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The Santol Fruit: A Philosophical Conundrum

Cambodia has an abundance of strange fruit. Most travelers here have heard of the durian: that’s the one that smells like rotting feet. Yet, there are other less commonly known fruits which are also enjoyed by Khmer.

One such fruit is the Santol fruit or as the Khmer call it, Komping reach. Of course, I misheard the pronunciation and walked around for a month calling it the “cum piggery” fruit. You can find them in pretty much any open market. However, I have never seen one in Luckymart.

The most basic way to eat the fruit is to remove the skin and cut it into pieces. The outer layers of the fruit have a more sour flavor and a harder texture. In contrast, the inner portions are sweeter with a softer texture.

A variation on this is to cut up 2 Santol’s into medium sized pieces and place them in a large bowl. Then, mix them with about ½ tsp of salt and about ¼ cup of sugar. The flavor is best when you refrigerate it for at least an hour or 2. Adding 1-3 diced red chilies gives us the second variant.

So what’s the deal? Why am I writing about the Santol? I find the Santol remarkable insofar as I have no idea whether or not I like it, despite the fact that I have eaten it on many occasions. When I eat the Santol I have the strangest reactions. I might shake my head no with a look of disgust while saying “mmm.” I eat and eat and eat, all the while with a look of bewilderment upon my face, muttering “I don’t know” over and over. I keep eating as if each bite were an experiment that will somehow provide me with the crucial data to confirm or reject a hypothesis.

This I find very disconcerting. How is it that I cannot determine if I like something? Normally, whenever I try a food I either like it or I don’t. On rare occasions, I may need a moment or two to evaluate a given food. But, I have eaten it countless times and still have no notion as to my preference.

Shouldn’t we be able to determine which mental states we are having? Take pain, for example. We know when we are in pain. Don’t’ we? Imagine if your friend told you that she didn’t know if she were in pain. That would be odd wouldn’t it? Pain and its absence, at least in normal situations, are the sorts of thing that we have certainty about: likewise with pleasure. Right?

There are three common ways of thinking about mental states such as pain and pleasure. First, we have physicalism (monistic materialism). Second, we have dualism. Third, we have functionalism.

The physicalist approach is less popular than the dualist position and is in vogue with most people of a scientific outlook. This perspective holds that there is no soul or spirit or private sensations. There just is physical material. What we call mental states (such as sensations, emotions, beliefs, etc.) are just various physical states of the nervous system in general and the brain in particular.

Pain, it would seem, would be some sort of physical state: let’s say pain occurs when the c-fibers are firing in our nervous system. To be clear, pain would be nothing other than the c-fibers firing. What is more, we determine that pain is occurring by checking to see what is happening to the subjects c-fibers.

One problem with the physicalist approach is that it would be unclear which mental states I am having without some sort of “brain scan.” Otherwise, how could I know what neurons are firing and what neurotransmitters are being released. It seems counter intuitive that I could not truly know my own mental states without the aid of machinery.

Another problem with the physicalist view is that arising from disagreement between a “brain scan” and my own self reports and observation of my behavior. Suppose a doctor gives me a “brain scan” and tells me that I do like the Santol. Is that good reason to believe that I like it? Suppose he told me I was mistaken about prohawk, which I believe that I hate. Why should I believe him? Aren’t my self reports and behavior reliable. Shouldn’t I give epistemic priority to self reports and behavior over “brain scan” results? Suppose a nail was in my arm and I was screaming in pain, but the doctor told me “don’t worry you are not in pain, you c-fibers are not firing.” Shouldn’t we believe me over the doctor and his “brain scanning” technology (assuming it is functioning properly)?

Dualism is the oldest and most popular approach (especially amongst the general public). For the dualist, there are two kinds of things in the world: mental and material. Mental states are non-material parts of reality (think of soul or spirit). Mental states (beliefs, emotions, sensations, etc.) cannot be reduced to matter or configurations of matter over time. In this view, pain is not a c-fiber firing or some neurological condition. Indeed, they would hold that c-fibers could be firing and yet a subject could conceivably feel no pain. Likewise, a c-fiber might not be firing, yet a subject could be feeling pain. (Note, there are many different sub-groupings of dualist that disagree about causal relationships between mind and matter. We are going to ignore that complexity here.)

There are a whole mess of problems for dualism. First, if mental states are non-physical things that people have, then they are private. This leads to the problem of solipsism. That is, how do I know that anyone else is actually having private sensations at all? Maybe they say they have pain, maybe they act as if the have pain and maybe their nervous system is in what we think of as a pain state. But, on this view that would tell us nothing. We could never know if they were experiencing anything at all.

Another problem has to do with inverted sensations. On the dualist account, it would be possible for two people to both look at a color (say red) and have two different private sensations. They both detect the color, have the same neural state, yet X has the private sensation of blue and Y has the private sensation of red. All the while they could never determine if the other is having the same private sensation. That is not helpful at all.

A final big problem for dualism is that it is metaphysically complicated. How are we going to account for the causal relationships between mind and matter? How could we accept a theory that posits private entities, the existence of which cannot be publicly tested? Theories are supposed to provide us with explanations and insight. Positing the existence of non-material mental stuff doesn’t seem to be doing much here.

Finally, we have functionalism. People in IT and robotics tend to find the functionalist view to be the most intuitively correct. The functionalist holds that mental states are just functional states. What does that mean?

Let us use the example of a robot. If we wanted to build a robot that felt pain, we should not need to give it c-fibers. In fact, it shouldn’t matter what kind of hardware or software we use: so long as it can be able to detect structural damage to itself. Indeed, functional states are multiply realizable. That means that we could use all sorts of different hardware and software to get the same result. A man, a cat and a dozen different robots could all be said to “see”, regardless of their differing physical states, so long as they were all functionally capable of gathering and using optical data.

Functionalism definitely offers a lot of advantages over physicalism. Not having to worry about hardware or software is a good thing. Imagine if we encountered an alien species with a completely different nervous system: for example, a non-carbon based life-form. Do we want to say that they don’t feel pain because they don’t have c-fibers? Surely not!

Both functionalism and physicalism share a similar downside. They just don’t mesh with our normal intuitions about minds and mental states. We normally think of them as non-material and private, regardless of how philosophically problematic such a view is. Most people reject the idea that we could build a robot that “really” had sensations.

So, does this help with the Santol? I think not much. Sadly, I don’t have access to a brain scanning device. Moreover, if I did, I would be quite skeptical about its results. The functionalist would have me look at my behavior and self reports when eating the Santol, which are all muddled and inconsistent. The dualist approach gets me nowhere. If my sensations are private and I am confused about them, then that means there would never be an objective way to figure out my preferences.

Here, the reader might suggest “Ahah, your problem is that you are puzzled over whether or not you like X. This is only confusing because you believe that you cannot like and not like something at the same time. Perhaps the problem is that X is a whole composed of parts some of which you like and some of which you do not like. Thus, there is no contradiction in your mental states.”

Well, that very well could be the case. I certainly lack the vocabulary to accurately describe my culinary experiences.

I have found that when I eat the Santol plain, as well as when sugar and salt are added, I am really at a loss for a solution. Interestingly, when the chili is added I feel a bit more inclined towards saying I like it. Is it because a flavor has been added, or because one has been masked, or is there some new emergent flavor property arising from the various flavor components? Strangely, when I am very drunk I profess that I really truly do love the Santol. Is that because my brain is malfunctioning, or is it because I am less inhibited and thus more receptive to the unique flavor of the Santol? Regardless, once sober the ambiguity returns and I can no longer account for my previous certainty.

Alas, I will continue to eat the Santol, making faces, strange noises and confessing my confusion. Perhaps if you try the Santol fruit you too shall find yourself riddling over the fundamental nature of consciousness and the epistemic reliability of assessments of your mental states.

James Giacometti

5 thoughts on “The Santol Fruit: A Philosophical Conundrum

  • Hmm. Interesting exercise, but the question is too self-absorbed and anthropomorphic for me. A more practical question is, “Does this pig/chicken/frog/fish I’m about to slaughter feel pain?” This raises the matter of sentience, which I suspect a fruit lacks but which I think takes precedence of assessing one’s personal taste.

    Reply
  • When you eat fruit, eat fruit-don’t think.

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  • I think it is worth savoring the fact that you can’t tell whether you like the fruit.

    Maybe you are not enjoying the fruit (and maybe you are), but you can enjoy the novel inability to decide.

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  • Gavinmac this guy is not. Tries too hard and it shows with the 5 star vocabulary words. Just be yourself when writing; eat or don’t eat the fruit, but don’t think about it too much (as mentioned above).

    Reply

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