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| Martin Buber's I and Thou |
There will be those who suspect the discussion in that last installment of trying to demote morality, especially as it pertains to God and religion. That is not my intent. To show why I don't think spirituality à la Buber imperils questions of right and wrong, I'd like to borrow and adapt an argument certain philosophers make about human sentience.
Why we have sentience or a capacity to have conscious experiences above and beyond the complex information processing we use to succeed in this world (the way Job succeeded before his downfall) is hard to explain. Philosophers of mind are not agreed on this, but some say conscious experience — "what it is like" to see the color red, for instance — simply cannot be explained with recourse to cause and effect in the physical domain of this world. There is also a mental sphere which is not physical but which "supervenes" on the physical.
A telling argument can be made to that effect by showing that there conceivably could have been an alternate world whose denizens are doppelgangers. They seem just like us, physically and behaviorally ... but they don't experience anything. This so-called "zombie world" would be externally indistinguishable from our own. We would have the uncanny experience of meeting up with our zombie twins if we went there, but we simply would not be able to tell that our zombie twins were having no experiences whatsoever!
I'd like to extend and adapt that same argument to suggest that there conceivably could be an alternate world in which our doppelgangers also lack what Buber calls "man's sense of Thou."
This "Thou-sense" might be what some philosophers imagine as a relational component of the mind, in addition to the physical component and the conscious component. Admittedly, I am not aware of any actual philosophers who consider this third component real — a lot of them don't even consider the second, conscious component real. Still, given how hard it is to argue for consciousness being real-though-immaterial, it's not surprising that philosophers would take a pass on asserting this sort of third component which Buber would call the "sense of Thou" or the "inborn Thou."
So let us simply stipulate, for the sake of this discussion at least, that there is in the mind such a third, relational component, a Thou-sense. Our zombie twins presumably might be lacking it as well as the second component, consciousness. When we observe these zombies in their hypothetical doppelganger world, would we be able to tell their Thou-sense was missing?
Perhaps yes, perhaps no. My main point here is that we wouldn't be able to tell, simply based on observing their moral behavior.
Remember, the zombies in this imaginary "Z-world" are just like us, physically and behaviorally. For instance, if we were to be able to peek into such a zombie world, we would not find our zombie twins acting as if it were a cardinal sin to fail to run down pedestrians in crosswalks whenever possible. Nor would we find proper crosswalk etiquette to be a matter of random chance, or momentary mood. Either of those two scenarios would be ruled out by our stipulation that our zombie twins behave just like us. They seem to observe moral standards and ethical rules as much (or as little) as we do.
The Thou-sense is not about morals or ethics. It is what it is like to know we would sooner die than never encounter our Thou, ever again. There's no way to be sure our zombie twins know what that feels like.
I think this Thou-sense is in fact a "component" of our minds, but only in the following way. Our capacity for subjective, conscious experience — our sentience — actually is a separate mental component, built atop of all of that physical information processing going on in our brains. It's separate because, strictly speaking, it doesn't have to exist — witness our zombie doppelgangers — and because, were it to be absent, every last one of the cause-and-effect events taking place in this material world with which we interact would still be exactly the same ... just as it is in the Z-world in which there is no Thou-sense.
The Thou-sense, though, is not really a third, separate mind component, but rather a relationship between the consciousness "module" and the information-processing "module" comprising the physical workings of our brains.
We can think of both of the paired brain-state modules, consciousness and information processing, as "things" in the It-world. On that view, even consciousness or sentience is an It. Conscious experience may not be wholly material, but it can still be looked on as a suitable object of scientific investigation.
But if Thou-sense were just another It, that would seem to be a contradiction in terms. To imagine that the eternal Thou is never an It, while the inborn Thou is only an It, simply doesn't compute.
Thinking of Thou-sense as a relation, not a truly separate module of the mind, sidesteps that problem and makes Thou-sense primary in the same way that Buber calls all relation primary when he says, "In the beginning is relation" (p. 18).
At another point (p. 22), Buber further qualifies the primary word I–Thou as "the vital primal words I–affecting–Thou and Thou–affecting–I." When the participle — the word affecting — has been "split asunder" from the pronouns and in itself "given eminence as an object," continues Buber, Thou degenerates into mere It, and the I of I–Thou is degraded to the I of I-It. I take this to mean that there is a difference between "affecting" in the domain of Thou and "causing" in the domain of It.
Extending that view, if consciousness is thoroughly acausal and the cognitive information processing of the brain alone is causal, then there can't be a domain of Thou, for us, without the existence of consciousness within us. No Thou-sense without sentience, in other words. So, if that thinking is correct, then our hypothetical Z-world, which lacks sentience, also lacks Thou-sense.
Which means the sense of Thou of which we are capable is as extraordinary as the sentience which we experience — if not more so.
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