Me and Avicenna on Philosophy Bites

A very interesting podcast. I wonder what kind of cognitive equipment the flying man would have to possess in order to be capable of knowing anything at all - especially something as philosophically abstract as knowing that he exists as a thinking entity. I imagine some philosophers would insist that the man would have to know a language in order to think such thoughts. Has God hard-wired the flying man with language? Can you hard-wire a flying man to possess something like language without his having the impression that an external world exists? And if the flying man is completely devoid of the experience of entities coming into existence, persisting, disappearing, etc. how would it ever occur to him to think about his own existence? It may wind up that the flying man will have to be understood as being a Putnam-style brain in a vat. Avicenna would then say the man falsely *thinks* he knows all kinds of things, but there is only one thing he actually does know, i.e., that he himself exists as a thinking entity. However, if he had never incorrectly thought he *knew* all those things, he would never be able to correctly deduce his own existence...

I very much enjoyed your fascinating, thought provoking discussion about Avicenna's flying man thought experiment (so much that I’ve listened to it 3 times). I think you are right that it might help a physicalist appreciate why some intuit not only that some part of us or even our essence is immaterial but that there is a "parallel between the self and God."

I appreciated your explanation of why Avicenna’s use of the flying man thought experiment to argue that the flying man’s self or soul isn’t a body fails, “at least at the very last inference,” as you put it, via your allusion to the identity of water and H2O and the fact that not being aware of an identity does not mean there is none. (I’m reminded of David Papineau’s use of the identity between actor Tony Curtis and Bernie Schwartz, the former being the stage name of the latter, in his arguments in defense of mind-brain identity and physicalism in general.)

What a great site you’ve created here, what a gift! Thank you!

hi prof. Adamson,

I'm not entirely convinced by the 'masked-man fallacy' objection to Avicenna's thought experiment. this is because it seems to me that the kind of awareness that Avicenna is trying to get at with the Flying Man - primitive self-awareness - is just so qualitatively distinct from the kind of awareness that one may have of objects external to the self (e.g., water) that it allows his deduction to go through. self-awareness of that sort is not a part with awareness of objects external to oneself.

what do you think? thanks in advance.