Topic: Mind
I braved a fairly long and boring stretch of Dennett's book over the last few days, things are picking up a little now. He's been exploring the "architecture" of the mind. This has him talking about virtual machines, neural nets, and schemes by which "drafts" rise to power. A lot of this stuff I've covered in other posts. The one thing I found interesting was his discussion of intentions and how that fits into multiple drafts. Since there is no center "where it all happens" there is no single entity standing in an intentional relation to something else. He's attacking the (obviously oversimplified) idea that we always mean what we say. Sometimes we just say, and then later invent a story about how we meant it. There are two important things going on in these cases. In a Freudian slip, for instance, there is intuitively not a single producer, but (at least) two producers which blend their voices. And then he notes we are not always intending and then picking out the right words, but often pick out the words, er, "memonically", the "real intent" never to be found.
