Slide 5 of 37
Notes:
Cartesian theater (Dennett, 1991, p. 39): “The exclusive attention to specific subsystems of the mind/brain often causes a sort of theoretical myopia that prevents theorists from seeing that their models still presuppose that somewhere, conveniently hidden in the obscure ‘center’ of the mind/brain there is a Cartesian Theater, a place where “it all comes together” and consciousness happens.”
Suga has identified the parts of the bat brain that are responsible for detecting the coincidence between the bat's outgoing signal and the echo returned by objects in its path. He can point to tonotopic, velocitopic, and spatial maps of objects detected by the bat's sonar. Despite all of this excellent neurophysiology, he still has not, in his words, identified the "pilot," that is the mechanism that reads the maps and steers the bat.
The fundamental facts that a dualist agenda dictates for explanation are those involving the mental essence of mental events. The incorrigibility and primacy of personal experience and the profound necessary ignorance of other minds. We have direct access only to our own minds and no access to others’. The purpose of psychology is to explain our feelings of experience following certain events. The mind is then characterized as that which has these feelings. This position further dictates that the world can be divided into those things that plausibly have those feelings of experience and those that do no.
