The Problem of Other Minds

Here I will provide a single but, I believe, telling example of Findlay's reasoning.  Philosophers have long been troubled by the question of how it is that we know that individuals other than ourselves possess minds.  It is argued that while we know our own minds directly through introspection, we can only infer the existence of others’ minds on the basis of their physical behavior.  It is readily apparent that this entire problem would not arise in a world in which all consciousness was effectively one, or, less dramatically, in a (slightly lower) world in which there was direct communication between separate minds, unmediated by behavior or other material events.  Indeed, we might posit the existence of a higher, unitary, world in order to solve the problem of minds other than our own.  We might also recognize that such a world, in which experience is organized quite differently than in our own, is more or less continually accessible to some individuals in our own world, and, to all of us, at least on occasion.  In those experiences in which the mystic, for example, recognizes the unity of all souls, or in those interpersonal encounters in which one immediately understands another’s thoughts and feelings, and experiences them as if they were one’s own, we are, as it were, transported to a “higher reality”.  When we conceptualize higher worlds simply as (radically) different ways of organizing experience, the great mystery about higher worlds and their penetration into our own disappears, and what at first appears as a distant, alien concept becomes familiar and relevant to daily life.