If we are asked to choose an option, we mostly focus on reasons for choosing one thing or another: and these reasons will tend to be positive reasons in favour of one option or the other. The extreme option has the most powerful positive reasons (e.g. a very close relationship with the child), so it wins out. If, on the other hand, we are asked to

Yet the unfolding of a life is not so different from the unfolding of a novel. We generate our beliefs, values and actions in-the-moment; they are not pre-calculated and ‘written’ in some unimaginably vast memory store just in case they might be needed. And this implies that there is no pre-existing ‘inner world of thought’ from which our thoughts

This makes no sense if we make our choices by referring to some inner oracle, but it makes perfect sense if we are improvising: conjuring up reasons, in the moment, to justify one choice or another. Choosing and rejecting the same thing seems peculiar.

In short, common-sense psychology sees our thought and behaviour as rooted in reasoning, but a lot of human intelligence seems to be a matter of finding complex patterns.

Yet the contents of our hidden depths seem to remain perpetually elusive. Freudian psychoanalysts can speculate about our hidden fears and desires; psychologists and neuroscientists can attempt to draw subtle and highly indirect conclusions from actions, heart-rate, skin conductance, pupil dilation and the rate of blood flow in the brain. But no hi

In this book, I want to convince you that the mind is flat: that the very idea of mental depth is an illusion. The mind is, instead, a consummate improviser, inventing actions, and beliefs and desires to explain those actions, with wonderful fluidity. But these momentary inventions are flimsy, fragmented and self-contradictory; they are like a film

Inconsistency and sparseness are not just characteristics of fiction. They are also the hallmarks of mental life.

What is, and should be, controversial is the proposal that our theory of the calculations that the brain carries out match up, in some fairly direct way, with our common-sense psychological explanation in terms of beliefs and desires and the like – a viewpoint that has been widely held ever since early computational models of the mind took hold in

when we claim to be just using our powers of inner observation, we are always actually engaging in a sort of impromptu theorizing – and we are remarkably gullible theorizers, precisely because there is so little to ‘observe’ and so much to pontificate about without fear of contradiction. Daniel Dennett1