There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of... course, on memory).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we imagine what it is like to be a languageless creature, we start, naturally, from our own experience, and most of what then... springs to mind has to be adjusted (mainly downward). The sort of consciousness such animals enjoy is dramatically truncated, compared to ours. A bat, for instance, not only can't wonder whether it's Friday; it can't even wonder whether it's a bat; there is no role for wondering to play in its cognitive structure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In chess we find several quite crisp distinctions that can also be discerned rather more problematically in the larger game of lif...e. There are, for instance, the "forced moves" in chess. Moves are occasionally forced by the rules of chess: in these instances one finds oneself so boxed in that one and only one legal move is available.... More interesting ... are the forced moves on those occasions when there is more than one legal move, but only one non-idiotic, non-"suicidal" move, which is said for that reason to be forced. It is forced not by the rules of chess, and not by the laws of physics, but by the dictates of reason. It is obviously the only rational thing to do, given one's interest in winning (or just not losing) the game.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Computers were originally just supposed to be number-crunchers, but now their number-crunching has been harnessed in a thousand im...aginative ways to create new virtual machines, such as video games and word processors, in which the underlying number-crunching is almost invisible, and in which new powers seem quite magical. Our brains, similarly, weren't designed (except for some very recent peripheral organs) for word processing, but now a large portion--perhaps even the lion's share--of the activity that takes place in adult human brains is involved in a sort of word processing: speech production and comprehension, and the serial rehearsal and rearrangement of linguistic items, or better, their neural surrogates. And these activities magnify and transform the underlying hardware powers in ways that seem (from the "outside") quite magical.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To a first approximation, the intentional strategy consists of treating the object whose behavior you want to predict as a rationa...l agent with beliefs and desires and other mental states exhibiting what Brentano and others call intentionality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Consciousness is cerebral celebrity--nothing more and nothing less. Those contents are conscious that persevere, that monopolize r...esources long enough to achieve certain typical and "symptomatic" effects--on memory, on the control of behavior and so forth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What makes some internal feature of a thing a representation could only its role in regulating the behavior of an intentional syst...em.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »