The Problem of Other Minds and Why It's Stranger Than Philosophers Admit

During a shamanic journey, I encountered an animal I did not recognise. It had a presence that was unmistakable, a distinct energy and character, and it communicated with me clearly. When I came back, I had to look it up to find out whether it existed at all. It did. It was a snow leopard.

I begin with this because it is the most direct response I know to the most common dismissal of what happens in shamanic practice. The standard objection is that journey encounters are generated by the practitioner's own unconscious, that what appears as an other is in fact a projection of the self dressed in symbolic clothing. It is a reasonable hypothesis.

But you cannot project an animal you have never heard of. The snow leopard arrived with its own character, its own way of moving and communicating, its own irreducible otherness. It was not mine. It came from somewhere that was not me. And when I returned to ordinary consciousness and verified its existence, the evidence of genuine encounter was as straightforward as evidence gets.

This is not the usual starting point for a discussion of the problem of other minds. The usual starting point is Descartes or Wittgenstein or the philosophical literature on analogy and inference. I will get there. But I want to begin here, with a specific animal in a specific journey, because I think the philosophical problem is considerably stranger than its standard treatments acknowledge, and the strangeness becomes most visible not in seminar rooms, but in practice.

The beautiful snow leopard

The Problem as Philosophy Frames It

The problem of other minds is one of the oldest and most stubbornly unsolved problems in Western philosophy. I know that I have a mind. I have direct, immediate access to my own conscious experience. But how do I know that you do? I observe your behaviour. I hear your words. I see your face arrange itself into expressions that resemble the expressions my face makes when I am in certain inner states. From all of this, I infer that something is happening inside you that resembles what happens inside me.

But the inference is never certain. I have no direct access to your experience. I cannot step inside your consciousness and verify that it is there. Everything I know about your inner life is mediated, indirect, constructed from external signs. The philosopher's zombie, a being behaviourally identical to a conscious person but with no inner life whatsoever, is at least conceptually possible. And if it is possible for you, it is possible for anyone. The problem extends outward from other humans to animals, to plants, to the living world in its entirety.

Philosophy has offered several responses to this. The argument from analogy: because your behaviour resembles mine, and mine is accompanied by conscious experience, yours probably is, too. The Wittgensteinian response: the very grammar of mental language presupposes other minds, so scepticism about them is incoherent. The evolutionary argument: consciousness presumably evolved for reasons and those reasons apply across species, not only to humans. Each of these has genuine force. None of them fully closes the gap. The problem remains open because the gap it points to is real: I genuinely cannot access your experience from the outside.

Where the Standard Treatment Stops Short

What troubles me about the philosophical literature on other minds is not that it is wrong but that it is too narrow in its assumptions about what kinds of access are available. The entire debate is structured around third-person observation: I watch you, I hear you, I measure your neural activity, and from all of this, I infer inward. The possibility that there might be modes of access that are not third-person, not inferential, not built from external signs, is not seriously entertained. It is not even seriously dismissed. It is simply absent.

This is a significant omission. If shamanic practice and the broader category of anomalous knowing that I have written about elsewhere involve genuine access to the interiority of other beings, then the problem of other minds looks very different. Not solved, exactly, but reframed. The question shifts from whether other minds can be known at all, given that inference from behaviour is all we have, to what different modes of knowing other minds are available, and what each of them can and cannot reach.

I am not claiming that shamanic practice dissolves the problem. I am claiming that it reveals dimensions of the problem that the standard philosophical treatment has not accounted for, and that those dimensions are philosophically significant.

What Journey Actually Reveals About Other Minds

When I access the interiority of another being in journey, what I encounter is not a reflection of myself. It feels, consistently and unmistakably, like another person. The being has its own energy, its own character, its own way of being present. It is recognisably distinct from every other being I have encountered, in the way that individual humans are distinct from one another despite sharing a common nature.

This is particularly striking with plants and trees. Not all of them communicate in the same way. They tend to speak in simpler sentences than humans, without the elaboration and qualification that human minds generate. They are more immediate, more direct, more attuned to what is present in their immediate environment. They do not pontificate. This is not a deficiency. It is a different mode of intelligence, shaped by a different kind of existence, and it is as recognisably real as the intelligence of any human I have sat with.

The philosophical significance of this is considerable. Animism, the oldest and most widespread ontological framework in human history, holds that the world is populated by beings with genuine interiority, beings that are not merely objects but subjects with their own perspectives, their own relationships, their own ways of knowing and being known.

Western philosophy has largely treated this as a category error, the projection of human subjectivity onto a world that is fundamentally composed of inert matter. But what I encounter in practice does not feel like projection. It feels like contact. And the snow leopard, arriving from a space I had no prior knowledge of, is as clean a piece of evidence against the projection hypothesis as I know how to produce.

The tree that speaks simply is not a lesser mind. It is a different one. That distinction is the heart of animism properly understood, and no armchair philosophy has access to it.

The Projection Objection and Why It Is Insufficient

The projection objection deserves to be taken seriously before it is set aside. It holds that what shamanic practitioners encounter in journey is generated by their own unconscious, that the apparent otherness of the beings encountered is an illusion produced by the same psychological processes that generate dreams and the sense of presence in religious experience. This is a coherent hypothesis and it cannot be dismissed simply because the encounters feel real. Many things that feel real are not.

But the hypothesis has a specific predictive implication: if journey encounters are projections of the practitioner's unconscious, they should be populated by beings and information the practitioner already has access to, dressed in unfamiliar forms. They should not produce beings the practitioner has never encountered, information the practitioner did not previously have, or communications that consistently contradict what the practitioner expected or wanted to hear.

There is a more precise version of this objection worth naming directly, because it is the one a careful reader will reach for first: cryptomnesia. The resurfacing of information encountered at some point and then genuinely forgotten, so that it returns feeling wholly new. Perhaps I once glimpsed a photograph of a snow leopard, in a documentary half-watched or a page turned without attention, and simply lost the memory of having seen it. This is not a fringe theory. It is the standard, well-evidenced explanation for exactly this kind of apparently novel content surfacing in dreams and altered states, and I do not think it can be waved away.

I take it seriously, and I cannot rule it out for the snow leopard on its own. I cannot prove I never encountered that image somewhere in sixty years of a visual life. What cryptomnesia cannot do, however, is account for the pattern rather than the instance. A forgotten photograph might explain a name and a shape. It does not explain a character that behaves consistently across an encounter, that responds to what I bring to it, that communicates something I did not already believe and in some cases did not want to hear, and that I only later have reason to verify.

Across four decades of practice, this is the pattern I have watched hold, not once but repeatedly, with beings whose behaviour in journey continues to exceed what forgotten information could supply. The single case is genuinely ambiguous, and I want to be honest about that rather than overstate my evidence. The pattern, held over decades, is harder to explain by a theory built for isolated cases of resurfaced memory.

My experience, and the experience of practitioners I respect and trust, does not fit what projection alone would predict either. The snow leopard is one instance. The broader pattern is that journey encounters regularly surprise, regularly contradict, regularly arrive from outside the practitioner's existing knowledge and expectations. This is not what projection produces. Projection is, by definition, the practitioner's own material. Genuine otherness resists and surprises in ways that the practitioner's own unconscious has no reason to do.

This does not conclusively prove that the beings encountered have independent existence in the way that physical objects do. The ontological question remains genuinely open, and I hold it with appropriate uncertainty. What it does establish is that something is happening in these encounters that neither projection nor cryptomnesia adequately explains on its own.

What This Means for the Problem of Other Minds

If shamanic practice involves genuine access to the interiority of other beings, even partial and imperfect access, then the problem of other minds is both more tractable and more complex than philosophy has assumed. More tractable because third-person inference from behaviour is not the only available route. More complex because the range of beings whose interiority may be accessible turns out to be far wider than the human circle within which the problem is usually discussed.

The animist ontology that my own practice has led me toward holds that interiority is not a rare and remarkable property possessed only by humans and perhaps a few cognitively sophisticated animals. It is a fundamental feature of the living world, expressed differently across different kinds of beings, but present throughout. The tree communicates differently from the human not because it lacks something the human has, but because it is something different, with its own mode of being and its own relationship to the world it inhabits.

If this is even partially right, the problem of other minds is not primarily a problem about whether other humans are conscious. It is a problem about the nature and distribution of interiority across a world that may be far more densely populated with genuine subjects than our dominant ontology has been willing to entertain. The philosophical tools we have developed for thinking about other minds were built for a much narrower question. They need to be extended, or replaced, by frameworks adequate to the full scope of what may actually be there.

The Limits of What Practice Can Establish

I want to be honest about what I am and am not claiming. Shamanic practice gives me access to something. That something has the character of genuine otherness, genuine interiority, genuine independent existence. But I cannot step outside my own experience to verify that what I am accessing is what I think it is. The same epistemic limitation that makes the problem of other minds difficult for philosophy makes it difficult for practice, too. I encounter the snow leopard. I cannot prove that my encounter with it maps precisely onto whatever the snow leopard is in itself.

What I can say is that practice consistently produces encounters with beings that behave as genuine others: that surprise, contradict, communicate on their own terms, and resist assimilation to my expectations. That is evidence of something. It is not certainty about everything. I hold the metaphysical question, what exactly are these beings and what is the nature of the reality they inhabit, with genuine openness. The phenomenology is clear. The ontology remains an open and fascinating question.

The problem of other minds is usually presented as a problem about knowledge: how do I know that you are conscious? But underneath that epistemological question is a deeper one about what the world actually is. If other minds are real, and if they extend beyond the human circle into the living world at large, then we are not the isolated subjects we have taken ourselves to be, marooned in private experience and inferring our way toward connection. We are part of a world that is already thick with interiority, already communicating in registers we are only beginning to learn to hear.

The snow leopard knew that. I just had to look it up.

Have you had an experience of genuine contact with a non-human mind, in nature, in practice, or somewhere unexpected? I would genuinely like to hear it.

Kathy Postelle Rixon is Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, a Cambridge researcher, and seventh-level shaman. You can contact her at kathy@magicinharmony.com or visit her website at www.magicinharmony.com.