Traditionally the mind-body problem was thought to be exhausted by the dualist and materialist perspectives respectively. In the 1930s, however, arrived a third possibility, logical behaviourism. In this paper I will examine the dualist and behaviourist angles on whether one can ascribe a feeling f pain to an alien, given its behaviour. I will evaluate these two positions and argue that while my sympathy may lean slightly more toward the logical behaviourist, I actually feel that neither position is a particularly strong one.
Dualism was popularised by the writings of Rene Descartes during the 17th century and essentially emphasizes the distinction between the body and the mind. Two main varieties exist: substance dualism which asserts the immaterial nature of the human mind despite its tenuous connection with both body and brain; and attribute dualism, which claims that bodies can be organized in a way that creates mental properties but those mental properties are not directly reducible to physical properties. Substance dualism is the more extreme of the two whose main advocate was Descartes himself. When faced with the alien creature, the substance dualist may dismiss the creature as not being human and therefore obviously not having a mind and so is not feeling pain. The attribute dualist, however, is faced with a more ambiguous situation. She believes that the mental property of feeling pain is immaterial and not reducible to physical properties such as the behaviour indicating the pain. The attribute dualist is constrained by the unavoidable consequence of separating the mind and the body: accepting that each individual can only, through introspection, confidently recognise their own mental state. Accepting the dualist hypothesis compartme ...