Good question. I suspect that the answer is 'yes', but we need to be clear that there are some puzzles about so-called 'self-deception' that need to be avoided. It's not plausible that I could lie to myself, fully knowing that I'm doing so, and also believe what I'm telling myself. Instead, we often *shroud* lots of what we tell ourselves in such a way that its untruth is not self-evident. So here I am with a plate of oatmeal-raisin cookies. I like them a lot, and although I know on some level that I shouldn't eat very many, I'm *extremely* clever at coming up reasons why I can have just one more. (Had a rough day, will run an extra mile tomorrow, raisins are pretty good for you, you know the drill.) So I might convince myself that I can clear the plate. But to do that I have to somehow shroud the fact that I know on some level that I shouldn't.

The upshot is that a direct answer to your question is: Some people (maybe most of us) believe things that we know on some level are lies (but usually when we do we--usually temporarily--lose sight of the fact that we know this). It's only afterwards that we admit to ourselves, faced with the empty cookie plate, that what we told ourselves was bull!

By the way, _Madame Bovary_ is (among other things) a brilliant case study of this phenomenon.

Mitch Green

Certainly, there is a difference between saying "Harry is rude" and believing that Harry is rude since we can say things that we don't believe and we can believe things that we don't say. But I think your (first) question is about how closely the content of our words matches the content of our beliefs in cases where we do our best to say what we believe. Here are a few cases where the content of my sincere words and the content of my beliefs may diverge:

1. I may say "Harry is rude" without really understanding the difference between being rude and being obnoxious, in which case the content of what I say may be somewhat different than the content of my belief -- if what I really believe, without having the right word to express it, is that he is obnoxious. Once someone explains the difference to me, I would recognize that I believe Harry is obnoxious rather than rude.

2. I may say "Harry is rude", knowing that this is a rather simplified expression of my belief yet being unwilling to take the time to add various qualifications -- that he is only occasionally rude, or only rude to people that annoy him, for example. If someone else voices these qualifications, I easily agree without altering my belief in any way.

3. A child may ask me whether Harry is rude and I may say "Yes, Harry is rude" because I know that this is best word for marking a point of agreement between me and the child. If I said "No, Harry is not rude, he is obnoxious", the child would wrongly assume that I do not agree with her. I am trying my best to share my belief with my audience.

These cases should also make it clear that there is no general answer to your (second) question about whether the contents of our words or the contents of our beliefs are more important (when they diverge). Both matter but they matter in different ways. The content of our words matters the most when there are not other indicators of what we believe, or when our audience is inattentive to those indicators. Words matter least when our audience can be counted on to share most of our assumptions, or when the focus is on immediate action rather than psychological discernment.

Freud made many questionable claims about the function of dreaming (e.g. as the fulfilling of wishes) and the meaning of particular dream images. I wouldn't want to defend everything he says about dreams, but I do want to resist your conclusion that dreaming is "meaningless" and dream interpretation is "at best harmless entertainment ."

Many therapists (Freudian and otherwise) treat a person's dreams as a source of insight about that person's thoughts and feelings, preoccupations and fears. This is entirely compatible with your claim that dreams are a by-product of moving information from short term to long term memory since it is (at least in part) our thoughts and concerns that determine what information gets moved into long term memory. The things that a person continues to remember over time show us something about the topics and the feelings that preoccupy that person. All recent events have some connection to a past event, but not all recent events make it into our dreams; so it is reasonable to suppose that the material that makes it into our dreams is more closely, or more significantly, related to our background thoughts and concerns, than the material that does not make it into our dreams.

Actually, the categories of "short term" and "long term" memory are pretty crude (psychologists now tend to make many more distinctions), and the move from short term to long term memory (as traditionally understood) happens within seconds, not over days. So whatever storage of information is being consolidated during sleep, it is not "simply" a move from short term to long term memory. Furthermore, the suggestion that dreams are a by-product of memory storage doesn't imply that they are "meaningless." Freud was eager to understand the biological underpinnings of dreaming, but he insisted that the contents of our dreams are just as meaningful as the contents of our waking thoughts and feelings (which might also be called "by-products" of perceptual and motivational processes).

In addition to using dreams as a source of discovery about the dreamer's existing thoughts and feelings, dream interpretation can people to develop connections between otherwise scattered thoughts (helping to unify one's psychic life) and it can help people to express difficult feelings. These aspects of dream interpretation can be extremely valuable.

There are two different distinctions that are of interest here.

First, there is a distinction between ends and means. Going to the kitchen is a means to the end of eating food. That is one way in which your desire to go to the kitchen is derivative from your desire to eat. Given the complexities of achieving most of our ends (buying and cooking and preparing food, earning money to be able to buy food, setting the alarm in order to get to one's job in order to earn money, and so on), the majority of our desires are bound to be derivative in this sense.

Second, there is a distinction between original goals and evolved goals. The original goals of a child may be few and simple (to eat, to avoid pain, to be loved, etc.) while the evolved goals of an adult are many (to travel, to learn about plants, to enjoy music, to learn other languages, to have children, to deepen friendships, etc.). It would be a mistake to assume that the adult's many goals are all just means to the original goals of a child, however -- that enjoying music, for example, is really just a means to the original ends of a child. The fact that one desire develops out of another doesn't mean that its ultimate aim is the satisfaction of that first desire.

If I have a sudden hankering to eat raspberries, it strikes me that I might want not want to eat them as a means to any end. I just want to eat some raspberries. So it's not derivative in any causal sense--it's not that I want this because it's a means of getting something else, and it's not obviously a result of some other desire. But our various desires might fall into natural classes. Wanting raspberries perhaps falls into the same class as wanting chocolate, and into a different class from wanting to get together with a friend. Wanting to eat some rasperries is an "instance" (that's the word I'd use) of some general type--it's an aesthetic desire, rather than a desire for interaction. If all humans have a set of fundamental desires like this, I think the list of them is quite long, and a lot of our specific desires fall into many categories, or resist categorization.

Good question, and I think it has a lot of philosophical import. Here's why. What we might call a "true lie" is one where the liar knows what she is doing. She knows that she needs to do or say something to alter what her target believes in order to get him to do something the liar wants. Contrast this with a "behavioristic lie," one that has the effect of getting the target to behave a certain way but without the "liar" knowing how she is doing it. Take the case of a 3-year-old girl who has learned that saying "I'm tired" often gets her out of doing something she doesn't want to do. One night her dad says "It's time to go to bed," so she repeats her standard ploy, "I'm tired." She does not seem to know how her lie works!

This difference between "true lying" and "behavioristic lying" seems to make a big difference. Behavioristic lying might not require any especially impressive cognitive abilities. Well, behavioristic learning itself is pretty impressive--and it allows more interesting and flexible forms of deception than, say, animal mimicry (the viceroy butterfly isn't doing anything cognitive in "pretending" to look like the poisonous monarch butterfly). But it's not as impressive as true lying. Your dog's behavior, if it is just behavioristic lying, does not seem to require understanding your mental states--your beliefs, desires, or intentions. Rather, your dog, like the 3-year-old girl, may have simply learned from past experience what works to get what she wants (e.g., to get fed or taken for a walk). Real lying, on the other hand, seems to require understanding that others perceive the world differently from you, they have different desires, beliefs, and intentions than your own. One cannot intentionally manipulate others' beliefs (i.e., truly lie) unless one understands that they have beliefs that can be manipulated (i.e., that can be false).

I happen to think the ability to "truly lie" may be unique to humans' (though perhaps it shows up in some other higher primates or dolphins or perhaps even dogs given their long co-evolution with humans). And I think it likely evolved because of our ancestors' complex social interactions (including reciprocal altruism) and in tandem with our remarkable ability to interpret, explain, and predict the behavior of others and ourselves in terms of beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. Once you've got that ability, you may be on your way to being able to think about alternative possibilities, choosing (freely) in light of such thinking about alternative future outcomes, thinking symbolically, doing philosophy, the whole shabang! Though I'm a bit leery of saying that so much of what makes us human is tied to our remarkable ability to truly lie...

You are raising really interesting questions that philosophers debate under the headings of "mental causation," "theory of action," and "free will." One way the problem gets generated is by assuming, as you do, that thoughts (including decisions or intentions) are immaterial things. That's what Descartes said, and ever since, the main objection to his view is your question--how could an immaterial thing causally interact with a physical thing like the brain (and vice versa, since on his view the physical world sends information through the brain to the mind which consciously experiences it--how the heck could that happen?).

The main response to this problem is by giving up your assumption of "dualism" and instead try to understand how thoughts and conscious experiences can be part of the physical world. That's no easy task. But one way to make the initial move in that direction is to see that the idea of non-physical or immaterial thoughts makes no more sense than the idea of physical thoughts. We simply have no clue what an immaterial soul or mind would be or how it would work and we have no idea how we might go about studying immaterial things. On the other hand, we are increasingly understanding how the brain works to produce thoughts, experiences, and actions, and we are beginning to understand how we might study consciousness and action in a way that combines first-person reports about how things seem to us with "hard" science approaches, such as neuroscience.

And if we assume that mental states just are brain states (or perhaps mental states "arise from"--without being distinct from--brain states), then we can begin to answer your question of how thoughts cause actions, since they are all part of the physical system.

Hope this helps!

Two comments on the central pair of assertions: "[T]houghts are not physical. They're metaphysical" -- one terminological (but not insignificant), the other more substantial.

(1) The terminological comment is this: "Metaphysical" does not mean "non-physical", "supernatural", or anything of that kind. Metaphysics is just the traditional label for a bunch of topics famously discussed -- though not for the first time! -- in Aristotle's Metaphysics.

That book, or rather collection of books, is so called because it was placed meta ta phusika, after the Physics, by ancient editors. Its topics include questions like what makes something an object rather than an event or process? must objects have essential properties and if so what? are numbers a kind of object? what is a cause? Now, those questions (and similar ones that we also nowadays by extension call metaphysical) raise very general issues. And you can see why the ancients might have been at a bit of a loss as to how to classify them, and so just called them -- in effect -- "the sort of questions that were dealt with by Aristotle after some more tractable questions of physics". But do note that they are mostly very general questions about the same world that e.g. science and mathematics addresses: they are not essentially questions about some further, supernatural or non-natural, realm. Indeed, lots of contemporary metaphysicians -- i.e. lots of theorists interested in such very general questions -- are naturalists, and suppose that the natural world that science and mathematics addresses is the only world there is. For more, see this Stanford Encyclopedia article.

(2) Leaving that aside, though: why should we suppose that thoughts are not physical? What does that mean? Is it true? After all, thoughts are states or events that dispose us to suitable actions: and we've every reason to suppose that our actions are non-spookily generated by neural events. So maybe talking about thoughts etc. is just another way of talking about those physical happenings (as it were, a software rather than a hardware level of description of the distributed processing system in our skulls).

And certainly, it isn't obvious that "thoughts are not physical", as the arguments in any introductory book in the philosophy of mind should make clear. (I still quite like this student-friendly book!)

I would like to focus on your last question: Is it possible that plants and animals have thoughts just like people? Let's take animals first. We are animals, so at least some animals have thoughts just like people. Our nearest animal relatives--the primates--probably have thoughts very much like ours, though (perhaps with a few very special exceptions) theirs differ from ours in that none of theirs are expressed in language (while some, if not all, of ours probably are). (The few very special exceptions would be those primates who have been taught various kinds of sign languages or artificial languages.) Going down the evolutionary tree, I'd be willing to say that other mammals have thoughts not unlike ours, etc. In fact, I'd be willing to say that any animal that has a suitably rich nervous system might have thoughts not unlike ours (what counts as "suitably rich" is open for debate, of course). In fact, I'll propose that having a nervous system (either biological or artificial) is a necessary condition for having thoughts.

That probably rules out plants.