The Problem of Other Minds

Philosophical claims are very often fatuous. The problems that give rise to such claims are, in some sense, pseudo-problems. But though pseudo, these problems are nevertheless deep. The problem of where your lap goes when you stand up is shallow; the problem of other minds, though also pseudo-problematic, is deep.

It is easy to motivate the problem of other minds: surely, I can only ever have access to my own sensations, my own perceptions, my own feelings, my own thoughts. These I know from 'the inside'. Do other people have sensations, perceptions, feelings, thoughts? Do their sensations and perceptions, thoughts and feelings resemble mine? These questions seem unanswerable if the only evidence I have is how other people appear from 'the outside' - in order to answer them I would have to be able to feel what they feel, sense what they sense, think what they think, and so on.

What is deep here is the sense of the otherness or other people, as well as the knowledge that, by hiding my feelings, I can put others at a disadvantage with respect to their knowledge of me. But in sex, the lack of access to the other can be particularly acute. Is she really enjoying herself? Should I push harder or not, faster or slower? How well does my sense of what pleases her match up with her own? The cult of orgasm is, I believe, a response to this kind of uncertainty: if she comes, the job is done. From this rather crude intuition flows the whole industry of foreplay as a kind of pump-priming, designed to bring the woman close enough to orgasm before penetration so that relatively little fucking stands a decent chance of bringing her to climax. Connected with this is the notion that sex aims at orgasm, and ends with it; also the primacy granted to simultaneous orgasm.

Well, maybe. Certainly, orgasm does function rather well as a measure. I love to help D come, and when I am eating her out and she comes I am very often keen to ride it out and then help her come again. This has been true also with A, though she does not have quite the capacity for serial orgasm that D does. But I do not think that for me this has anything to do with scorekeeping or with elimination of uncertainty. Though D now does quite often come from fucking, that was not true during the first year of our affair, and we did a huge amount of fucking in that time. I never at any point expected or hoped or even fantasized that D would come as result of fucking. When it did happen, it was not aimed at, and the fact that it is possible has, in some minor ways, changed the character of the sex that we have. Oral, on the other hand, certainly did aim at orgasm, and after she has come from oral, D loves to be fucked.

A: she too had never orgasmed from straight fucking, or 'unassisted intercourse', as the Kinsey Report terms it. With A, though, we set out deliberately to see if it could happen, almost as an experiment - one that was, at the first real attempt, a great success. A's interpretation of this was that a mental block had to be overcome: by believing that it was possible, and by setting out after it in a way that was focussed and intent but somehow still low-key and low-pressure, she was able finally to get past the point of near-climax that she had reached so many times before.

Did this elevate sex with A to some new status? No. She had come when I went down on her many times before, and had also helped herself to come around my cock with her hand, so she knew what it felt like to orgasm while being fucked. Did it feel much different because the climax came about without any stimulation besides that derived from fucking? No. Yet it was something that she wanted very much, and something that I was very happy to help her achieve.

Female orgasm is a puzzle from an evolutionary point of view. The various candidate explanations are convincingly demolished by Elisabeth Lloyd in her book, The Case of the Female Orgasm, published by Harvard a year or so ago. She defends the non-explanatory view that female orgasm is an accidental by-product: orgasm is strongly selected for in the male, and the female acquires it by happenstance, just as nipples are selected for in the female, and men end up with up with them by embryological accident. A very pleasing account, in Lloyd's view as well as mine, for if female orgasms are not for anything in evolutionary terms, they cannot be improperly or unnaturally generated. Yet I am not sure that this account can quite capture the delight that I feel when I help a woman achieve climax. That, I suppose, is what is distinctively human - all that outstrips what the best account of our origins can explain. For I do not suppose that evolution will explain our musical ability, or our love of play, or our capacity to do set-theory, any better than it will explain female orgasm.

I have wandered in my topic. About female orgasm I have much more to say. About the problem of other minds, though, I have little more to say. Z, who has no sensation below the waist, and who is despite that sexually responsive - her cunt gets wet, and swells with blood on arousal - has taught me to think and feel more carefully about these matters. She is, strangely, in much the same situation with respect to her own feelings as I am. Being with her, it is natural to describe her state as one of ignorance about what she feels rather than as not feeling it at all. She is so beautiful, so sexy, so desirable; and she is clearly wired to respond to the desire of others for her as well. Yet some part of the circuit is blown.

Z: well, she is not currently nearby. We did have a magical excursion in Central Park after midnight the last time she was in the city, about which I should blog. But this is enough for now.