SECRET 1: Competence without Comprehension: Something—e.g., a register machine—can do perfect arithmetic without having to comprehend what it is doing. SECRET 2: What a number in a register stands for depends on the program that we have composed. SECRET 3: Since a
Your brain is importantly not in the same predicament you would be in, trapped in the control room. Its task is—must be—partly solved in advance by the way some inputs are “wired up” to some outputs so that there is some leverage
Experimental psychology is giving us an ever-more detailed catalogue of the competences and frailties of the mind—the triumphs of perception and the embarrassments of illusion, the pace of language learning and the conditions of distraction, lust, fear, and mirth—and now, as “convinced
Why indulge in this “sorta” talk? Because when we analyze—or synthesize—this stack of ever-more competent levels, we need to keep track of two facts about each level: what it is and what it does. What it is can be described in terms
In the millennia-old quest to understand the mind, theorists have often succumbed to the temptation to imagine an inner agent, a little man—homunculus, in Latin—who sits in the control room in the brain and does all the clever work. Bottom-up, neuroscientifically inspired,
This idea, that we can divide and conquer the daunting problem of imagining how a person could be composed of (nothing but) mindless molecules, can be looked at bottom-up, or top-down, starting with the whole person and asking what smallish collection of
This simple theory of intentional systems is a theory about how and why we are able to make sense of the behaviors of so many complicated things by considering them as agents. It is not directly a theory of the internal mechanisms
Probably the most important pattern in our manifest image, because it anchors so many other categories that matter to us, is the pattern I call folk psychology. I proposed folk psychology as a term for the talent we all have for interpreting
The manifest image is the world as it seems to us in everyday life, full of solid objects, colors and smells and tastes, voices and shadows, plants and animals, and people and all their stuff: not only tables and chairs, bridges and
A young child is asked what her father does, and she answers, “Daddy is a doctor.” Does she believe what she says? Clearly her understanding of what it is to be a doctor, as well as what it is to be a