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

Thinking Machines 135water becoming wine. Because it is so easy to say something about selfknowledge,writers can crow about their "theory of consciousness."A second sense is access to information. I ask, "A penny for yourthoughts?" You reply by telling me the content of your daydreams, yourplans for the day, your aches and itches, and the colors, shapes, andsounds in front of you. But you cannot tell me about the enzymes secretedby your stomach, the current settings of your heart and breathing rate, thecomputations in your brain that recover 3-D shapes from the 2-D retinas,the rules of syntax that order the words as you speak, or the sequence ofmuscle contractions that allow you to pick up a glass. That shows that themass of information processing in the nervous system falls into two pools.One pool, which includes the products of vision and the contents of shorttermmemory, can be accessed by the systems underlying verbal reports,rational thought, and deliberate decision making. The other pool, whichincludes autonomic (gut-level) responses, the internal calculations behindvision, language, and movement, and repressed desires or memories (ifthere are any), cannot be accessed by those systems. Sometimes informationcan pass from the first pool to the second or vice versa. When we firstlearn how to use a stick shift, every motion has to be thought out, but withpractice the skill becomes automatic. With intense concentration andbiofeedback, we can focus on a hidden sensation like our heartbeat.This sense of consciousness, of course, also embraces Freud's distinctionbetween the conscious and the unconscious mind. As with selfknowledge,there is nothing miraculous or even mysterious about it.Indeed, there are obvious analogues in machines. My computer hasaccess to information about whether the printer is working or not working(it is "conscious" of it, in this particular sense) and can print out anerror message, Printer not responding. But it has no access to informationabout why the printer is not working; the signal carried backalong the cable from printer to computer does not include the information.The chip inside the printer, in contrast, does have access to thatinformation (it is conscious of it, in this sense); the sensors in differentparts of the printer feed into the chip, and the chip can turn on a yellowlight if the toner supply is low and a red light if the paper is jammed.Finally, we come to the most interesting sense of all, sentience: subjectiveexperience, phenomenal awareness, raw feels, first-person presenttense, "what it is like" to be or do something, if you have to ask you'llnever know. Woody Allen's joke turned on the difference between thissense of consciousness and Freud's sense of it as access to information