The Cat in the Mirror
We know it notices the mirror because it avoids it deliberately. If we shift the mirror so that it reflects the place where it usually sits, it moves. But if one of us waves from behind the cat, where it can see us only in the reflection, it turns around and looks straight at us.
The mirror is a familiar piece of furniture in the cat's world, so its lack of fear, surprise, or hostility tells us little by itself. The turn is more revealing: the cat knows, at least in practice, that the mirror shows something behind it. Yet it consistently avoids looking directly at its own reflection.
The cat uses the mirror to find us, yet avoids looking directly at its own reflection.
Looking Away
The cat cannot avoid seeing the reflection, but it does not know what to do with it. Its response appears to be: this is nonsense. Stop this foolishness. Look away and do something useful, like monitoring the situation or cleaning yourself.
This is not really about my cat. Any intelligent creature can ignore, neglect, deny, or rationalize what lies too far beyond its ability to understand. This means that the brain may not register such a thing as a difficult problem. It may simply dismiss it as nonsense that can safely be ignored.
Two Skepticisms
Many people today are proud of being skeptical, as if skepticism were automatically a sign of higher intelligence. But skepticism is ambiguous. There is a disciplined skepticism that protects thought from credulity. There is also an animal skepticism: a practical dismissal of whatever offers no smell, touch, food, threat, immediate use, or stable place in the world. My cat is skeptical in exactly this sense. Many apes would be skeptical of aesthetic disinterestedness. So would many clever humans. Attention without an obvious benefit or practical purpose may be a more advanced capacity than dismissal: staying with a strange thing long enough to find out what it is, without simply believing it.
"Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" John Keats, letter to George and Thomas Keats, 1817
Philosophy and Reality
The unsettling thing is not just the difficulty of a given problem, like identifying oneself in a mirror. A person can fail to solve an equation without feeling threatened by it. What makes a problem psychologically unsettling is that it disturbs the person's self-image, world-image, or the relation between them. Some fields of inquiry raise questions of this kind more directly than others. Philosophy is one of them.
Moral and political philosophy touch our self-image and sense of purpose. They ask what we should do, what we owe, and what kind of creature we are. The bias is toward answers that protect our self-image, commitments, and sense of purpose. Because these questions make a practical difference, people become animated, take sides, and fight for a cause.
More abstract are theological and metaphysical questions about the nature of the world itself, rather than our place and purpose within it. Is reality purposive or indifferent? Is mind fundamental or accidental? These questions can disturb the background against which moral and practical questions make sense.
Self, World, Relation
The main problem is the relation between the self and the world. A change in either can be unsettling. But when the relation changes, what counts as self and world changes with it.
By self I mean the image of what kind of creature I am and what I am doing here. By world I mean the larger context in which action, purpose, fact, and value make sense. The relation is how the self belongs to the world while encountering it from one place within it.
Any mind has to keep track of all three. This is the mirror problem in its most general form. The self appears as an element inside the world, but it also appears as the condition from which the world is encountered. The world seems to contain the knower, and yet the knower is the site in which the world becomes present. From the outside, the self is one object among others. From the inside, the world is given only through the self's own appearing field. This is not a puzzle at the edge of philosophy. It is the structure that makes philosophy unstable.
The Human Version
The cat's difficulty is not simply that it sees an image. The reflection puts its body in one place and its visible image in another. The image is there, but there is no second cat to smell or touch. It moves exactly as the cat moves. The cat can end the problem by looking away.
Human beings do the same under more respectable names: ignorance, neglect, denial, rationalization. In philosophy we may call something "merely abstract," "just metaphysics," "wordplay," "mysticism," "nonsense," "unfalsifiable," or "impractical." That judgment is sometimes correct, but it can also become a way of refusing the question before we have understood it.
My cat looks away. We can do the same with an argument. The difficult part is noticing when skepticism has stopped helping us understand.
