Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

134 HOW THE MIND WORKS. . . Special consideration is given to a study of consciousness as opposedto unconsciousness, with many helpful hints on how to remain conscious.Verbal humor sets readers up with one meaning of an ambiguous wordand surprises them with another. Theoreticians also trade on the ambiguityof the word consciousness, not as a joke but as a bait-and-switch:the reader is led to expect a theory for one sense of the word, the hardestto explain, and is given a theory for another sense, the easiest to, explain.I don't like to dwell on definitions, but when it comes to consciousnesswe have no choice but to begin by disentangling the meanings.Sometimes "consciousness" is just used as a lofty synonym for "intelligence."Gould, for example, must have been using it in this way. Butthere are three more-specialized meanings, nicely distinguished by thelinguist Ray Jackendoff and the philosopher Ned Block.One is self-knowledge. Among the various people and objects that anintelligent being can have information about is the being itself. Not onlycan I feel pain and see red, I can think to myself, "Hey, here I am, StevePinker, feeling pain and seeing red!" Oddly enough, this recondite senseof the word is the one that most academic discussions have in mind.Consciousness is typically defined as "building an internal model of theworld that contains the self," "reflecting back on one's own mode ofunderstanding," and other kinds of navel-gazing that have nothing to dowith consciousness as it is commonly understood: being alive and awakeand aware.Self-knowledge, including the ability to use a mirror, is no more mysteriousthan any other topic in perception and memory. If I have a mentaldatabase for people, what's to prevent it from containing an entry formyself? If I can learn to raise my arm and crane my neck to sight a hiddenspot on my back, why couldn't I learn to raise a mirror and look up atit to sight a hidden spot on my forehead? And access to informationabout the self is perfectly easy to model. Any beginning programmer canwrite a short piece of software that examines, reports on, and even modifiesitself. A robot that could recognize itself in a mirror would not bemuch more difficult to build than a robot that could recognize anythingat all. There are, to be sure, good questions to ask about the evolution ofself-knowledge, its development in children, and its advantages (and,more interesting, disadvantages, as we shall see in Chapter 6). But selfknowledgeis an everyday topic in cognitive science, not the paradox of