What Ghosh chose to include and not include in this leaves some really weird gaps. He mentions Descartes, and the "cogito", but quotes Seth in attributing to De

What Ghosh chose to include and not include in this leaves some really weird gaps. He mentions Descartes, and the "cogito", but quotes Seth in attributing to Descartes an "unholy trinity, of language, intelligence and consciousness", and then links that "trinity" to behaviorism. This would make one think that until "recently", most scientists were in the same boat as Descartes, but I think this is really misleading. Descartes believed that mental stuff and physical stuff were categorically different ("cartesian dualism"), whereas almost all scientists would subscribe to some form of monism / physicalism. But the reason for the cogito, which has persisted until at least "recently" is that subjective phenomena are intrinsically not accessible for objective observation. At best, we can capture the "correlates" of consciousness, whether those be behaviors, fMRI BOLD signals, EEG readings, etc, none of which directly shows that there's an inner subjective experience. There's still maybe the possibility of a philosophical zombie, who has the right objectively available signals but doesn't have any internal experience. But scientists have all the while been working under the operational assumption that animals have something like our experiences. When we study aggression or stress or motivation or whatever else in animal models, and draw parallels between the brains of mice or monkeys and humans, we're assuming that their emotional states feel at least somewhat like ours do. A classic protocol for rodents, relevant in testing anti-depressants (where the whole point is to change some aspect of our subjective experience) is the "forced swim", where you drop a mouse in water in a vessel with smooth vertical sides, and time how long it takes for them to stop struggling. This is taken to be a measure of "despair". If scientists decades ago didn't believe animals experienced anything, they wouldn't do this research. Descartes' "I think therefore I am" was the minimal statement he could make with absolute certainty -- but we all operate with at least a smidge less solipsism if we assume that other humans are conscious. And it's of course only a small extension to guess that other primates, who have rich social relations and brains similar to ours have a lot of overlapping experiences. And that other mammals, like rodents, who have a bunch of stuff in their brains like ours, have overlapping experiences. And then suddenly you're open to this landscape of different kinds of creates with different kinds of mental experiences.