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

558 J HOW THE MIND WORKSwith a better theory of shadows and reflections. But how well does it do atexplaining the sentient self that dreams, imagines, and directs the body?Some problems continue to baffle the modern mind. As the philosopherColin McGinn put it in his summary of them, "The head spins in theoreticaldisarray; no explanatory model suggests itself; bizarre ontologiesloom. There is a feeling of intense confusion, but no clear idea aboutwhere the confusion lies."I discussed one of the problems in Chapter 2: consciousness in thesense of sentience or subjective experience (not in the sense of informationaccess or self-reflection). How could an event of neural informationprocessingcause the feel of a toothache or the taste of lemon or the colorpurple? How could I know whether a worm, a robot, a brain slice in adish, or you are sentient? Is your sensation of red the same as mine, ormight it be like my sensation of green? What is it like to be dead?Another imponderable is the self. What or where is the unified centerof sentience that comes into and goes out of existence, that changes overtime but remains the same entity, and that has a supreme moral worth?Why should the "I" of 1996 reap the rewards and suffer the punishmentsearned by the "I" of 1976? Say I let someone scan a blueprint of my braininto a computer, destroy my body, and reconstitute me in every detail,memories and all. Would I have taken a nap, or committed suicide? Iftwo Is were reconstituted, would I have double the pleasure? How manyselves are in the skull of a split-brain patient? What about in the partlyfused brains of a pair of Siamese twins? When does a zygote acquire aself? How much of my brain tissue has to die before I die?Free will is another enigma (see Chapter 1). How can my actions be achoice for which I am responsible if they are completely caused by mygenes, my upbringing, and my brain state? Some events are determined,some are random; how can a choice be neither? When I hand my walletto an armed man who threatens to kill me if I don't, is that a choice?What about if I shoot a child because an armed man threatens to kill meif I don't? If I choose to do something, I could have done otherwise—butwhat does that mean in a single universe unfolding in time according tolaws, which I pass through only once? I am faced with a momentousdecision, and an expert on human behavior with a ninety-nine percent