The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

like that. More generally, minds evolved to support foresight, which brains compute by learning and using the statistics of the world in which they live.
    Thus, the mind is best defined as the bundle of computations carried out collectively by the brain’s neurons. Because the same computation can be implemented by different physical means, nonbiological minds are revealed as a distinct possibility. This line of reasoning, supported by hard evidence from cognitive sciences, exposes the mind-body problem as an artifact of old ways of conceptualizing cognition that can be safely dismissed.
 
     

3
     
    The Republic of Soul
     
    A discourse on method. Faster than
a speeding marmot. A treatise of human
nature. Perception by numbers. Representation
space: the final frontier. Being in the world.
The instruments of change. The value of
everything. Things get interesting.
     
    Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.
    —T. S . ELIOT, The Hollow Men (1925)
     
     
. . . at this moment, I’d say, I am
a bringer of light; a man who stands in a doorway
flooded by sun;
I am a bird; someone who learns,
in shadow, the real shape of brightness.
    —WILLIAM REICHARD,
“An Open Door” ( This Brightness, 2007)
     

A Discourse on Method
     
    If this book is your first encounter with the idea that the mind is a bundle of computations, reading the previous chapter may have been something of a transformative experience for you. Francis Crick, best known for discovering together with James Watson the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule, gave the title The Astonishing Hypothesis to a book in which he equated the mind with “the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells.” How much more astonishing is the hypothesis that what truly matters about the behavior of nerve cells is what they compute!
    Whether you have been transformed, astonished, or merely intrigued by this hypothesis (which complements the other one nicely), 1 let me tell you that the best stuff—seeing it grow, prosper, and bear yummily explanatory fruit from one page to the next—is yet to come. So is, I must disclose, some hard thinking, considering what we’re up against here. If the mind is a bundle of computations, then understanding how it works would seem to call for a feat of reverse software engineering—a field of endeavor whose defining observation is “Hell is someone else’s code.”
    Fortunately, just as you did not need a degree in computer science to understand the fundamental nature of computation, you do not need one to work out quite an adequate explanation of how computations come together to form a mind. This is because the machinery of mind does not, in fact, use any kind of “software” for anyone to decipher—just as a falling pebble does not use software to plot its course. To start making sense of this machinery, we need to learn to think about the mind on a number of levels.
    It is the need to do so that distinguishes mindful entities—those whose representations are used by the entities themselves to some purpose—from mindless ones. It does not take a lot of sophistication for a system to possess rudimentary purposive mindfulness. What are its telltale signs? Imagine yourself waking up in the morning, perhaps a little earlier than usual, to discover that your slippers are slowly but steadily trying to get out of your sight. Such a scene would definitely raise more than one question. Some of the more likely ones are “Why?” (or, if you are prone to taking things personally, “Why are they doing this to me?”) and “How?” A little reflection reveals that this last question is too general, which suggests multiple alternatives that are more specific, such as “How do they figure out where to go?” and “How do they actually move?” Now, if you have more than a passing curiosity about your world, you would not settle for having just one of these questions answered. They all address different aspects of the startling