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

Thinking Machines 147finding in neuroscience, once you clear up the usual confusion of sentiencewith access and self-knowledge.How can a book called How the Mind Works evade the responsibilityof explaining where sentience comes from? I could, I suppose, invokethe doctrine of logical positivism, which holds that if a statement cannotbe verified it is literally meaningless. The imponderables in my list askabout the quintessentially unverifiable. Many thinkers, such as Dennett,conclude that worrying about them is simply flaunting one's confusion:sentient experiences (or, as philosophers call them, qualia) are a cognitiveillusion. Once we have isolated the computational and neurologicalcorrelates of access-consciousness, there is nothing left to explain. It'sjust irrational to insist that sentience remains unexplained after all themanifestations of sentience have been accounted for, just becausethe computations don't have anything sentient in them. It's like insistingthat wetness remains unexplained even after all the manifestations ofwetness have been accounted for, because moving molecules aren't wet.Most people are uncomfortable with the argument, but it is not easyto find anything wrong with it. The philosopher Georges Rey once toldme that he has no sentient experiences. He lost them after a bicycleaccident when he was fifteen. Since then, he insists, he has been a zombie.I assume he is speaking tongue-in-cheek, but of course I have noway of knowing, and that is his point.The qualia-debunkers do have a point. At least for now, we have noscientific purchase on the special extra ingredient that gives rise to sentience.As far as scientific explanation goes, it might as well not exist. It'snot just that claims about sentience are perversely untestable; it's thattesting them would make no difference to anything anyway. Our incomprehensionof sentience does not impede our understanding of how themind works in the least. Generally the parts of a scientific problem fittogether like a crossword puzzle. To reconstruct human evolution, weneed physical anthropology to find the bones, archeology to understandthe tools, molecular biology to date the split from chimpanzees, andpaleobotany to reconstruct the environment from fossil pollen. Whenany part of the puzzle is blank, such as a lack of chimpanzee fossils or anuncertainty about whether the climate was wet or dry, the gap is sorelyfelt and everyone waits impatiently for it to be filled. But in the study ofthe mind, sentience floats in its own plane, high above the causal chainsof psychology and neuroscience. If we ever could trace all the neurocomputationalsteps from perception through reasoning and emotion to