51 ideas
| 10688 | 'Equivocation' is when terms do not mean the same thing in premises and conclusion [Beall/Restall] |
| Full Idea: 'Equivocation' is when the terms do not mean the same thing in the premises and in the conclusion. | |
| From: JC Beall / G Restall (Logical Consequence [2005], Intro) |
| 10690 | Formal logic is invariant under permutations, or devoid of content, or gives the norms for thought [Beall/Restall] |
| Full Idea: Logic is purely formal either when it is invariant under permutation of object (Tarski), or when it has totally abstracted away from all contents, or it is the constitutive norms for thought. | |
| From: JC Beall / G Restall (Logical Consequence [2005], 2) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] The third account sounds rather woolly, and the second one sounds like a tricky operation, but the first one sounds clear and decisive, so I vote for Tarski. |
| 10691 | Logical consequence needs either proofs, or absence of counterexamples [Beall/Restall] |
| Full Idea: Technical work on logical consequence has either focused on proofs, where validity is the existence of a proof of the conclusions from the premises, or on models, which focus on the absence of counterexamples. | |
| From: JC Beall / G Restall (Logical Consequence [2005], 3) |
| 10695 | Logical consequence is either necessary truth preservation, or preservation based on interpretation [Beall/Restall] |
| Full Idea: Two different views of logical consequence are necessary truth-preservation (based on modelling possible worlds; favoured by Realists), or truth-preservation based on the meanings of the logical vocabulary (differing in various models; for Anti-Realists). | |
| From: JC Beall / G Restall (Logical Consequence [2005], 2) | |
| A reaction: Thus Dummett prefers the second view, because the law of excluded middle is optional. My instincts are with the first one. |
| 10689 | A step is a 'material consequence' if we need contents as well as form [Beall/Restall] |
| Full Idea: A logical step is a 'material consequence' and not a formal one, if we need the contents as well as the structure or form. | |
| From: JC Beall / G Restall (Logical Consequence [2005], 2) |
| 10696 | A 'logical truth' (or 'tautology', or 'theorem') follows from empty premises [Beall/Restall] |
| Full Idea: If a conclusion follows from an empty collection of premises, it is true by logic alone, and is a 'logical truth' (sometimes a 'tautology'), or, in the proof-centred approach, 'theorems'. | |
| From: JC Beall / G Restall (Logical Consequence [2005], 4) | |
| A reaction: These truths are written as following from the empty set Φ. They are just implications derived from the axioms and the rules. |
| 10693 | Models are mathematical structures which interpret the non-logical primitives [Beall/Restall] |
| Full Idea: Models are abstract mathematical structures that provide possible interpretations for each of the non-logical primitives in a formal language. | |
| From: JC Beall / G Restall (Logical Consequence [2005], 3) |
| 10692 | Hilbert proofs have simple rules and complex axioms, and natural deduction is the opposite [Beall/Restall] |
| Full Idea: There are many proof-systems, the main being Hilbert proofs (with simple rules and complex axioms), or natural deduction systems (with few axioms and many rules, and the rules constitute the meaning of the connectives). | |
| From: JC Beall / G Restall (Logical Consequence [2005], 3) |
| 22427 | To explain object qualities, primary qualities must be more than mere sources of experience [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: In order that we have available an explanation of the qualities of objects we need to be able to conceive primary qualities as consisting in something other than powers to produce experiences. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6 n 52) | |
| A reaction: I suppose if the qualities are nothing more than the source of the experiences, that is Kant's noumenon. Nothing more could be said. The seems to be a requirement for tacit inference here. We infer the interior of the tomato. |
| 14308 | We can bring dispositions into existence, as in creating an identifier [Dennett, by Mumford] |
| Full Idea: We can bring a real disposition into existence, as in Dennett's case of a piece of cardboard torn in half, so that two strangers can infallibly identify one another. | |
| From: report of Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], p.376) by Stephen Mumford - Dispositions 03.7 n37 | |
| A reaction: Presumably human artefacts in general qualify as sets of dispositions which we have created. |
| 7384 | Words are fixed by being attached to similarity clusters, without mention of 'essences' [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: We don't need 'essences' or 'criteria' to keep the meaning of our word from sliding all over the place; our words will stay put, quite firmly attached as if by gravity to the nearest similarity cluster. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 13.2) | |
| A reaction: Plausible, but essentialism (which may have been rejuventated by a modern theory of reference in language) is not about language. It is offering an explanation of why there are 'similarity clusters. Organisms are too complex to have pure essences. |
| 22413 | Being red simply consists in looking red [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: What we should claim is that being red consists in looking red. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: A very nice simple account. There is more to being square than looking square (which may not even guarantee that it is square). That's the primary/secondary distinction in a nut shell. But red things don't look red in the dark. Sufficient, not necessary. |
| 7374 | Light wavelengths entering the eye are only indirectly related to object colours [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: The wavelengths of the light entering the eye are only indirectly related to the colours we see objects to be. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 12.2) | |
| A reaction: This is obviously bad news for naïve realism, but I also take it as good support for the primary/secondary distinction. I just can't make sense of anyone claiming that colour exists anywhere else except in the brain. |
| 22415 | Relativity means differing secondary perceptions are not real disagreements [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Relativity permits differences in the perceived secondary qualities not to imply genuine disagreement, whereas perceived differences of primary qualities imply that at least one perceiver is in error. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: An example of 'relativity' is colour blindness. Sounds good, but what of one perceiver seeing a square as square, and another seeing it obliquely as a parallelogram? The squareness then seems more like a theory than a perception. |
| 22416 | Phenomenalism is correct for secondary qualities, so scepticism is there impossible [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: We might say that scepticism is ruled out for secondary qualities because (roughly) phenomenalism is correct for them; but phenomenalism is not similarly correct for primary qualities, and scepticism cannot get a foothold. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: An odd idea, if phenomenalism says that reality consists entirely of phenomena. I should think phenomenalism is a commitment to the absence of primary qualities. |
| 22422 | Maybe all possible sense experience must involve both secondary and primary qualities [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: The inseparability thesis about perception says that for any actual and possible sense the content of experiences delivered by that sense must be both of secondary qualities and of primary qualities. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: That would mean that all possible experience must have a mode of presentation, and also must be 'of' something independent of experience. So a yellow after-image would not count as an 'experience'? |
| 22428 | You understood being red if you know the experience involved; not so with thngs being square [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: To grasp what it is to be red is to know the kind of sensory experience red things produce; ...but it is not true that to grasp what it is to be square one needs to know what kinds of sensory experience square things produce. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 8) | |
| A reaction: Are any experiences involved in the understanding of squareness? We don't know squareness by a priori intuition (do we?). To grasp squareness if may be necessary to have a variety of experiences of it. Or to grasp that it is primary. |
| 22414 | You don't need to know how a square thing looks or feels to understand squareness [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: To grasp what it is for something to be square it is not constitutively necessary to know how square things look or feel, since what it is to be square does not involve any such relation to experience. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: You could even describe squareness verbally, unlike redness. It seems crucial that almost any sense (such as bat echoes) can communicate primary qualities, but secondary qualities are tied to a sense, and wouldn't exist without it. |
| 22423 | Touch doesn't provide direct experience of primary qualities, because touch feels temperature [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Bennett's claim that touch provides experience of primary qualities without experience of any secondary qualities strikes me as false, because tactile experience includes felt temperature, which is a dispositional secondary quality. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: [J.Bennett 1971 pp. 90-4] Fair point. What about shape and texture? We experience forces, but the shape is assembled in imagination rather than in experience. So do we meet primary qualities directly in forces, such as acceleration? No secondary quality? |
| 22426 | We can perceive objectively, because primary qualities are not mind-created [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: I hold that experience succeeds in representing the world objectively, since primary quality perceptual content is not contributed by the mind. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: My new example of a direct perception of a primary quality is acceleration in a lift. What would we say to one passenger who denied feeling the acceleration? It took an effort to see that mind contributes to secondary qualities (so make more effort?). |
| 22412 | Lockean secondary qualities (unlike primaries) produce particular sensory experiences [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: In the Lockean tradition, secondary qualities are defined as those whose instantiation in an object consists in a power or disposition of the object to produce sensory experiences in perceivers of a certain phenomenological character. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: Primary qualities are said to lack such dispositions. Not sure about these definitions. Primaries offer no experiences? With these definitions, comparing them would be a category mistake. I take it primaries reflect reality and secondaries do not. |
| 22421 | Could there be a mind which lacked secondary quality perception? [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Can we form a conception of a type of mind whose representations are free of secondary quality perceptions? | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: Nice question. Minds must have experiences, and there has to be a 'way' or 'mode' for those experiences. A mind which directly grasped the primary quality of sphericity would seem to be visionary rather than sensual or experiential. |
| 22424 | Secondary qualities contain information; their variety would be superfluous otherwise [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Surely we learn something about an object when we discover its secondary qualities? ...If secondary quality experience were informationally inert, its variety would be something of a puzzle. Why not employ the same medium for all primary informaton? | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: This is important. We can't just focus on the primary qualities, and ignore the secondary. But diverse colours draw attention to information, which can then be translated into neutral data, as in spectroscopic analysis. Locke agrees with this. |
| 22425 | The utility theory says secondary qualities give information useful to human beings [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Secondary quality perception, according to the utility theory, gives information about the relation between the perceptual object and the perceiver's needs and interests. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: Almost the only example I can think of is whether fruit is ripe or rotten. ...Also 'bad' smells. We recognise aggressive animal noises, but that is not the same as dangerous (e.g. rustling snake). Divine design is behind this theory, I think. |
| 7629 | We see objects 'directly' by representing them [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: My view is that we see objects 'directly' by representing them in visual experience. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], Ch.8 n1) | |
| A reaction: [Quoted by Maund] This rejects both inference in perception and sense-data, while retaining the notion of representation. It is a view which has gained a lot of support. But how can it be direct if it represents? Photographs can't do that. |
| 7369 | Brains are essentially anticipation machines [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: All brains are, in essence, anticipation machines. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 7.2) | |
| A reaction: This would necessarily, I take it, make them induction machines. So brains will only evolve in a world where induction is possible, which is one where there a lot of immediately apprehensible regularities. |
| 7393 | We can't draw a clear line between conscious and unconscious [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Even in our own case, we cannot draw the line separating our conscious mental states from our unconscious mental states. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 14.2) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as being a simple and self-evident truth, which anyone working on the brain takes for granted, but an awful lot of philosophers (stuck somewhere in the seventeenth century) can't seem to grasp. |
| 7367 | Perhaps the brain doesn't 'fill in' gaps in consciousness if no one is looking. [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Perhaps the brain doesn't actually have to go to the trouble of "filling in" anything with "construction" - for no one is looking. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: This a very nice point, because claims that the mind fills in in various psychological visual tests always has the presupposition of a person (or homunculus?) which is overseeing the visual experiences. |
| 7394 | Conscious events can only be explained in terms of unconscious events [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness at all. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 14.4) | |
| A reaction: This sounds undeniable, so it seems to force a choice between reductive physicalism and mysterianism. Personally I think there must be an explanation in terms of non-conscious events, even if humans are too thick to understand it. |
| 7391 | We can know a lot of what it is like to be a bat, and nothing important is unknown [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: There is at least a lot that we can know about what it is like to be a bat, and Nagel has not given us a reason to believe there is anything interesting or theoretically important that is inaccessible to us. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 14.2) | |
| A reaction: I agree. If you really wanted to identify with the phenomenology of bathood, you could spend a lot of time in underground caves whistling with your torch turned off. I can't, of course, be a bat, but then I can't be my self of yesterday. |
| 7387 | "Qualia" can be replaced by complex dispositional brain states [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: "Qualia" can be replaced by complex dispositional states of the brain. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 14.1) | |
| A reaction: 'Dispositional' reveals Dennett's behaviourist roots (he was a pupil of Ryle). Fodor is right that physicalism cannot just hide behind the word "complexity". That said, the combination of complexity and speed might add up to physical 'qualia'. |
| 7376 | We can't assume that dispositions will remain normal when qualia have been inverted [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: The goal of the experiment was to describe a case in which it was obvious that the qualia would be inverted while the reactive dispositions would be normalized. But the assumption that one could just tell is question-begging. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 12.4) | |
| A reaction: It certainly seems simple and plausible that if we inverted our experience of traffic light colours, no difference in driver behaviour would be seen. However, my example, of a conversation in a gallery of abstract art, seems more problematic. |
| 7372 | In peripheral vision we see objects without their details, so blindsight is not that special [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: If a playing card is held in peripheral vision, we can see the card without being able to identify its colours or its shapes. That's normal sight, not blindsight, so we should be reluctant on those grounds to deny visual experience to blindsight subjects. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 11.4) | |
| A reaction: This is an important point in Dennett's war against the traditional all-or-nothing view of mental events. Nevertheless, blindsight subjects deny all mental experience, while picking up information, and peripheral vision never seems like that. |
| 7373 | Blindsight subjects glean very paltry information [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Discussions of blindsight have tended to ignore just how paltry the information is that blindsight subjects glean from their blind fields. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 11.4) | |
| A reaction: This is a bit unfair, because blindsight has mainly pointed to interesting speculations (e.g. Idea 2953). Nevertheless, if blindsight with very high information content is actually totally impossible, the speculations ought to be curtailed. |
| 7385 | People accept blurred boundaries in many things, but insist self is All or Nothing [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Many people are comfortable taking the pragmatic approach to night/day, living/nonliving and mammal/premammal, but get anxious about the same attitude to having a self and not having a self. It must be All or Nothing, and One to a Customer. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 13.2) | |
| A reaction: Personally I think I believe in the existence of the self, but I also agree with Dennett. I greatly admire his campaign against All or Nothing thinking, which is a relic from an earlier age. A partial self could result from infancy or brain damage. |
| 7383 | The psychological self is an abstraction, not a thing in the brain [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Like the biological self, the psychological or narrative self is an abstraction, not a thing in the brain. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 13.1) | |
| A reaction: Does Dennett have empirical evidence for this claim? It seems to me perfectly possible that there is a real thing called the 'self', and it is the central controller of the brain (involving propriotreptic awareness, understanding, and will). |
| 7386 | Selves are not soul-pearls, but artefacts of social processes [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Selves are not independently existing soul-pearls, but artefacts of the social processes that create us, and, like other such artefacts, subject to sudden shifts in status. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 13.2) | |
| A reaction: "Soul-pearls" is a nice phrase for the Cartesian view, but there can something between soul-pearls and social constructs. Personally I think the self is a development of the propriotreptic (body) awareness that even the smallest animals must possess. |
| 7381 | We tell stories about ourselves, to protect, control and define who we are [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control and self-definition is telling stories, and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others - and ourselves - about who we are. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 13.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems to suggest that there is someone who wants to protect themselves, and who wants to tell the stories, and does tell the stories. No one can deny the existence of this autobiographical element in our own identity. |
| 7382 | We spin narratives about ourselves, and the audience posits a centre of gravity for them [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: The effect of our string of personal narratives is to encourage the audience to (try to) posit a unified agent whose words they are, about whom they are: in short, to posit a centre of narrative gravity. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 13.1) | |
| A reaction: What would be the evolutionary advantage of getting the audience to posit a non-existent self, instead of a complex brain? It might be simpler than that, since we say of a bird "it wants to do x". What is "it"? Some simple thing, like a will. |
| 7370 | The brain is controlled by shifting coalitions, guided by good purposeful habits [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Who's in charge of the brain? First one coalition and then another, shifting in ways that are not chaotic thanks to good meta-habits that tend to entrain coherent, purposeful sequences rather than an interminable helter-skelter power grab. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 8.1) | |
| A reaction: This is probably the best anti-ego account available. Dennett offers our sense of self as a fictional autobiography, but the sense of a single real controller is very powerful. If I jump at a noise, I feel that 'I' have lost control of myself. |
| 7379 | If an epiphenomenon has no physical effects, it has to be undetectable [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Psychologists mean a by-product by an 'epiphenomenon', ...but the philosophical meaning is too strong: it yields a concept of no utility whatsoever. Since x has no physical effects (according to the definition), no instrument can detect it. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 12.5) | |
| A reaction: Well said! This has always been my half-formulated intuition about the claim that the mind (or anything) might be totally epiphenomenal. All a thing such as the reflection on a lake can be is irrelevant to the functioning of that specified system. |
| 7365 | Dualism wallows in mystery, and to accept it is to give up [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Given the way dualism wallows in mystery, accepting dualism is giving up. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 2.4) | |
| A reaction: Some things, of course, might be inherently mysterious to us, and we might as well give up. The big dualist mystery is the explanation of how such different substances can interact. How do two physical substances manage to interact? |
| 7371 | All functionalism is 'homuncular', of one grain size or another [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: All varieties of functionalism can be viewed as 'homuncular' functionalism of one grain size or another. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 9.2) | |
| A reaction: This seems right, as any huge and complex mechanism (like a moon rocket) will be made up of some main systems, then sub-systems, then sub-sub-sub.... This assumes that there are one or two overarching purposes, which there are in people. |
| 7380 | Visual experience is composed of neural activity, which we find pleasing [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: All visual experience is composed of activities of neural circuits whose very activity is innately pleasing to us. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 12.6) | |
| A reaction: This is the nearest I can find to Dennett saying something eliminativist. It seems to beg the question of who 'us' refers to, and what is being pleased, and how it is 'pleased' by these neural circuits. The Hard Question? |
| 7366 | It is arbitrary to say which moment of brain processing is conscious [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: If one wants to settle on some moment of processing in the brain as the moment of consciousness, this has to be arbitrary. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 5.3) | |
| A reaction: Seems eliminativist, as it implies that all that is really going on is 'processing'. But there are two senses of 'arbitrary' - that calling it consciousness is arbitrary (wrong), or thinking that mind doesn't move abruptly into consciousness (right). |
| 22420 | The indexical perspective is subjective, incorrigible and constant [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: I attribute three properties to the indexical perspective: it is subjective, incorrigible, and constant. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 5) | |
| A reaction: That is as good an idea as any for summarising the view (associated with John Perry) that the indexical perspective is an indispensable feature of reality. For a good attack on this, which I favour, see Cappelen and Dever. |
| 18410 | Indexical thought is in relation to my self-consciousness [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Very roughly, we can say that to think of something indexically is to think of it in relation to me, as I am presented to myself in self-consciousness. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: So it is characterised relationally, which doesn't mean it has a distinctive intrinsic character. If I'm lost, and I overhear someone say 'Peter is in Hazlemere', I get the same relational information (in a different mode) without the indexicality. |
| 22417 | Indexicals do not figure in theories of physics, because they are not explanatory causes [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Indexicals are like secondary qualities in not figuring in causal explanations of the interactions of objects: physics omits them not because they are relative and egocentric, but because they do not constitute explanatory predicates of a causal theory. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: They are outside explanatory physics, but not outside explanation. The object moved because a force acted on it; or the object moved because I wanted it moved. |
| 18402 | Indexical concepts are indispensable, as we need them for the power to act [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: The present suggestion is that indexical concepts are ineliminable because without them agency would be impossible: when I imagine myself divested of indexical thoughts employing only centreless mental representations, I am deprived of the power to act. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: A nice clear statement of the view developed by Perry and Lewis. I agree with Cappelen and Dever that it is entirely wrong, and that indexical thought is entirely eliminable, and nothing special. |
| 22418 | I can know indexical truths a priori, unlike their non-indexical paraphrases [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: I know the truth of the sentence 'I am here now' a priori, but I do not know a priori 'McGinn is in London on 15th Nov 1981'. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 3) | |
| A reaction: I'm not convinced that I can grasp the concepts of 'here' and 'now' (i.e. space and time) by purely a priori means. But he certainly shows that you can't glibly dismiss indexicals by paraphrasing them in that way. |
| 7368 | Originally there were no reasons, purposes or functions; since there were no interests, there were only causes [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: In the beginning there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing had so much as a function; there was no teleology in the world at all. The explanation is simple: there was nothing that had interests. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 7.2) | |
| A reaction: It seems reasonable to talk of functions even if the fledgling 'interests' are unconscious, as in a leaf. Is a process leading to an end an 'interest'? What are the 'interests' of a person who is about to commit suicide? |