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1996, 108 Cowley R w d , Oxford, OX4 IJF,UK

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Mind G. Language, ISSN: 0268-1064
Vol. 11. No. 1 March 1996, p p 86-91.

SwampJoe:Mind or Simulation?
JOE LEVINE

As part of his argument against the computational model of mind, Searle

likes to point out that no one would mistake a computer simulation of a
hurricane with the real thing, yet it seems that philosophers and practitioners
of artificial intelligence ignore this obvious distinction when it comes to the
mind (Searle, 1980). Computers don’t realize minds, they simulate them.
One might take a similar attitude toward SwampJoe, my accidentally-
produced-from-swampgas molecular duplicate. That is, though SwampJoe
behaves just like me, and goes through all the same internal states that I do,
still he’s only a simulation, not a realization of my psychological type. Sure,
if you want to know how I’ll reply to the latest eliminativist attack on qualia,
try it out on SwampJoe. But what he gives you is not a real reply, any more
than what the computer shows on its screen is real wind and rain.
Of course that very comparison points out the problem with the ’mere
simulation’ ploy. Hurricanes involve wind and rain, neither of which appear
in the vicinity of the computer, so it’s clear why computers can only simu-
late, not realize, hurricanes. Minds involve representational states (perhaps
with a little consciousness thrown in), and it begs the question to say straight
off that we don’t have these in the case of computers or SwampJoe. What’s
more, the intuitive default position-both for Hal (of 2001 fame) and
SwampJoe-is that they certainly do realize mental states. Just imagine seri-
ously treating such creatures as ’mere simulations‘. It couldn’t be done.
I find the intuitive default position here completely compelling. I can’t
imagine actually denying of SwampJoe that he’s got a mind. Part of what
fuels this inability is certainly a Cartesian impulse with regard to the mental.
That is, I look at it from the first-person perspective. For all I know, a skeptic
could argue me into taking seriously the possibility that my origins were
the same as SwampJoe’s. But could she argue me into taking seriously the
possibility that I’m not thinking? Epistemologically speaking, everything

Address for correspondence:Department of Philosophy and Religion, North Carolina State

University, Box 8103, Raleigh, NC 27695-8103, USA.
Email jIevine@unity.ncsu.edu.
 Swampfoe: Mind or Simulation? 87
could be just as it is with me yet I was created five minutes ago out of
swamp gas. But for everything to be just as it is with me, epistemologically
speaking, I have to be thinking, for that’s what‘s ‘with me’ right now. One
could also directly apply the Cartesian argument to SwampJoehimself. After
all, wouldn’t he in some sense ’think he had a mind? What would it mean
for him to be wrong about this?
As a response to the historicists, of both teleological and purely causal
varieties, the remarks above are clearly question-begging. But I’m not inter-
ested in making the argument for the Cartesian position here. Rather, I’d
like to speculate about some of the implications of this position for a general
theory of mind and its relation to basic metaphysical issues.
So let’s suppose we take the Cartesian claim to knowledge of one’s own
mentality-including SwampJoe’s-as our starting point. Still, not every-
thing about his thoughts is immediately validated. For instance, it does seem
odd to credit him with genuinely referring to Aristotle, or even my brother,
Jay, when he thinks thoughts apparently about them. After all, how could his
thoughts get to be about them, without so much as a single causal connection
between him and them? But then why not credit this same argument when
it comes to kinds like water, or even non-natural kind properties? On the
other hand, extending the argument in this way strips SwampJoe’s thoughts
of all meaning, and we’re back to claiming he’s thoughtless, a proposition
that runs directly against our Cartesian convictions about this case.
In an interesting discussion of the swamp controversy, Karen Neander, a
teleological historicist about intentionality, attempts to soften the anti-
Cartesian thrust of denying thoughts of water to SwampJoe by noting that
her position only entails that SwampJoe’s thoughts lack wide content, not
narrow content (Neander, this issue). Furthermore, there’s no reason to deny
him qualia either. So, on Neander’s view, SwampJoehas quite a bit of mental
life after all, what with his qualia and narrow contents to occupy him.
But though having qualia is certainly a consolation (especially for
SwampJoe, who, I have on special authority, is quite attached to his qualia),
it isn‘t what’s at issue here, and narrow content is more problematic. What
the Cartesian position on SwampJoe requires is that his thoughts are genu-
ine, meaningful thoughts. In order to be meaningful they have to mean
something, and that seems to entail that there’s something they mean, or
represent. (I know Wittgenstein objects to this inference, but we‘re doing
Descartes here, not Wittgenstein).There may be a place for narrow content
in theorizing about the mind. I’m not taking a stand on that. However, unless
what we mean by ‘narrow content’ is really wide content that’s restricted to
a primitive, perhaps sensory, base, it doesn’t serve on its own to underwrite
the attribution of genuine thought to SwampJoe. On the other hand, if by
‘narrow content’ we do mean something along the lines of a sensory, or
observational stereotype, then of course SwampJoe does have thoughts
merely by having states with narrow content. But then there’s no startling
claim to get all excited about in the first place. The controversy is about
which things SwampJoe represents, not whether he represents at all.
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88 Mind 6 Language
So if SwampJoe is to have thoughts at all, they must represent something.
Our starting point was that he definitely has thoughts. So it must be possible
to represent without being in causal contact. Yet the consideration about
Aristotle and Jay seemed to show the necessity of causal contact for genuine
representation. How do we reconcile our Cartesian intuition with womes
about Aristotle? I propose to ask Kant and Frege for help.
Kant emphasized that it is a fundamental feature of judgment that it has
predicative structure: it involves the application of concepts to objects. Frege
was so committed to the metaphysical difference between concepts and
objects that he made such puzzling cIaims as that the concept horse is not
a concept. Leaving aside questions of Kant and Frege scholarship, I think
the following Kantian/Fregean picture suggests a resolution to our quan-
dary about SwampJoe, and provides an interesting way to look at the
relations among metaphysics, semantics, and the theory of mind.
The idea is this. There are reasons, both from a semantical and a metaphys-
ical point of view, to distinguish between properties/universals and
objects/individuals. To put it crudely, our concepts give us guaranteed
access to properties but not to objects. If we think a thought of the form ‘a
has F’, while we may fail to refer to any object by ‘a’, and while ’F’ may
have an empty extension, stilI there is a property expressed by ’P; at least
so long as we maintain that the thought is meaningful, i.e. a real thought.
There is something, in this sense, that we are attempting to predicate of an
object, even if there is no object in this case to be the subject of the predi-
cation.
I think it’s worth dwelling a bit on the different attitude we take toward
reference failure for names and for predicates. When a name fails to refer,
a standard treatment is to view the proposition expressed as containing a
gap, therefore neither true nor false. The name is literally meaningless, con-
tributing nothing to the thought expressed, and therefore a gap results. But
no such gap results from a denotationless predicate. Of course we learn in
baby logic that there is always the empty set to serve as the extension, and
therefore, the predicate is not without any reference. But what’s also going
on, is that the predicate expresses a property, albeit an uninstantiated one.
Hence there is no reason to treat the predicate as meaningless merely
because its extension is empty. (I don’t mean to deny that there can be genu-
inely meaningless predicates, as in made-up gibberish. But that’s a different
case altogether.)
So what I want to say about SwampJoe is that he has genuine thoughts
because his concepts represent properties, though many of his attempted
references to objects fail. What then to make of his thoughts containing ‘Aris-
totle’ and ’Jay’? I‘m inclined to treat his object-oriented thoughts as a kind
of fictional discourse. However one treats a thought that Hamlet is inde-
cisive, or that the Power Rangers are powerful, they are thoughts, meaning-
ful representational states, though lacking objects.
Of course one might object that in standard cases of fictional discourse,
as in the two examples above, the subject knows the objects don‘t exist and
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 SwampJoe: Mind or Simulation? 89
therefore there might be some other sort of object intended as the referent,
like a ‘character’. But consider the following two cases, which I think are
quite comparable to SwampJoe.I overhear people talking about somebody,
and construct from my eavesdropping quite a rich characterization of the
object of their gossip. However, it turns out that I am wrong about there
being such a person. I’ve misheard and in fact what I took to be a single
name of a person being repeated throughout the conversation was actually
several different words, sometimes not even names. Or consider the possible
world in which the Cartesian demon really did put all these thoughts into
n ~ yhead five minutes ago.
I think in both these cases we‘d have to say that the names fail to refer,
though genuine thought is taking place. There is a fictional world corre-
sponding to our thoughts, a notional world, but not the real world. But,
again, in order to have a notional world one has to have notions, which,
given the essentially representational nature of the notion of a notion, means
that there must be something represented, and this is where properties do
the work. By thinking I entertain concepts which express properties. This
much I’m guaranteed just by virtue of being a thinker. What I can’t guaran-
tee is that there are any objects in the world that are either picked out by
the names I use, or instantiate the properties of which I conceive.
One might object on the other side that we should credit SwampJoe with
genuine reference to Aristotle and Jay. After all, unlike the other cases, there
actually are objects that satisfy much of what he thinks about them. If they
be fictional entities, what a bizarre coincidence that life should imitate art
in this way. Well, the whole scenario with SwampJoe is a pretty bizarre
coincidence, so why should this add to the strangeness? It seems quite simi-
lar to a case of imaginative coincidence. Suppose someone were to write a
story that just happened to match a particular individual’s life perfectly.
(That’s the point of the disclaimers at the ends of movies.) Despite the match,
it just isn’t about them. One might object that in the case of SwampJoe it’s
more than coincidence, since it’s in virtue of his physical similarity to me
that he has these thoughts about Aristotle and Jay. But that’s to import a
causal dependence of his states on mine which isn’t part of the story. It’s
supposed to be a genuine coincidence that his states are physical duplicates
of mine. If it were otherwise, if he were the way he is because I am the way
I am, then even teleological historicists might grant him genuinely con-
tentful thought.
There’s one last issue to address. I’ve argued that our epistemic relation
to properties is more intimate than the corresponding relation to individuals.
But when it comes to natural kind properties, at least, doesn’t the distinction
collapse? In other words, is there any more reason to credit SwampJoewith
thoughts about water than with thoughts about Aristotle? True, it may be
necessary to credit him with thoughts, but why about water? Doesn’t some-
one nee4 to be in causal contact with that stuff to be able to think about it
in just the way someone needs to be in causal contact with Aristotle in order
to think about him?
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90 Mind 8 Language
Natural kinds pose a problem for SwampJoe to the extent they behave
like objects. So one approach for the defender of SwampJoe’s mentality is
to resist this assimilation. Natural kinds are properties which can play the
role of what is represented without any actual causal chain connecting the
mind and instances of the kind. Of course one has to have a theory of what
does underwrite the representation relation in this case, but there are pro-
posals around, such as Fodor’s asymmetric dependence condition. I don’t
know if that one in particular works, but it does show there is a way to
make sense out of the idea that one can represent a property even though
one has not had a causal interaction with any of its instantiations.
On the other hand, one can insist that to be water is to be that stuff, and
therefore to think about water requires actual causal contact in just the way
it does for individual objects. But even if we accept this, it still doesn’t show
that SwampJoe‘s apparent water-thoughts are meaningless; just that they
aren’t about water (i.e. H20). After all, when I claim to be able to conceive
of a possible world in which water is not H,O, the standard response is that
I’m wrong in thinking this is what I’m conceiving, I’m actually conceiving
of a world in which a ‘watery substance’ is not H20. Notice the response is
not that I fail to conceive anything at all. I think I’m thinking about water,
but I’m actually thinking of something intimately related to it. Why not say
something similar about SwampJoe? There is a property his water-concept
expresses, it’s just not H20. Perhaps it would come down to thinking about a
water-stereotype, in which case we would be endorsing the ’narrow content
defence’ on the second reading above.
In fact, it seems to me that the very idea that natural kind properties
behave l i e individuals+ that causal contact with their instantiations is
necessary for the capacity to represent them-argues for treating natural
kind concepts as containing genuinely singular referential apparatus. So, for
instance, one’s concept of water might involve demonstrative reference, per-
haps via a ’dthat’ operator affixed to a representation of ’watery substance’.
If we adopt an analysis of this sort, then SwampJoe’s thoughts about water
would be just like his thoughts about Aristotle, failure of reference but genu-
ine expression of a property. Thus we would add water, gold, and the like
to his cast of fictional characters.
Adopting the position that there is a fundamental difference between our
epistemic access to properties and individuals doesn’t relieve one of the obli-
gation to say how representation of properties works. In particular, an
account is needed of how our concepts determine which properties they
represent, which in turn determines which objects instantiate them. So if a
property is uninstantiated in our world, we need to know what makes our
mental state about it, and what determines which objects our concept would
apply to were the property in question to be instantiated. But, as I said
above, there are proposals around concerning these issues. I don’t claim to
know which one will work now. All I want to emphasize is that there is
sound motivation for treating properties (at least non-natural kinds) and
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 SwampJoe: Mind or Simulation? 91
objects differently, and doing so seems to give us the intuitively most plaus-
ible judgments about SwampJoe.

Department of Philosophy and Religion

North Carolina State University

References
Neander, K. this issue: Swampman Meets Swampcow.
Searle, J. 1980 Minds, Brains, and Programs. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 3,
417-57.

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