Chapter 3 Chapter 2 Consciousness and Intelligence
Human consciousness is probably the last unsolved mystery.The reason why it is called a mystery is that people want to solve it but can't do it.Of course there are other great mysteries: such as the origin of the universe, life and reproduction, the wonderful phenomena seen in nature, the mysteries of time, space, gravity, and so on.Men were once baffled and awed by these mysteries, which were scientifically ignorant.We don't yet have all the answers to those questions about cosmology and particle physics, about molecular genetics and the theory of evolution, but we know what to do. ... As for consciousness, we are still in a cloud.Consciousness is, to this day, the only topic that often leaves the tongues of the wisest thinkers stunned and confused.As with all mysteries encountered in the past, there are those who insist—and hope—that consciousness will always remain a mystery.
Charfes Mingus once said about jazz music that you can't improvise from scratch, you have to have some basics.The Romans said that we cannot cook without rice.Therefore, conceiving a new plan of action has to start somewhere and then be perfected.Two of the most prominent examples of creativity in action are evolution of species and immune responses.Both use Darwinian processes to shape rough raw material into something good.But when we try to apply Darwinism to our mental activities, confusion about consciousness (not to mention confusion about the levels of its mechanisms) often leads us astray.That may be why there has been little progress in the theory of spiritual Darwinism for over a century.
In the previous chapter, I discussed what intelligence is and is not.In this chapter, I try to do the same for consciousness, hoping to avoid repeating arguments that already stray from James's point of view.There is considerable duplication between the meanings of consciousness and intelligence, although consciousness tends to refer to mental activity in a waking state, while intelligence tends to refer to the imagination or efficiency of our mental activity.We need to keep in mind that advanced intellectual behavior may actually require both conscious and subconscious processing.
How should we go about explaining the unknown?The overall strategy should always be kept in mind, especially when those who the philosopher Owen Flanagan has dubbed "the new mystics—provide attractive shortcuts as explanations. Take Dennett's view of" With such a brilliant definition of "mystery," let us consider for a moment the physicists working on consciousness who are exploring how quantum mechanics might work in consciousness and provide "free will" through (in the thin microtubules that usually cluster near synapses) to get rid of the shadow of "determinism".
I'm not going to spend more space here judging their best-selling arguments (or, more accurately, the arguments of their best-selling books), but when you see that they don't involve (let alone explain) awareness and When looking at the wide-ranging implications of intelligence, you may feel (as I do) that they are just another instance of "futility."
Moreover, as studies of chaos and complexity have taught us, determinism is not actually a controversial issue, it is only suitable as a topic at a cocktail party, and does not need to be excused by quantum mechanics.With some notable exceptions (I will call them Ecclesian neuroscientists—after the eminent Australian neurophysiologist John C. Eccles), neuroscientists are very Rarely do we talk about things in this way. Seriously, we rarely get involved in any kind of wordplay about consciousness.
This is not for lack of interest, how the brain works is, after all, our main concern.Maybe after a stressful day of neurobiology meetings, we'll be drinking beer and saying, while we still haven't found a general explanation, we do know what doesn't work.Wordplay produces more heat than light, as do so-called "interpretations" that simply substitute one mystery for another.
Neuroscientists know that a useful scientific explanation of our internal mental world must "explain" and not merely provide a catalog of psychoactive capacities; The aberrations caused, the creativity of hallucinations, the trappings of delusions, the unreliability of memory, and our fears of mental illness and its ravages are rare in other animals.An explanation would have to be consistent with the many facts of a century of brain research, and with what we know about consciousness from studies of sleep, stroke, and mental illness.We have many ways to dismiss demagogues.In the 30 years I've been doing brain research, I've heard a lot of this.
There are many ways to slice the cake of our mental activity.In The Brain Symphony, I tried to focus on the discussion of consciousness.The reason why I avoid discussing consciousness hereafter and focus on the basis of intelligence is that the direct consequence of the discussion of consciousness ends in a passive observer rather than an explorer and an explorer in the world. Explorer.In the dictionary, you can see that the word "consciousness" has many interpretations: self-feeling, thinking, sentient, volitional, fully aware of the situation, awake, intentional, sensitive, etc.Philosopher Paul M. Churchland recently produced a more useful checklist, stating that "consciousness" is:
use of short-term memory (sometimes called working memory);
independent of sensory input, i.e. we can think about things that don't exist and imagine things that aren't real;
Demonstrates manageable attention;
Ability to provide various interpretations of complex or ambiguous data;
Disappears during deep sleep;
Reappear in dreams;
• The ability to accommodate the content of several sensory modalities in a single unified experience.
The focus of this list is also on the passive observer rather than the explorer, but we see that Piaget's views on intelligence have been considered in the "various interpretations" column listed above.
There is a tendency among scientists to use "consciousness" to mean "awareness" and "recognition."For example, Francis Crick and Christof Koch used the word "consciousness" when discussing the "association problem in object recognition and recall". But just because a word in English is used to mark Such a wide range of mental abilities, so this does not mean that they have the same neural mechanism. Other languages often use different words to express these meanings of "consciousness" mentioned above. Crick's thalamocortical theory is thinking about objects. Extremely useful in identifying problems, but has absolutely nothing to do with the predictions or decisions that his use of the word "consciousness" implies. It's very easy to make overly general inferences with the words you choose. This Not to criticize, until we have a clearer understanding of the mechanism, there is no good choice. For now, the reader can draw a reasonable conclusion: the meaning of consciousness is some kind of intelligence test, which can examine one's confusion The ability to roam the world. Debates about consciousness often confuse these meanings, and arguers seem to believe in the existence of a common underlying entity—the "little man in the head" that sees everything. To avoid doing this The assumption is that we can use different English words to express different meanings of "consciousness", such as we use aware (perceived) and avoid conscious (conscious). I usually try to do this, but when you use different words There is also a pitfall sometimes, because of so-called "back translation." For example, doctors try to avoid the word "consciousness" and instead refer to the patient's level of arousal, which can be learned by calling out and prodding the patient. to obtain, such as stupor, stupor, lucidity, sufficient timing and orientation. This generally works, but problems arise when one tries to translate it back into terms such as "consciousness". Yes, in A comatose person is unconscious, but to say "conscious" is at the other end of the arousal scale is potentially seriously misleading. Worse, equating conscious with arous-able , which means to assign consciousness to any organism that has stimulus sensitivity (stressability). Since stressability is a basic characteristic of all living tissues, plants and animals, this extends consciousness to everything but stones. Almost everything except . While this appeals to some and shocks others, it's certainly a poor strategy scientifically. If you cook everything in one pot, then You can't really know what consciousness means.
With so many synonyms for consciousness in English (aware, senskive, awake, arousable, deliberate, etc.), you can understand why people tend to be a little confused when it comes to what consciousness really means.It is not uncommon to hear words switch meanings during the same discussion.If this happened to the word "lift" and one speaker meant "hitchhiker" and another meant "elevator", we would often laugh out loud.But when we talk about consciousness, we often don't pay attention to the inversion of meaning, and both sides of the argument often use this ambiguity to score points or to diverge arguments.
What's more, at least in the scientific world, connotations of consciousness usually include aspects of mental activity such as concentration, alertness, mental repetition, voluntary behavior, subconscious stimulation, you don't know what you know, imagery, Understanding, thinking, making decisions, different states of consciousness, the changing concept of self in the child's mind, etc. - all the subconscious ones, and all those aspects of the unconscious that our "narrators of consciousness" may not pay attention to.
Many people think that what we tell ourselves when we are awake or in our dreams may constitute our consciousness.Narratives are an important part of how we feel about ourselves, and not just in the sense of being self-narrative.When we take on a role, like a 4 year old playing 'doctor' and 'player' tree in fake copies, we have to temporarily detach ourselves and imagine ourselves to be in another person's place, The ability to act in the way that person is empowered. (This ability is a more useful definition of one's sense of self.)
But narration is a tangible part of our everyday life, and it is unconscious.From around the age of three or four, we weave most things into stories.Syntax is often a way of telling at an early age: in a sentence, the word "lunch" drives us to search for words similar in meaning to the verb "to eat," for food, places, and people present.Verbs (such as "give") lead us to look for 3 nouns that play different roles: subject, direct object, indirect object.There are many standard relationships, and the characters are familiar to the players, so that we can guess contextually what to fill in the gaps that are not filled.We often guess well, but in dreams we have the same kind of fictionalism that occurs in memory-disordered patients, who unconsciously make inexplicable guesses.It has been often said recently that "perception can be seen primarily as the modification of an expectation." It is always an active process, conditioned by our expectations and adapted to the environment.Instead of talking about what we saw and understood, we should discuss what we saw and noticed.We only notice when we are looking for something; we pay attention only when some imbalance (i.e., a discrepancy between our expectations and the information we receive) catches our attention.We can't accept everything we see in one room, but if something changes we will notice.EM Gombrich, Art and Fantasy It is generally accepted that the sense of self is accompanied by subtle mental activities, so let me briefly address a common notion that self-consciousness has complex 'intellectual' mental Structural involvement. 2. When you want to imitate someone else's action (say, sticking out your tongue), how do you know which muscle to move? Do you need to first look at yourself in the mirror and compare what you see with The commands to the muscles required to imitate this action? No. In fact, infants can also imitate the facial expressions they see without any experience. This suggests that there is some kind of innate wiring in the brain that connects at least It is the connection between certain sensory templates and corresponding motor commands, so that for a certain level of imitation, the wiring in the brain is wired innately. This wiring may explain why some animals can recognize themselves in the mirror , while others find the image in the mirror amusing or frightening as another animal. Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gibbons can recognize themselves in the mirror, some instantly or within days; Orangutans, baboons, and most other primates cannot. The capuchin monkey "is the most intelligent of the New World monkeys (the platysmus) and is very good at using tools.If a full-length mirror is placed in their cage, they will constantly threaten "the other animal" for several weeks.Often, after a short time one animal backs down and submits to the "other animal".But in the case of the mirror monkey, there is no outcome; even if the capuchin monkey wants to submit, (the other, the mirror image) will submit.Eventually the monkey became so frustrated with the unresolved conflict that the experimenter had to remove the mirror.
What might be involved in self-identification?What sensory inputs can be expected from a certain action (so-called efferent copies"), so if these sensory expectations exactly match the input signals from your skin and muscles during small movements, it will make you Recognize yourself in the mirror. This associative movement's perfect alignment with internal projections is certainly unusual for most wild animals as they rarely see their own Face.
Controversies about self-awareness in the animal research literature may revolve around fairly simple issues such as attention to expected facial expressions, which is certainly one of the considerations of consciousness, but hardly its focus.Self-recognition undoubtedly involves both the guessing process discussed by Barlow and the esoteric inquiry process discussed by Piaget, but I would not include it in the list of "wooden intelligence".However, self-identification is certainly more relevant than quantum fields.
Does the mysterious mechanics of the nose have anything to do with these conscious aspects of our mental activity?Or is it just another case of invoking quantum mechanics in discussions of consciousness, mistaking a field rich in mysterious effects (chaos, self-organizing automata, fractals—, economics, and weather) that might Has a relationship with another equally mysterious realm?Most such associations must be confounding of irrelevant things.The argument is especially questionable when the two realms are at opposite poles of a mysterious unfolding spectrum.
Reducing things to their basics is a good science strategy (and that's what physicists are good at), but only if those basics are at some appropriate level of organization.And driven by reductionist zeal, physicists working on consciousness seem to have forgotten a common scientific concept: levels of explanation (often related to levels of mechanism).Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter gives a good example of levels of explanation by pointing out that it is impossible to explain the cause of a traffic jam at the level of a car or its components.Traffic jams are an example of self-organization.Stop-and-go is an extreme form of quasi-stability, and its self-organizing nature is seen more clearly in this case.Of course a component failure could be the cause of an occasional traffic jam.But the term "spark plug failure" is clearly not enough to analyze a traffic jam, and it is not a very good idea compared with other reasons, such as the intersection of lanes, proper distance between cars, the setting of traffic lights, and failure to accelerate when going uphill. level of analysis.
An explanation on a more basic level is mostly irrelevant to traffic jams unless it offers an instructive analogy.It is true that assembly principles, surface area-volume ratios, chaos, and fractals also exist in multiple configurations, but this does not mean that these constitute a mechanism across levels: analogies do not form mechanisms.
The quasi-stable hierarchy makes self-organization more tractable, especially when building blocks such as crystals are present.Since we are looking for some useful analogies to help explain our mental activity, it is worth looking at how levels of explanation work elsewhere.From time to time random combinations form some higher form of organization.Some forms are ephemeral, such as the honeycomb cells formed in porridge cooking, which are destroyed by stirring.Some forms (such as crystals) will build up a self-protection mechanism after reaching an ordered state to prevent it from degenerating into a "disordered" state.Crystals are the best known of these quasi-stable forms, as do molecular configurations.There may even be quasi-stable forms of intermediate levels, such as the quantum state of microtubules, which is the state physicists working on consciousness hope to function in.Hierarchical stability refers to the summation of such quasi-stable hierarchies.The forms that make up life are the most complex; from time to time they collapse like houses of cards, and the higher organized forms disintegrate with them (this is one of the ways in which death is explained).
Between quantum mechanics and consciousness, there may be 10 or so levels of fabric: chemical bonds.Molecules and their self-organization, molecular biology, genetics, biochemistry, membranes and their ion channels, synapses and their neurotransmitters, neurons themselves, neural circuits, cortical columns and modules, dynamic activity in large-scale cortex, etc. .Because of the intense competition among neuroscientists working at adjacent levels, one is always aware of these levels in neuroscience research.
Occasional changes in consciousness are associated with generalized cessation of certain types of synaptic activity.But a more reasonable level of inquiry into consciousness would seem to be at a level of organization adjacent to the level of perception and planning, such as (in my opinion) cortical circuits and ever-changing postage stamp-sized cortical regions with firing patterns involved dynamic self-organizing hierarchy. "Consciousness," even though it has many meanings, cannot be explained on a low-level chemical level or even a lower-level physical level.I call this attempt to jump from the lower basement of quantum mechanics to the attic of consciousness the "Dream of Si Yan".
Explaining consciousness in terms of quantum mechanics is like explaining radios in terms of crystals, or explaining traffic jams in terms of spark plugs.It is necessary but not sufficient.Interesting in itself, of course, but the subject is too far removed from our mental activity.
Spirit seems to be different from pure matter, so many people still think that there needs to be some kind of magic to explain it.The mind, however, is to be regarded as something crystalline—composed of the same matter and energy as everything else, only temporarily organized in some complex form.This idea is not new. In the early 19th century, Percy Bysshe Shelley pointed out:
The vast majority of people have come to believe that sensation and thought (as opposed to matter) are by their nature insensitive to fragmentation, decay, and that even if a body is dismembered, the principles that animate it remain eternal.But that which we call thought may not be a real being like the matter of which the rest of the world is composed, but merely a relation between certain parts of the infinitely variable material world, once those parts Change its mutual position, and it ceases to exist.
The patterns of information flow in the brain are far more complex than the patterns of vehicle movement.Fortunately, it has some similarities with music, which we can use as an analogy.Understanding consciousness and intelligence will require both appropriate metaphors and actual mechanisms.Instead of falling back into wordplay, or something magical.
A ghost is another word for a mysterious substance.For our analysis of creative mental activity it is worth considering what this concept means.Ghosts exemplify another essential aspect of the mind, namely the role of memory.
The fact that the word "ghost" exists in most languages suggests that people need it to describe things they see and hear that they cannot explain.Why do so many people think ghosts really exist?Is this the starting point for the idea of a spiritual world with no bodily form?
We now know that ghosts exist because of mistakes made by the brain; some are trivial everyday mistakes, others arise from abnormalities in sleep;We call these hallucinations; auditory hallucinations tend to outnumber visual hallucinations.Fantasy people or pets often mess around, just as they mess around in our succubi.
Remember that what you see under normal circumstances is actually a mental pattern that you have constructed.Your eyes are literally darting around, producing a retinal image of the scene that jumps like an amateur videographer's video.Some of what you thought you saw was actually filled with memory.In hallucinations, this thought pattern is taken to an extreme.Memories stored in your brain are interpreted as present sensory input.This sometimes happens when you are struggling to wake up, before your limp muscles return to normal quickly.You watch real people move about in the bedroom, and dream elements are superimposed on top of it.Or, you may hear a deceased relative say a familiar remark to you.Half of my mind is awake while the other half is still sleepwalking.Fortunately, you realize this and don't want to fantasize about it.We've all experienced some of the symptoms of dementia, delirium, and hallucinations in our sleep at night, we just take it for granted and don't take it seriously.
However, hallucinations can also occur at night before bed or while working during the day.I think many of these "ghosts" are simply cognitive errors, as I experienced recently: I heard a distinct creaking sound in the kitchen, which was repeated a moment later.Oh!As I continue to type, I'm thinking, that cat has finally eaten its cat food.Two seconds later it dawned on me, "Wait a minute, let me think about it." Oh my god, that cat died of chronic poor feeding months ago.All I heard in a daze was the automatic frosting of the refrigerator, which was less noisy than the ice maker, and I made habitual guesses about the sounds I heard before I could figure things out.
When we only vaguely hear something, we always fill in the details with guesswork.A window that squeaks in the wind can also sound a bit like your puppy whining at you for food, making you think you heard the puppy barking.Once this memory is awakened, the actual sound can be difficult to reproduce - the details filled by the memory become the perceived reality.This is not unusual, as James pointed out a century ago, we do it all the time.
When we hear a person speak or read a printed page, we think that what we saw or heard newly has many memories from our {1.Although we see typographical errors, we ignore them and imagine the correct letters; when we go to foreign theaters, we realize how little is actually audible, and what bothers us more there is not the inability to Understand what the actors say, but can't hear their lines clearly.In fact, under similar conditions in China, we can hear very little, just because our minds are full of English word associations, which provide the necessary material for understanding, although the auditory clues are very insignificant.
This filling from memory is part of what is called categorical perception, which we call hallucinations when we don't know what triggered it.Unless the sound is repeated, we cannot compare our filling perception of the sound with the original sound; fortunately, if it is a visual phenomenon, we can often take a second look and spot it before indulging in "ghost appearances" mistake.
We now know that suggestion (even without hypnosis) and stress (even without grief) can enhance our natural tendency to jump to conclusions, making it easier for memories to be mistaken for present reality.Having already had a preconceived notion of something, I probably wouldn't have looked for alternative explanations, or walked into the kitchen in time to discover the real reason.Thereafter, whenever I remember "hearing" the dead cat meow, I may fall into the usual non-scientific explanations: "That's a ghost!" or "I must have lost my soul! It could be Alzheimer's disease !” Both statements are scary enough, and neither is possible.But if that's the only explanation you can get, you'll be very upset.
Have scientific explanations exorcised the ghosts from our culture?At least for the uneducated, the concept of ghosts can be quite frightening. (Dinosaurs were popular with kids for exactly the same reason: in an underlying sense they were triple-featured, they were big, they were scary, and they were extinct, so they were safe.) Temporal lobe epilepsy sufferers explain hallucinations when doctors explain Before, I didn't think hallucinations were so ridiculous.Grieving relatives look back and say that it would have been nice if someone had given them some knowledge of this.
This example shows that, to the scientifically educated, science can dispel that once frightening mystery.Science doesn't just make humanity stronger by seeding more advanced technologies; it helps us stay out of trouble in the first place.Knowledge is like a vaccine, making people immune to man-made panic and "failure".
Yet another related ghost story in neuroscience: philosopher Gilbert Ryle's lovely phrase "ghost in the machine" and our use of "little man in the brain" to describe the "little man in the brain" We" have similarities in the same way.It has led some researchers to discuss the "interface" between the "mind" and the brain, and between the unknowable and the knowable.Is this dressed up in modern clothing by the neo-mystics?
We are now making good progress in replacing this pseudo-spirit with more appropriate physiological analogies and, in some cases, even actual brain mechanisms.Just as a previous generation of scientists beneficially ruled out external ghosts, our growing awareness of psychic substitutes will help people see themselves more clearly, explain their experiences more reliably, and will help psychiatry. Home explains the symptoms of mental illness.
Physicists working on consciousness are trying to find answers, and they certainly don't intend to tell another ghost story.They're just making broad guesses.Just imagine how absurd it would be for neuroscientists—even those with a few classes in quantum mechanics—to speculate on the mysteries of physics.But why are these physicists so serious when dabbling in fields that are several organizational levels away from their specialties?Specialization itself may be part of the answer, but it also shows a danger of intelligence.
Specialization in science is about asking questions that might be answered, requiring attention to detail, which will take a lot of time and effort.As is often the case when college students debate some of the big questions in science, none of us really wants to give up our claims.We were concerned with those questions, and it was those questions that drew us into the realm of science.They're not as backward as the ghosts, but the progress scientists make on intellectual problems sometimes reminds me of what happens when canal locks are raised and lowered vertically.
At least in Seattle, it's like being in a giant bathtub with a view of the waterfront, fish ladders, mountains and tourists.Immediately after the gates are opened, your ship sinks, and your attention is drawn to the eddies that form near the locks to pitch the ship.They are indeed charming.If you insert a paddle into a vortex, it creates a lot of secondary vortices.The theory of self-similarity implies themselves, and thus the transformation into fractals begins.
If you put aside your experiments and look up from your theoretical ideas in this giant tub, all you see is a rectangle of sky.Now you look out of a huge wet box (the walls of this box are 1-2 stories high), and there are shadows of people standing on the wall in the sunlight on the north wall of the box.Like in Plato's Cave, you start to ponder the meaning of the shadows on the wall, guessing blindly what's going on outside. What starts off as two people fighting each other turns into one standing over the other In front of you, talking and dancing. Specialization can be such a limited picture that you can hardly see the whole picture unless you come out of the water occasionally to enjoy the view.
As the price of scientific progress, people are often unfamiliar with other levels of organization than the level adjacent to their specialty (a chemist may know some biochemistry, some planetary mechanics, but not much neuroanatomy).When you have no other information than what you have provided through your own mental activity, you are apt to make wild guesses only at the shadows on the wall.Sometimes you just have to do that, and Plato and Fencar did a great job back then.
But why should you settle for dancing shadows against the wall if you can do better?Why play word games?One eventually realizes that a word itself is only a poor approximation of the process it expresses.It is hoped that after reading this thin book the reader will be able to imagine some of the processes that might lead to consciousness, and which can operate fast enough to constitute agile thinking.
Describing our mental lives is a notoriously big problem, one that inevitably gets bogged down in ancient subjectivity.There are two other vortices that we need to avoid when navigating our thoughts.
One way of thinking is to act as a passive observer who stands between sensation and action and analyzes the interior of the mental process, which is a view that will get into all kinds of unnecessary philosophical troubles.This is partly because feel is only half the circle, and we therefore overlook the role of feel in preparation for movement.Some of the more subtle connections between sensation and movement are called "cortical reflexes," but we also need to understand how thoughts are connected to movements in subtle ways when we explore the process of a new movement.Ignoring the internals of mental processes (as behavioral psychologists did half a century ago) is not the way to go in the long run.Neuroscientists often focus on preparation for movement, which brings us closer to the thought process.
We often divide mental activity into feeling phases, thinking phases, and acting phases, but this leads to trouble because events rarely happen at a single point in time and space.Interesting activity in the brain involves spatiotemporal patterns of cellular activity, a bit like the melody of a piece of music (in this case the space is the keyboard or musical scale).All our senses, such as the feel of your fingers as you prepare to turn the page to the next, are patterns spread across time and space.Likewise, all our movements are spatiotemporal patterns involving different muscles at different times.When you turn the page, you activate as many muscles as you do when you play the piano (unless your precise timing activates various muscles, you can't separate the next page from the rest).Furthermore, when we understand mental activities, we often think of them as taking place in one place, at one moment.
But what exists within the mind is also a spatio-temporal pattern (the firing of individual neurons), which we should not expect to converge to a single point in space (like a particular neuron); generate a pulse), as if a perception or a thought should not be played one note at a time.As far as I know, in vertebrates this only occurs in the escape reflex in fish (sometimes nature makes this arrangement to make it easier for neurophysiologists to study), where spatio-temporal patterns eventually converge to the brainstem A large neuron in the , whose firing causes a powerful tail flick in the fish.But higher-level functions inevitably involve large, overlapping groups of cells whose activities are spread out in time.That's a more difficult concept to describe.Understanding higher mental functions requires us to analyze the brain's spatiotemporal patterns, those melodies in the cerebral cortex.
除了航行中旋涡的危险性，我们还将需要仔细地挑选构筑单元，以避免只是简单地用一种奥秘来代替另一种奥秘。在挑选构筑单元时最显而易见的危险是过早地把“门” 关上，不再去探寻可能的机制，这正是求助于灵魂或鼻子场来解释智力时发生的情况。
我们还必须意识到，在对付一种“解释”的终极状态时必须处理的若干危险：一种是新时代变种的“万事皆相关”论，另一种是在不适当的组构层次作还原论的解释（恕我直言，这正是从事意识研究的物理学家们和埃克尔斯学派的神经科学家们所为）。
解释精神活动是一个庞大的任务。你可能已注意到本书的篇幅并不大，我将试图从不同的角度来切蛋糕，专注于对我们精神活动与智力相关联的那些侧面的论述，而不去进一步探讨意识的内涵。这无非是建立一套内容广泛的行为，即适应各种情况的“妙着”。专注于智力所涵盖的范围与专注于意识所涵盖的范围是相同的，但是前者避免了许多航行中陷入旋涡的危险。最重要的是，这套“妙着”所导致的终点与被动的沉思甚不相同。与试图谈论动物的意识所产生的思想紊乱相比，对智力这个主题的论述，肯定更易使我们发现自身与其他动物间的连贯性。因此，下一个任务是从进化的角度来看一看出色的猜测可能是从哪里来的。
关于意识的体论——一个人越清醒，就有越多层的处理过程将其隔离于世界——和自然中众多其他事物一样，是一种交易。渐渐远离于外部世界只是对认识世界所付的代价。我们对世界的认识越深、越广，我们为获得那种意识所必需处理的层次就越复杂。