Sublime

creationists ask, rhetorically, “where does all the information in the DNA come from?” and Darwin’s answer is simple: it comes from the gradual, purposeless, nonmiraculous transformation of noise into signal, over billions of years.

with the origins of human life reduced to material causality, the idea that mind existed independently of matter could likewise be set aside—just a mistaken intuition, an understandable misapprehension that turned out to be human egotism all along.

Conversely, I have settled on a simple test for judging claims, including Dennett’s, to have explained the nature of consciousness (or any other computational task): if you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it.

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.

We especially have in mind opinions to the effect that a human being

is purely physical, just an animal?basically, just the human brain. Or the opinion that human beings are, as such, good, or not to be forced to do anything they don?t want to do.

After Libet, we now know that I actually began moving my arm toward Jar A before I became aware of my own conscious decision to choose Jar A. In effect, I decided to reach for the cookie in Jar A before I realized that I made the decision. The question is, which I was I? Which I am I? Am I the decider-I or the realizer-I? Both? Neither?

brains—and conscious minds—as embodied and embedded systems.