Sublime

But the distinction between comprehension and incomprehension is still important, and we can salvage it by the well-tested Darwinian perspective of gradualism: comprehension comes in degrees. At one extreme we have the bacterium’s sorta comprehension of the quorum-sensing signals it responds to (Miller and Bassler 2001) and the computer’s sorta com

also has to be inferred.

feel that we freely author our own thoughts and actions (however difficult it may be to make sense of this in logical or scientific terms).

or, better, a collection of perceptions—a tightly woven bundle of neurally encoded predictions geared toward keeping your body alive.

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

Past philosophers have taken this observation and run with it, arguing that minds and brains are fundamentally distinct and separate phenomena. This is the view the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.”1 But modern scientists and philosophers who have rejected dualism haven’t necessarily replaced it with a better

On the object level, science feeds on science, and each new discovery paves the way for new discoveries—but all that takes place with a protected interpreter, the human brain, running untouched in the background.

But for our commonsense notions of human agency and morality to hold, it seems that our actions cannot be merely lawful products of our biology, our conditioning, or anything else that might lead others to predict them.