14 DAY TRIAL // It is hard answering a simple question: what is mind?
A team of psychologists at Harvard University made a survey on more than 2,000 subjects asked to depict how they perceived the minds of others using two different elements: agency (the individual ability for self-control, morality and planning), and experience (the capacity of detecting emotions-sensations like hunger, fear and pain).
The study points a subjective way of perceiving mental traits in others, not regarded as a single continuum, fact that explains many moral and legal decisions.
"Important societal beliefs, such as those about capital punishment, abortion, and the legitimacy of torture, rest on perceptions of these dimensions, as do beliefs about a number of philosophical questions," said Kurt Gray, a doctoral student in Harvard's Department of Psychology.
"Can robots ever have moral worth? What is it like to be God? Is the human experience unique?"
The subjects were presented with 13 characters: 7 living human forms (7-week-old fetus, 5-month-old infant, 5-year-old girl, adult woman, adult man, man in a persistent vegetative state, and the respondent himself or herself), 3 animals (frog, dog, and wild chimpanzee), a dead woman, God, and a sociable robot.
The subjects had to rate the traits on the extent to which each had a number of qualities, from hunger, fear, embarrassment, and pleasure to self-control, morality, memory and thought.
Agency and experience are independent traits: one form can be regarded as having experience without having any agency, and vice versa.
Infants were regarded as high in experience but low in agency (they experience feelings, but cannot control their actions) while God was perceived as having agency but not experience.
"Respondents, the majority of whom were at least moderately religious, viewed God as an agent capable of moral action, but without much capacity for experience," said Gray.
"We find it hard to envision God sharing any of our feelings or desires."
The subjects regarded themselves and other "normal" human adults as possessing the highest experience and agency; a dead person was totally devoid of both.
Some entities, like fetuses and people in a persistent vegetative state were seen as having little agency, but possessing something in the middle on experience, thus people disagree on whether these forms are truly capable of experience or not.
"The perception of experience to these characters is important, because along with experience comes a suite of inalienable rights, the most important of which is the right to life," Gray says.
"If you see a man in a persistent vegetative state as having feelings, it feels wrong to pull the plug on him, whereas if he is just a lump of firing neurons, we have less compunction at freeing up his hospital bed."
"If attributing experience to another entity is the key to imbuing them with moral worth, attributing agency is the key for holding them responsible for their actions," he says.
"When we perceive agency in another, we believe they have the capacity to recognize right from wrong and can punish them accordingly," Gray says.
"The legal system, with its insanity and reduced capacity defenses, reflects the fact that people naturally assess the agency of individuals following a moral misdeed."