there is also no shortage of anti-dualist philosophers and scientists who are not yet comfortable with materialism and are casting about for something in between, something that can actually make some progress on the science of consciousness without falling into either. The trouble is that they tend to misdescribe it, inflating it into something

There seem to be two competing orientations, the first-person point of view of the Defenders and the third-person point of view of the scientists, much like the two ways of seeing the philosophers’ favorite illusions, the duck-rabbit and the Necker cube. You can’t adopt both orientations at once.

Darwin’s “strange inversion of reasoning” and Turing’s equally revolutionary inversion were aspects of a single discovery: competence without comprehension. Comprehension, far from being a Godlike talent from which all design must flow, is an emergent effect of systems of uncomprehending competence: natural selection on the one hand, and mindless

the inventor of one of the most valuable thinking tools of all time, the system of “Cartesian coordinates” that enables us to translate between algebra and geometry, paving the way for calculus and letting us plot almost anything we want to investigate, from aardvark growth to zinc futures.

Perhaps the best way of seeing the reality, indeed the ubiquity in Nature, of reasons is to reflect on the different meanings of “why.” The English word is equivocal, and the main ambiguity is marked by a familiar pair of substitute phrases: what for? and how come?” “Why are you handing me your camera?” asks what are you doing this for? “Why does

Asking better and better questions is the key to refining our search for solutions to our “mysteries,” and this refinement is utterly beyond the powers of any languageless creature. “What is democracy?” A dog will never know the answer, to be sure, but it will never even understand the question. We can understand the questions, which radically

The most influential argument for a dedicated, innate Language Acquisition Device (or LAD) (Chomsky 1965, p. 25) is the “poverty of the stimulus” argument, which claims that a human infant simply doesn’t hear enough grammatical language (and ungrammatical language corrected—trial and error) in the first few years of life to provide the data

Some folks might wish to treat the question of why ice floats as inviting a what for reason—God’s reason, presumably—for this feature of the inanimate world. (“I guess God wanted fish to be able to live under the ice in the winter, and if ponds froze from the bottom up, this would be hard on the fish.”) But as long as we have an answer to the how

Moreover, on this topic everybody’s an expert. People are calmly prepared to be instructed about the chemical properties of calcium or the microbiological details of cancer, but they think they have a particular personal authority about the nature of their own conscious experiences that can trump any hypothesis they find unacceptable.