Brainstorms — Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology

„It is a small step to calling the information possessed the computer’s beliefs, its goals and subgoals its desires.”

„Ascriptions of beliefs and desires must be interdependent, and the only points of anchorage are the demonstrable needs for survival, the regularities of behavior, and the assumption, grounded in faith in natural selection, of optimal design.”

„The presumption of rationality is so strongly entrenched in our inference habits that when our predictions prove false, we at first cast about for adjustments in the information-possession conditions (he must not have heard, he must not know English, he must not have seen x, been aware that y, etc.) or goal weightings, before questioning the rationality of the system as a whole.”

„The capacity for language is without doubt the crowning achievement of evolution, an achievement that feeds on itself to produce ever more versatile and subtle rational systems, but still it can be looked at as an adaptation which is subject to the same conditions of environmental utility as any other behavioral talent. When it is looked at in this way several striking facts emerge. One of the most pervasive features of evolutionary histories is the interdependence of distinct organs and capacities in a species. Advanced eyes and other distance receptors are of no utility to an organism unless it develops advanced means of locomotion; the talents of a predator will not accrue to a species that does not evolve a carnivore’s digestive system. The capacities of belief and communication have prerequisites of their own. We have already seen that there is no point in ascribing beliefs to a system unless the beliefs ascribed are in general appropriate to the environment, and the system responds appropriately to the beliefs. An eccentric expression of this would be: the capacity to believe would have no survival value unless it were a capacity to believe truths. What is eccentric and potentially misleading about this is that it hints at the picture of a species “trying on”

„experiment”

„How, for instance, is one to follow the advice to believe the truth? Could one abandon one’s sloppy habit of believing falsehoods? If the advice is taken to mean: believe only what you have convincing evidence for, it is the vacuous advice: believe only what you believe to be true. If alternatively it is taken to mean: believe only what is in fact the truth, it is an injunction we are powerless to obey.”

„a man’s assertions are, unconditionally, indicative of his beliefs, as are his actions in general.”

„if one wants to predict and explain the “actual, empirical”

„we are convicted of ignoring something in our memory, jumping to a conclusion, confusing two different ideas.”

„we are often deceived about our own beliefs; we often do not know what train of “subconscious”

„To build a self, a first-person, with a privileged relation to some set of mental features, out of the third-person stuff of intentional systems is the hard part, and that is where awareness, the notion Arbib finds of dubious utility, is supposed to play its role. Content is only half the battle; consciousness is the other.”

„At best, the utterances for which I claim a sort of infallibility express only a partial sampling of one’s inner state at the time. The content of one’s reports does not exhaust the content of one’s inner states.”

„We are confused about consciousness because of an almost irresistible urge to overestimate the extent of our incorrigibility. Our incorrigibility is real; we feel it in our bones, and being real it is, of course, undeniable, but when we come to characterize it, we generously endow ourselves with capacities for infallibility beyond anything we have, or could possibly have, and even the premonition that we could not possibly have such infallibility comforts rather than warns us, for it ensures us that we are, after all, mysterious and miraculous beings, beyond all explaining. Once we see just how little we are incorrigible about, we can accommodate the claim that this incorrigibility is the crux of our selfhood to the equally compelling claim that we are in the end just physical denizens of a physical universe.”

„Our infallible, non-inferential access consists only in our inevitable authority about what we would mean to say at a particular moment, whether we say it or not. The picture I want to guard against is of our having some special, probing, evidence-gathering faculty that has more access to our inner states (our states of awareness1.5 perhaps) than it chooses to express in its reports. Our coming to mean to say something is all the access we have, and while it is infallible access to what we mean to say, it is only highly reliable access to what state is currently controlling the rest of our activity and attitudes.”

„If one supposes that it is our thinking that actually controls our behavior, then we must grant that we do our thinking subconsciously, beyond our direct access, for we have only fallible and indirect, though highly reliable, access to those states, events, processes that occur in our control systems. If one supposes on the other hand that one’s thinking is one’s “stream of consciousness,”

„The current thoughts, it seems, coexist not serially in a stream of consciousness, not as distinct episodes to which anyone, even the robot, has access in any sense, but in parallel, in the processes of control. I don’t think it is wrong to think of thought in this way, and I also don’t think it is wrong to think of thought as that contentful stream to which I have privileged, non-inferential access.”

„the bits of factual knowledge we pick up by asking questions and reading books, especially the facts that only language-users could apprehend”

„Judgments, unlike beliefs, occur one at a time; we have at any moment indefinitely many beliefs, but can be thinking just one thought.”

„we know that there is a purely mechanistic explanation of the chess-playing computer, and yet it is not false to say that the computer figures out or recognizes the best move, or that it concludes that its opponent cannot make a certain move, any more than it is false to say that a computer adds or multiplies.”

„Certainly if we discovered that people only handed over their wallets to robbers after being conditioned to do this, and, moreover, continued to hand over their wallets after the robber had shown his gun was empty, or when the robber was flanked by policemen, we would have to admit that Skinner had unmasked the pretenders; human beings would be little better than pigeons or wasps, and we would have to agree that we had no freedom and dignity.”

„human problem solving, from the most blundering to the most insightful, involves nothing more than varying mixture of trial and error and selectivity.”

„Consider the law of supply and demand. There is no mystery about why the law holds as reliably as it does: people are not fools; they want as much as they can get, they know what they want and how much they want it, and they know enough to charge what the market will bear and buy as cheap as they can.”

„that a primary task of psychology “is to understand …why … behavior … is so generally adaptive, i.e., successful in the sense of reducing needs and facilitating survival.”

„The Law of Effect presumes there to be a “population”

„extinction,”

„We are to understand that creatures so “wired”

„feedback,”

„We can have all that and more by simply positing that creatures have two environments, the outer environment in which they live, and an “inner”

„In a way we are turning the principle of natural selection on its head: we are talking of the evolution of (inner) environments to suit the organism, of environments that would have survival value in an organism. Mutations equipped with such benign inner environments would have a distinct survival advantage over merely Skinnerian creatures in any exiguous environment, since they could learn faster and more safely (for trial and error learning is not only tedious; it can be dangerous). The advantage provided by such a benign inner environment has been elegantly expressed in a phrase of Karl Popper’s: it “permits our hypotheses to die in our stead.”

„Ultimately of course it is environmental effects that are the measure of adaptivity and the mainspring of learning, but the environment can delegate its selective function to something in the organism (just as death had earlier delegated its selective function to pain), and if this occurs, a more intelligent, flexible, organism is the result.”

„The AI researcher starts with an intentionally characterized problem (e.g., how can I get a computer to understand questions of English?), breaks it down into sub-problems that are also intentionally characterized (e.g., how do I get the computer to recognize questions, distinguish subjects from predicates, ignore irrelevant parsings?) and then breaks these problems down still further until finally he reaches problem or task descriptions that are obviously mechanistic. Here is a way of looking at the process. The AI programmer begins with an intentionally characterized problem, and thus frankly views the computer anthropomorphically: if he solves the problem he will say he has designed a computer that can understand questions in English. His first and highest level of design breaks the computer down into subsystems, each of which is given intentionally characterized tasks; he composes a flow chart of evaluators, rememberers, discriminators, overseers and the like. These are homunculi with a vengeance; the highest level design breaks the computer down into a committee or army of intelligent homunculi with purposes, information and strategies. Each homunculus in turn is analyzed into smaller homunculi, but, more important, into less clever homunculi. When the level is reached where the homunculi are no more than adders and subtractors, by the time they need only the intelligence to pick the larger of two numbers when directed to, they have been reduced to functionaries “who can be replaced by a machine.”

„“A ubiquitous strategy in AI programming is known as generate-and-test, and our opening quotation of Paul Valéry perfectly describes it. The problem solver (or inventor) is broken down at some point or points into a generator and a tester. The generator spews up candidates for solutions or elements of solutions to the problems, and the tester accepts or rejects them on the basis of stored criteria. Simon points out the analogy, once again, to natural selection (op. cit., pp. 95–98). The tester of a generate-and-test subroutine is none other than a part of the inner environment of our post-Skinnerian mutations, so if we want to know how well the principle of selection by inner environment can work, the answer is that it can work as well as generate-and-test methods can work in AI programs, which is hearteningly well. Simon, as we saw at the outset, was prepared to go so far as to conclude that all “human problem solving, from the most blundering to the most insightful”

„varying mixtures of trial and error and selectivity.”

„As long as the programmer must, in effect, reach in and rewire the control system, the system is not learning. Learning can be viewed as self-design, and Simon suggests we “think of the design process as involving first the generation of alternatives and then the testing of these alternatives against a whole array of requirements and constraints”

„information theory”

„That is, as a result of the process something comes to have a design it previously did not have. This new design “must come from somewhere.”

„stimulation”

„As Simon points out, generate-and-test is not an efficient or powerful process unless the generator is endowed with a high degree of selectivity (so that it generates only the most likely or most plausible candidates in a circumstance), and since, as he says, “selectivity can always be equated with some kind of feedback of information from the environment”

„Mozart, it seems, was of the same type: “When I feel well and in a good humor, or when I am taking a drive or walking after a good meal, or in the night when I cannot sleep, thoughts crowd into my mind as easily as you would wish. Whence and how do they come? I do not know and I have nothing to do with it. Those which please me I keep in my head and hum them; at least others have told me that I do so.”

„In this introspective experience he has been given a rare opportunity to glimpse the processes in the generator; what is normally accomplished out of sight of consciousness is witnessed on this occasion, and the ideas that form stable combinations are those few that would normally be presented to the conscious chooser for further evaluation. “ “Finally, I cannot resist passing on a wonderful bit of incidental intelligence reported by Hadamard: the Latin verb cogito is derived, as St. Augustine tells us, from Latin words meaning to shake together, while the verb intelligo means to select among. The Romans, it seems, knew what they were talking about.”

„In other words, a normative decision theory is to be adapted as a natural history of cognitive processes in the organism, and for such a history to be true, agents must “have means for representing their behavior to themselves.”

„For, according to the model, deciding is a computational process; the act the agent performs is the consequence of computations defined over representations of possible actions. No representations, no computations. No computations, no model”

„there is no upper bound to the complexity of the representation that may be required to specify the behavioral options available to the agent”

„The famous four F’s (fighting, fleeing, feeding and sexual intercourse)”

„all creatures of noticeable intelligence make decisions (I who “care terrifically”

„As Michael Arbib has suggested, what the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain is not what the frog’s eye tells the frog.”

„…cognitivist theories are or should be theories of the subpersonal level, where beliefs and desires disappear, to be replaced with representations of other sorts on other topics.”

„Dream composition utilizes the dreamer’s general and particular knowledge, her recent and distant experience, and is guided in familiar ways by her fears and desires, covert and overt. Studying these three processes will require tampering with them, and we can imagine that the researchers will acquire the technological virtuosity to be able to influence, direct, or alter the composition process, to stop, restart, or even transpose the presentation process as it occurs, to prevent or distort the recording process.”

„Perhaps, to echo the earlier conjecture, dreams are composed and presented very fast in the interval between bang, bump, or buzz and full consciousness, with some short delay system postponing the full “perception”

„The composition might even have occurred aeons before our birth; we might have an innate library of undreamed dream cassettes ready for appropriate insertion in the playback mechanism.”

„Sometimes we draw a distinction between remembering and seeming to remember such that remembering, like knowing, is veridical.”

„The idea of a subject, an “I,”

„Suppose at noon Jones, who is wide awake, suffers some event in her brain that has a delayed effect: at 12:15 she will “recall”

„Computational access has nothing directly to do with the access of personal consciousness, for we do not have access to many things that various parts of our nervous systems are shown to have access to.”

„…we are speaking creatures (we have a sort of print-out faculty), and—at least to a first approximation—that of which we are conscious is that of which we can tell, introspectively or retrospectively.”

„There are other worries as well, of course. Nonhuman, nonverbal creatures have no print-out faculties, or at best very rudimentary and unexpressive print-out faculties, yet some philosophers—notably Nagel— insist that full-blown, phenomenological consciousness is as much their blessing as ours.”

„What I am granting is that there is no guarantee that information loaded into M has a publication in the native tongue that is acceptable to the system”

„Lashley’s provocative comment on his example was that “no activity of the mind is ever conscious,”

„…we do not do anything in order so to eavesdrop; we just are aware of our own thinkings.”

„having been conditioned, in effect, to infer or expect the effect when seeing the cause, we found ourselves drawing the inference, and this gave rise to an illusion of sorts that we were seeing a necessary connection that explained and grounded the inference we were compelled to make.”

„We have no direct personal access to the structure of contentful events within us.”

„(1) One perceives more than one experiences.”

„(2) The content of one’s experience includes whatever enters (by normal routes) the buffer memory M. What one experiences may decay before it is in fact accessed by PR, or it may be garbled in transition to PR, or it may be relatively inaccessible to PR.* In virtue of this possibility of error or malfunction between M and PR, what one wants to say is not an infallible or incorrigible determinant of what one has experienced or is currently experiencing. So the content of one’s experience is given an objective characterization, and any intuition we have to the contrary that we are the sole and perfect arbiters of what we experience should be discarded.”

„(3) One experiences more at any time than one wants to say then.”

„(4) One experiences more than one attends to—in either of two senses of attention. One experiences more than what results from higher-level allocations of cognitive resources, and one experiences, as (3) asserts, more than one is currently thinking. These are entirely different ways in which there are unattended contents of consciousness, even though there is a strong contingent link between them. Usually Control fixes things so that what one is attending to in the former sense is what one is attending to in the latter. Put otherwise, our conscious access to what we are attending to is normally excellent.”

„(5) One’s access to one’s experience is accomplished via the access relations between M and PR. As Anscombe would put it, we simply can say what it is we are experiencing, what it is we are up to. This is accomplished without any inner eye or introspective faculty beyond the machinery invoked in the model.”

„(6) Our feelings of special authority in offering introspective reports—the basis for all the misbegotten theses of introspective incorrigibility and infallibility—arise from the fact that our semantic intentions, which determine what we want to say, are the standards against which we measure our own verbal productions; hence if we say what we mean to say, if we have committed no errors or infelicities of expression, then our actual utterances cannot fail to be expressions of the content of our semantic intentions, cannot fail to do justice to the access we have to our own inner lives.”

„Having an inner life—being something it is like something to be—is on this account a matter of having a certain sort of functional organization, but the only natural entities that could be expected to have such functional organizations would be highly evolved and socialized creatures.”

„When we wonder if something or someone is conscious, it is tempting to view this as wondering whether or not a special light is turned on inside. This is an error, however, as we can see by asking questions about our own cases: was I conscious (or conscious of X) at time t?”

„(1) Would an entity instantiating this theory sketch seem (to “others,”

„“Suppose some model passed all the appearance tests we could devise. How on earth should one then address question (2)?”

„I am aware of the irony of recommending something so reminiscent of the battle of descriptions that embarrassed the early introspectionists to death, but how else could anyone plausibly support the claim that one’s theory was a theory of consciousness?”

„No one of them itself is, or contains, or need be held to be or contain, a mental image, but as a sequence they form a particular natural prelude to a particular mental image, namely, α.”

„Perhaps there could be unapprehended mental images. If so, the people visited by them do not believe they are visited by them, do not make use of them (e.g., to solve problems, to answer questions, simply to perceive), do not remember them. That is what we shall mean by apprehension. A mental image that fails to be apprehended is like a stimulus that fails to stimulate; one can rule either out by definition if one wishes.”

„What normally causes people to believe that the sun is shining is the sun’s shining, but what normally causes people to believe that everything they are now experiencing they have experienced once before is not their having experienced it all once before.”

„the β-manifold of a person can be endowed with a certain authority: the authority to create a world, the world that is the logical construct of the manifold of beliefs. Any set of beliefs determines a world; if the beliefs are all true, the world thus determined coincides with a portion of the real world. If any are false, the set determines a world that is at least partly fictional (e.g., the world of Dickens’ London). If the set of beliefs is inconsistent, the world determined will contain objects with contradictory properties, but that is all right, since the objects are not real objects but merely intentional objects.”

„There can be no denying (though many have ignored it) that our concept of pain is inextricably bound up with (which may mean something less strong than essentially connected with) our ethical intuitions, our senses of suffering, obligation, and evil. It will not do to suppose that an assessment of any attempt at robot synthesis of pain can be conducted independently of questions about what our moral obligations to this robot might be. One reason, then, why you can’t make a computer that feels pain is that our concept of pain is not a pure psychological concept but also ethical, social, and parochial, so that whatever we put inside our computer or robot will not avail unless it brings in its train these other considerations, a matter over which our control, as computer designers, is worse than limited.”

„When he says no robot could feel pain as he does, is it the artificiality, the chemistry, or what that makes the difference?”

„Everyone knows, for instance, that distracting one’s attention (e.g., by going to a movie) diminishes or banishes pain. This can be easily provided for if we build in a presenter-receiver filtering system across the pathway for incoming signals from all the sense modalities, subject to the following conditions: the receiver can have its general sensitivity raised or lowered, and the presenter has selective volume controls, so that its various signals can be turned up independently.”

„…pains interfere with our ability to concentrate, to solve problems, to think clearly…”

„A less commonly recognized home remedy for pain is not to distract, but to concentrate one’s attention on the pain.”

„How could cortical enhancement possibly produce analgesia? One possible answer: by evoking a hallucination (e.g., of a blunt instrument being drawn across the skin). The abnormal cortical activity of first stage anesthesia is known to evoke hallucinations, and hallucinations do have the power to overrule and obliterate competing veridical inputs (one’s hallucinations are not simply superimposed on veridical perceptions), so if one were fortunate enough to hallucinate a harmless blunt instrument when the scalpel was plunged in, one would not feel pain. And, of course, one’s being fortunate enough would not be fortuitous; the content of hallucinations is apparently guided by our deepest needs and desires, and what apter or deeper guiding desire than the desire to avoid pain? A similar account suggests itself for analgesia under hypnotic suggestion. The shutting down of the reticular formation by anesthetics does not “turn off”

„recruitment”

„We have already seen its utility in accounting for the morphine timedependence phenomenon. It could also be invoked to account for the relation between the amnestic and anesthetic properties of some drugs. Brazier suggests that anesthesia may result from a derangement of some memory functions subserved by the hippocampus, producing a sort of continuous amnesia of the specious present. Such a “forgetting”

„This forces us to acknowledge a far from negligible distinction between the pain we humans experience and the pain experienced by creatures that lack a neocortex (unless we want to maintain that only human beings and perhaps a few other “higher”

„Pains are abhorrent, but what are we to make of the reports of subjects who are lobotomized or under morphine analgesia, who report pains, rank them in terms of greater and less intensity, but seem and claim not to mind the pains? Are they confused? They say they are in pain, but could they properly be said to believe they were in pain? It is not as if they are speaking parrot-fashion, nor do they exhibit massive conceptual confusions in other areas, so why can it not be that they do believe they are in pain? The only strong presumption against granting them this belief is that a good many “theories”

„incorrigible”

„A better concept is called for, and since even the most rudimentary attempt at a unified theory of pain phenomena is led inelectably to the position that pain occurs normally only as the result of a process of perceptual analysis, the esse est percipi position of pain promises to be more theoretically perspicuous, which, faced with the impasse of intuitions, is reason enough to adopt it. This suggests an identification of pain with events—whatever they are—that occur post-interpretation, so that if we can determine where, in our model, interpretation is completed, whatever issues from that will be pain (when the interpretation machinery so interprets).”

„What governs our decisions about essentiality, however, is our stock of pretheoretical intuitions, which we have seen to be in disarray. Having countenanced legislation to settle two such conflicts already, we still face incompatibility of well-entrenched intuitions, such as these: (1) Pains are essentially items of immediate experience or consciousness; the subject’s access to pain is privileged or infallible or incorrigible. 2) Pains are essentially abhorrent or awful—“Pain is perfect misery, the worst of evils …”

„The mechanistic style of explanation, which works so well for electrons, motors and galaxies, has already been successfully carried deep into man’s body and brain”

„Intentional explanations, then, cite thoughts, desires, beliefs, intentions, rather than chemical reactions, explosions, electric impulses, in explaining the occurrence of human motions.”

„Intentional explanations have the actions of persons as their primary domain, but there are times when we find intentional explanations (and predictions based on them) not only useful but indispensable for accounting for the behavior of complex machines.”

„In the case of the chess-playing computer one adopts this stance when one tries to predict its response to one’s move by figuring out what a good or reasonable response would be, given the information the computer has about the situation. Here one assumes not just the absence of malfunction, but the rationality of design or programming as well. Of course the stance is pointless, in view of its extra assumption, in cases where one has no reason to believe in the system’s rationality. In weather predicting, one is not apt to make progress by wondering what clever move the wise old West Wind will make next. Prediction from the intentional stance assumes rationality in the system, but not necessarily perfect rationality. Rather, our pattern of inference is that we start with the supposition of what we take to be perfect rationality, and then alter our premise in individual cases as we acquire evidence of individual foibles and weaknesses of reason. This bias in favor of rationality is particularly evident in the tactics of chess players, who set out to play a new opponent by assuming that he will make reasonable responses to their moves, and then seeking out weaknesses.”

„We do not expect new acquaintances to react irrationally to particular topics, but when they do, we adjust our strategies accordingly. The presumption that we will be able to communicate with our fellow men is founded on the presumption of their rationality, and this is so strongly entrenched in our inference habits that when our predictions prove false we first cast about for external mitigating factors (he must not have heard, he must not know English, he must not have seen x, been aware that y, etc.) before questioning the rationality of the system as a whole. In extreme cases personalities may prove to be so unpredictable from the intentional stance that we abandon it, and if we have accumulated a lot of evidence in the meanwhile about the nature of response patterns in the individual, we may find that the design stance can be effectively adopted.”

„Communication, then, is not a separable and higher stance one may choose to adopt toward something, but a type of interaction one may attempt within the intentional stance.”

„“The presentation of an argument cannot affect a causal chain,”

„We are generally absolved of responsibility in cases where we have been manipulated by others, but there is no one principle of innocence by reason of manipulation. (…) normally one is absolved when one has been duped by a forgery, but not, of course, if the forgery is obvious or one has any evidence that would lead a reasonable man to be suspicious. And if the evidence that misled one into a harmful act was produced by mere chance or “act of God”

„If by introducing an electrode into the brain of a person, I succeed in getting him to believe that he is Napoleon, that surely is not a rational belief that he has, nor is he responsible for what he does in consequence of this belief, however convinced he may be that he is fully justified in acting as he does”

„The non-rationality, it seems, is not to be ascribed to the content of the belief, but somehow to the manner in which it is believed or acquired. We do, of course, absolve the insane, for they are in general irrational, but in this case we cannot resort to this precedent for the man has, ex hypothesi, only one nonrational belief. Something strange indeed is afoot here, for as was mentioned before, the introduction of the evil manipulator adds nothing to the example, and if we allow that the presence of one non-rationally induced belief absolves from responsibility, and if the absurdity or plausibility of a belief is independent of whether it has been rationally acquired or not, it seems we can never be sure whether a man is responsible for his actions, for it just may be that one of the beliefs (true or false) that is operative in a situation has been produced by non-rational accident, in which case the man would be ineligible for praise or blame.”

„The issue between Flew and MacIntyre can be resolved, then, by noting that one cannot directly and simply cause or implant a belief, for a belief is essentially something that has been endorsed (by commission or omission) by the agent on the basis of its conformity with the rest of his beliefs. One may well be able to produce a zombie, either surgically or by brainwashing, and one might even be able to induce a large network of false beliefs in a man, but if so, their persistence as beliefs will depend, not on the strength of any sutures, but on their capacity to win contests against conflicting claims in evidential showdowns. A parallel point can be made about desires and intentions. Whatever might be induced in me is either fixed and obsessive, in which case I am not responsible for where it leads me, or else, in MacIntyre’s phrase, “can be influenced or inhibited by the adducing of some logically relevant consideration,”

„The intentional stance toward human beings, which is a precondition of any ascriptions of responsibility, may coexist with mechanistic explanations of their motions. The other side of this coin, however, is that we can in principle adopt a mechanistic stance toward human bodies and their motions, so there remains an important question to be answered.”

„All that is the case is that we, as persons, cannot adopt exclusive mechanism (by eliminating the intentional stance altogether). A corollary to this which has been much discussed in the literature recently is that we, as persons, are curiously immune to certain sorts of predictions. If I cannot help but have a picture of myself as an intentional system, I am bound, as MacKay has pointed out, to have an underspecified description of myself, “not in the sense of leaving any parts unaccounted for, but in the sense of being compatible with more than one state of the parts. This is because no information system can carry a complete true representation of itself (whether this representation is in terms of the physical stance or any other). And so I cannot even in principle have all the data from which to predict (from any stance) my own future.Another person might in principle have the data to make all such predictions, but he could not tell them all to me without of necessity falsifying the antecedents on which the prediction depends by interacting with the system whose future he is predicting, so I can never be put in the position of being obliged to believe them. As an intentional system I have an epistemic horizon that keeps my own future as an intentional system indeterminate. Again, a word of caution: this barrier to prediction is not one we are going to run into in our daily affairs; it is not a barrier preventing or rendering incoherent predictions I might make about my own future decisions, as Pears for one has pointed out.27 It is just that since I must view myself as a person, a full-fledged intentional system, there is no complete biography of my future I would be right to accept.”

„Mechanism as a theory of mind would be refuted if it could be shown that a human being (or his mind)* can do what no machine can do, and there is a family of arguments invoking Gödel’s Theorem which purport to prove just that.1 I wish to show that all these arguments must fail because at one point or another they must implicitly deny an obvious truth, namely that the constraints of logic exert their force not on the things in the world directly, but rather on what we are to count as defensible descriptions or interpretations of things.”

„For each shift of state there must be a corresponding physical shift, which might be a shift of gears, or the sliding of a different cam onto a drive shaft, or the opening and closing of series of electrical or hydraulic relays. The whole machine may exploit only a few simple principles of electronics or it may be a Rube Goldberg contraption, but in either case it must be more or less insulated from the rest of the environment, so that coincidental features of the outside world do not interfere with its operation, e.g., changes in temperature or relative humidity, or sudden accelerations. The better the design, the more immune to interference the machine will be.”

„…the ultimate function and design of every part of a man is not in the end to be decided by any objective test.”

„…nothing concrete could be just a particular Turing machine, and any concrete realization of any Turing machine can in principle have capacities under one interpretation denied it under another.”

„I am a human being, and probably you are too.”

„The idea that we might cease to view others and ourselves as persons (if it does not mean merely that we might annihilate ourselves, and hence cease to view anything as anything) is arguably self-contradictory”

„Is being an entity to which states of consciousness or self-consciousness are ascribed the same as being an end-in-oneself, or is it merely one precondition?”

„In less technical surroundings the distinction stands out as clearly: when we declare a man insane we cease treating him as accountable, and we deny him most rights, but still our interactions with him are virtually indistinguishable from normal personal interactions unless he is very far gone in madness indeed.”

„What I wish to do now is consider six familiar themes, each a claim to identify a necessary condition of personhood, and each, I think, a correct claim on some interpretation. What will be at issue here is first, how (on my interpretation) they are dependent on each other; second, why they are necessary conditions of moral personhood, and third, why it is so hard to say whether they are jointly sufficient conditions for moral personhood.”

„The first and most obvious theme is that persons are rational beings. (…) The second theme is that persons are beings to which states of consciousness are attributed, or to which psychological or mental or intentional predicates, are ascribed. (…) The third theme is that whether something counts as a person depends in some way on an attitude taken toward it, a stance adopted with respect to it. (…) The fourth theme is that the object toward which this personal stance is taken must be capable of reciprocating in some way. (…) The fifth theme is that persons must be capable of verbal communication. (…) The sixth theme is that persons are distinguishable from other entities by being conscious in some special way: there is a way in which we are conscious in which no other species is conscious. (…)”

„I will argue that the order in which I have given these six themes is—with one proviso—the order of their dependence. The proviso is that the first three are mutually interdependent; being rational is being intentional is being the object of a certain stance. These three together are a necessary but not sufficient condition for exhibiting the form of reciprocity that is in turn a necessary but not sufficient condition for having the capacity for verbal communication, which is the necessary* condition for having a special sort of consciousness, which is, as Anscombe and Frankfurt in their different ways claim, a necessary condition of moral personhood. (I will not discuss Sartre’s claim here.)”

„An intentional system is a system whose behavior can be (at least sometimes) explained and predicted by relying on ascriptions to the system of beliefs and desires (and other intentionally characterized features—what I will call intentions here, meaning to include hopes, fears, intentions, perceptions, expectations, etc.). There may in every case be other ways of predicting and explaining the behavior of an intentional system— for instance, mechanistic or physical ways—but the intentional stance may be the handiest or most effective or in any case a successful stance to adopt, which suffices for the object to be an intentional system. So defined, intentional systems are obviously not all persons. We ascribe beliefs and desires to dogs and fish and thereby predict their behavior, and we can even use the procedure to predict the behavior of some machines.”

„If, for instance, I predict that a particular plant—say a potted ivy—will grow around a corner and up into the light because it “seeks”

„Thinking the thoughts, however that is characterized, is not what makes truly intelligent behavior intelligent.”

„Communication, in Gricean guise, appears to be a sort of collaborative manipulation of audience by utterer; it depends, not only on the rationality of the audience who must sort out the utterer’s intentions, but on the audience’s trust in the utterer. Communication, as a sort of manipulation, would not work, given the requisite rationality of the audience, unless the audience’s trust in the utterer were well-grounded or reasonable. Thus the norm for utterance is sincerity; were utterances not normally trustworthy, they would fail of their purpose (see Chapter 1). Lying, as a form of deception, can only work against a background of truth-telling, but other forms of deception do not depend on the trust of the victim. In these cases success depends on the victim being quite smart, but not quite smart enough. Stupid poker players are the bane of clever poker players, for they fail to see the bluffs and ruses being offered them. Such sophisticated deceptions need not depend on direct encounters. There is a book on how to detect fake antiques (which is also, inevitably, a book on how to make fake antiques) which offers this sly advice to those who want to fool the “expert”

„authentic”

„conclusion”

„gets a hunch”

„rationale”

„Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, men may also want to have (or not to have) certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are. … No animal other than man, however, appears to have the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires. “ — Harry Frankfurt “Because, I believe, the “reflective self-evaluation”

„order which is there”

„…when wrong has been done and the question of responsibility arises.”

„“Language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. … Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness.”

„Now it seems to me, if you will hear my answer and its perhaps extravagant supposition, that the subtlety and strength of consciousness are always in proportion to the capacity for communication of a man (or an animal), the capacity for communication in its turn being in proportion to the necessity for communication. … In short, the development of speech and the development of consciousness (not of reason, but of reason becoming self-conscious) go hand in hand.”

„The so called free will problem is in fact many not very closely related problems tied together by a name and lots of attendant anxiety. Most people can be brought by reflection to care very much what the truth is on these matters, for each problem poses a threat: to our self-esteem, to our conviction that we are not living deluded lives, to our conviction that we may justifiably trust our grasp of such utterly familiar notions as possibility, opportunity and ability.* There is no very good reason to suppose that an acceptable solution to one of the problems will be, or even point to, an acceptable solution to the others, and we may be misled by residual unallayed worries into rejecting or undervaluing partial solutions, in the misguided hope that we might allay all the doubts with one overarching doctrine or theory. But we don’t have any good theories. Since the case for determinism is persuasive and since we all want to believe we have free will, compatibilism is the strategic favorite, but we must admit that no compatibilism free of problems while full of the traditional flavors of responsibility has yet been devised.”

„An incomplete list of the very different questions composing the free will problem: (1) How can a material thing (a mechanism?) be correctly said to reason, to have reasons, to act on reasons? (a question I attempt to answer in Chapter 12). (2) How can the unique four dimensional nonbranching world-worm that comprises all that has happened and will happen admit of a notion of possibilities that are not actualities? What does an opportunity look like when the world is viewed sub specie aeternitatis? (3) How can a person be an author of decisions, and not merely the locus of causal summation for external influences? (4) How can we make sense of the intuition that an agent can only be responsible if he could have done otherwise? (5) How can we intelligibly describe the relevant mental history of the truly culpable agent—the villain or rational cheat with no excuses? As Socrates asked, can a person knowingly commit evil?”

„For all we know, which variation occurs is undetermined. That is, the implementation of any one of our intentional actions may encounter undetermined choice points in many places in the causal chain.”

„The libertarian would not be relieved to learn that although his decision to murder his neighbor was quite determined, the style and trajectory of the death blow was not.”

„It takes two to invent anything. The one makes up combinations; the other one chooses, recognizes what he wishes and what is important to him in the mass of the things which the former has imparted to him. What we call genius is much less the work of the first one than the readiness of the second one to grasp the value of what has been laid before him and to choose it.”

„We are rushed, but moreover, we are all more or less lazy, even about terribly critical decisions that will affect our lives—our own lives, to say nothing of the lives of others. We invariably settle for a heuristic decision procedure; we satisfice; we poke around hoping for inspiration; we do our best to think about the problem in a more or less directed way until we must finally stop mulling, summarize our results as best we can, and act. A realistic model of such decision-making just might have the following feature: When someone is faced with an important decision, something in him generates a variety of more or less relevant considerations bearing on the decision. Some of these considerations, we may suppose, are determined to be generated, but others may be non-deterministically generated. Some of these considerations, we may suppose, are determined to be generated, but others may be non-deterministically generated.”

„The model of decision making I am proposing has the following feature: when we are faced with an important decision, a consideration-generator whose output is to some degree undetermined produces a series of considerations, some of which may of course be immediately rejected as irrelevant by the agent (consciously or unconsciously). Those considerations that are selected by the agent as having a more than negligible bearing on the decision then figure in a reasoning process, and if the agent is in the main reasonable, those considerations ultimately serve as predictors and explicators of the agent’s final decision. What can be said in favor of such a model, bearing in mind that there are many possible substantive variations on the basic theme? First, I think it captures what Russell was looking for. The intelligent selection, rejection and weighting of the considerations that do occur to the subject is a matter of intelligence making the difference. Intelligence makes the difference here because an intelligent selection and assessment procedure determines which microscopic indeterminacies get amplified, as it were, into important macroscopic determiners of ultimate behavior. Second, I think it installs indeterminism in the right place for the libertarian, if there is a right place at all. The libertarian could not have wanted to place the indeterminism at the end of the agent’s assessment and deliberation. It would be insane to hope that after all rational deliberation had terminated with an assessment of the best available course of action, indeterminism would then intervene to flip the coin before action. It is a familiar theme in discussions of free will that the important claim that one could have done otherwise under the circumstances is not plausibly construed as the claim that one could have done otherwise given exactly the set of convictions and desires that prevailed at the end of rational deliberation. So if there is to be a crucial undetermined nexus, it had better be prior to the final assessment of the considerations on the stage, which is right where we have located it. Third, I think that the model is recommended by considerations that have little or nothing to do with the free will problem. It may well tum out to be that from the point of view of biological engineering, it is just more efficient and in the end more rational that decision-making should occur in this way. Time rushes on, and people must act, and there may not be time for a person to canvass all his beliefs, conduct all the investigations and experiments that he would see were relevant, assess every preference in his stock before acting, and it may be that the best way to prevent the inertia of Hamlet from overtaking us is for our decision-making processes to be expedited by a process of partially random generation and test. Even in the rare circumstances where we know there is, say, a decision procedure for determining the optimal solution to a decision problem, it is often more reasonable to proceed swiftly and by heuristic methods, and this strategic principle may in act be incorporated as a design principle at a fairly fundamental level of cognitive-conative organization. A fourth observation in favor of the model is that it permits moral education to make a difference, without making all of the difference. A familiar argument against the libertarian is that if our moral decisions were not in fact determined by our moral upbringing, or our moral education, there would be no point in providing such an education for the young. The libertarian who adopted our model could answer that a moral education, while not completely determining the generation of considerations and moral decision-making, can nevertheless have a prior selective effect on the sorts of considerations that will occur. A moral education, like mutual discussion and persuasion generally, could adjust the boundaries and probabilities of the generator without rendering it deterministic.Fifth—and I think this is perhaps the most important thing to be said in favor of this model—it provides some account of our important intuition that we are the authors of our moral decisions. The unreflective compatibilist is apt to view decision-making on the model of a simple balance or scale on which the pros and cons of action are piled. What gets put on the scale is determined by one’s nature and one’s nurture, and once all the weights are placed, gravity as it were determines which way the scale will tip, and hence determines which way we will act. On such a view, the agent does not seem in any sense to be the author of the decisions, but at best merely the locus at which the environmental and genetic factors bearing on him interact to produce a decision. It all looks terribly mechanical and inevitable, and seems to leave no room for creativity or genius. The model proposed, however, holds out the promise of a distinction between authorship and mere implication in a causal chain. Consider in this light the difference between completing a lengthy exercise in long division and constructing a proof in, say, Euclidian geometry. There is a sense in which I can be the author of a particular bit of long division, and can take credit if it turns out to be correct, and can take pride in it as well, but there is a stronger sense in which I can claim authorship of a proof in geometry, even if thousands of school children before me have produced the very same proof. There is a sense in which this is something original that I have created. To take pride in one’s computational accuracy is one thing, and to take pride in one’s inventiveness is another, and as Valéry claimed, the essence of invention is the intelligent selection from among randomly generated candidates. I think that the sense in which we wish to claim authorship of our moral decisions, and hence claim responsibility for them, requires that we view them as products of intelligent invention, and not merely the results of an assiduous application of formulae. I don’t want to overstate this case; certainly many of the decisions we make are so obvious, so black and white, that no one would dream of claiming any special creativity in having made them and yet would still claim complete responsibility for the decisions thus rendered. But if we viewed all our decision-making on those lines, I think our sense of our dignity as moral agents would be considerably impoverished. Finally, the model I propose points to the multiplicity of decisions that encircle our moral decisions and suggests that in many cases our ultimate decision as to which way to act is less important phenomenologically as a contributor to our sense of free will than the prior decisions affecting our deliberation process itself: the decision, for instance, not to consider any further, to terminate deliberation; or the decision to ignore certain lines of inquiry. These prior and subsidiary decisions contribute, I think, to our sense of ourselves as responsible free agents, roughly in the following way: I am faced with an important decision to make, and after a certain amount of deliberation, I say to myself: “That’s enough. I’ve considered this matter enough and now I’m going to act,”

„manifest image,”

„Annette Baier claims* that we can discover something important about the mind, something overlooked or denied in recent accounts, by examining a particular sort of episode in the natural history of minds, the sort of episode ordinarily called a change of mind. We can, she says, see more clearly what does and does not count as a mind by seeing what does and does not count as a change of mind. We can understand thought by understanding second thoughts.”

„Ronald de Sousa, in a fascinating paper, “How to give a piece of your mind: or, the logic of belief and assent,”

„…I think, is the fact that although opting for the boat or not is my decision, it is something I do, I don’t know in the end why I do it, what causes me to do it. I am not in a privileged position to tell someone else exactly what prevented me from opting if l refrain or what tipped the balance if I buy. In this matter, my decision is the occasion of the discovery I make about myself.”

„How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?”

„…animals may have beliefs about this and that, but they don’t have opinions. They don’t have opinions because they don’t assent. Making up your mind is coming to have an opinion, I am proposing, and changing one’s mind is changing one’s opinion.”

„So de Sousa proposes a two-level theory for human beings (and other persons if such there be). We human beings are believers, as are the beasts. But moreover (and here he is echoing Hume, as we learn from Baier) we harbor epistemic desires. We are collectors, he says, of true sentences. We have a hunger for such items, which we add to our collections by what he calls “a bet on truth alone, solely determined by epistemic desirabilities.”

„“Now why do we have opinions at all? And why do we have them while animals don’t? Because we have language. I think the way to look at it is this: once you have a language, there are all these sentences lying around, and you have to do something with them. You have to put them in boxes labeled “True”

„My opinions can be relied on to predict my behavior only to the degree, normally large, that my opinions and beliefs are in rational correspondence, i.e., roughly as Bayes would have them. It is just this feature of the distinction between opinion and belief that gives us, I think, the first steps of an acceptable account of those twin puzzles, self-deception and akrasia or weakness of will. Animals, I submit, whatever their cognitive and conative frailties, are immune to both self-deception and akrasia. Why? Because they have only beliefs, not opinions, and part of what is true when one exhibits either of these normal pathologies, self-deception or weakness of will (I think they may be just one affliction in the end), is that one behaves one way while judging another. One’s behavior is consonant with one’s beliefs “automatically,”

„There are in any case many ways of adding to one’s collection of opinions, just as there are many ways of acquiring paintings or overcoats. One can inherit them, fall into possession of them without noticing, fail to discard them after deciding to discard them, take them on temporary loan and forget that this is what one has done. For instance, one’s verbal indoctrination as a child—as an adult too—certainly has among its effects the inculcation of many ill-considered dicta one will be willing to parade as true though one has never examined them. Habits of thought tied to well-turned phrases may persist long after one has denied the relevant assertions. One may suspend disbelief in a few enabling assumptions “for the sake of argument,”

„Why are critics important? Because one changes one’s own mind the way one changes somebody else’s: by an actual colloquy or soliloquy of persuasion. (see Chapter 14). Note that in such an enterprise there can be success, or failure, or an intermediate result between success and failure. Understanding these intermediate results is important to understanding selfdeception and akrasia. Surely the following has happened to you—it has happened to me many times: somebody corners me and proceeds to present me with an argument of great persuasiveness, of irresistible logic, step by step by step. I can think of nothing to say against any of the steps. I get to the conclusion and can think of no reasons to deny the conclusion, but I don’t believe it! This can be a social problem. It is worse than unsatisfying to say: “Sorry, I don’t believe it, but I can’t tell you why. I don’t know.”

„Yes indeed, that conclusion falls in the set of true sentences.”

„Being a philosopher of firm physicalist conviction, I believed unswervingly that the tokening of my thoughts was occurring somewhere in my brain: yet, when I thought “Here I am,”

„How did I know where I meant by “here”

„Dennett is wherever he thinks he is.”

„The speed of light is fast, but finite, and as my brain and body move farther and farther apart, the delicate interaction of my feedback systems is thrown into disarray by the time lags.”

„What moved from A to B at such speed was surely myself, or at any rate my soul or mind—the massless center of my being and home of my consciousness.”

„As many philosophers unfamiliar with my ordeal have more recently speculated, the acquisition of a new body leaves one’s person intact.”