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

Thinking Machines 145chamberpot containing her soul falls out the window and conks apasserby, played by Steve Martin, on the head. Tomlin's dybbuk comes torest in the right half of his body while he retains control of the left half.He lurches in a zigzag as first his left half strides in one direction andthen his right half, pinkie extended, minces in the other.So, consciousness in the sense of access is coming to be understood.What about consciousness in the sense of sentience? Sentience andaccess may be two sides of a single coin. Our subjective experience isalso the grist for our reasoning, speech, and action. We do not just experiencea toothache; we complain about it and head to the dentist.Ned Block has tried to clarify the distinction between access and sentienceby thinking up scenarios in which access could occur without sentienceand vice versa. An example of access without sentience might befound in the strange syndrome called blindsight. When a person has alarge blind spot because of damage to his visual cortex, he will adamantlydeny that he can see a thing there, but when forced to guess where anobject is, he performs well above chance. One interpretation is that theblindsighter has access to the objects but is not sentient of them. Whetheror not this is correct, it shows that it is possible to conceive of a differencebetween access and sentience. Sentience without access might occurwhen you are engrossed in a conversation and suddenly realize that there isa jackhammer outside the window and that you have been hearing it, butnot noticing it, for some time. Prior to the epiphany you were sentient ofthe noise but had no access to it. But Block admits that the examples are abit strained, and suspects that in reality access and sentience go together.So we may not need a separate theory of where sentience occurs inthe brain, how it fits into mental computation, or why it evolved. Itseems to be an extra quality of some kinds of information access. Whatwe do need is a theory of how the subjective qualities of sentienceemerge out of mere information access. To complete the story, then, Imust present a theory that addresses questions like these:• If we could ever duplicate the information processing in the humanmind as an enormous computer program, would a computer running theprogram be conscious?