose too – clearly absurd. This is a problem of inductive reasoning.

Problem 2 – If the only evidence we have is the behaviour of others then there are problems. What if they are robots, automata or ‘zombies’? That is, not creatures who are not thinking but simply programmed or ‘disposed’ to act in certain ways?
(Note. To a philosopher, a zombie is something that looks and acts like a human but has no independent will or thinking – it’s like a flesh robot. Forget the movie versions, OK!)
This is weird but consider – you can train a dog to behave in certain ways but dogs don’t do much in the way of deep thinking. They don’t really interpret situations. They ‘act-react’ – beg-food-eat, play-stick-chase. They work from instinct and conditioning. How can we be sure that other people are not such programmed creatures who are merely a little more advanced and evolved? Or even that we are not so programmed ourselves?

Conclusion – It is reasonable to assume that others have minds and anyone who behaved as if they did not would be insane. Solipcism, the idea that you are the only being and everything/everyone else is a product of your mind can be a madness as it would imply a complete lack of empathy – you’d be sociopathic, or God. However it is not perfectly rational to think this way – you can’t really prove it because the mind is intangible.
Rationalism is rather extreme. It demands absolute proof by logic rather than observation and experiment (empiricism). You cannot prove that the sun will rise tomorrow. It is a sensible assumption and you can predict it on the basis of the evidence - inductive reasoning followed by a deduction. It has happened for the last few billion years. But you cannot be certain.
• Induction – observing all the cases and creating a ‘law’. (All swans are white).
• Deduction – predicting or explaining events by using the law. (Therefore, that’s not a swan).

You can apply Occam’s Razor here as well. Clearly the simplest and most obvious explanation is that others have minds similar to your own. It is pointless to invent such complex and unproved entities as zombies and automata to argue the opposite. How would they happen or who would build them, and to what purpose?