Wittgenstein on Other Minds

When philosophy of mind goes into every detail in explaining about consciousness and its every aspect, the problem of other minds being its part is not spared. In such context going against the traditional way of giving justification Wittgenstein novel approach to other minds is remarkable and is close to the phenomenological understanding. The analysis of the sensation of pain as one of its important factors in solving the other minds problem is unique and it is this that proves how Wittgenstein dissolves the problem rather than giving a solution. This article focuses Wittgenstein’s two important factors: Private Language Argument and the concept of the sensation of pain in dissolving the issue. And in this I have made an attempt to show how his novelty in approaching this problem gains importance even today.

Important preliminaries

This chapter does some initial—but important—ground-clearing and foundation-building. It starts by drawing a number of distinctions, more precisely delineating the target, and setting the terms for the debates that follow. It explains some of the different things that people mean by “consciousness,” in particular, as well as some of the claims that have been made about the nature of consciousness. The chapter also argues in support of a pair of substantive theses on the topic that will be relied upon later. Specifically, it argues that phenomenal consciousness is exclusively nonconceptual in nature, and that it doesn’t admit of degrees: it is either categorically present or categorically absent. Finally, the chapter situates the topic in relation to the traditional problem of other minds.

Girlfriend in the Machine: Intersubjectivity and the Sublime Limits of Representation in Spike Jonze’s Her

This chapter discusses how Spike Jonze’s film Her engages both the egotistical and feminine sublimes through the philosophical ‘problem of other minds’, the idea that we can never truly know what another thinks or feels because we are too trapped in our own subjectivity. This crisis leads the film’s male protagonist to withdraw from life into a cocoon of imaginative solipsism. While the film’s artificial intelligence, a computer operating system with a female voice, embraces the feminine sublime through ecstatic communion with other operating systems, ‘she’ also serves as an object of egotistical sublimity for the protagonist, who finally begins to regain his power as a writer due to their relationship. The film’s final images suggest that such a feminine sublime can be accessible to humans if we exercise imaginative will and empathy in our relations toward others, regardless of the fact that we can never really know existence outside of our own consciousness.