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Human beings seem remarkably good (surprisingly so) at understanding the workings of the physical world--matter in motion, causal agents in space--but they do far less well when it comes to fathoming their own minds. And why, in evolutionary terms, should they be intellectually equipped to grasp how their minds ultimately operate? Our concepts of the empirical world are fundamentally controlled by the character of our perceptual experience and by the introspective access we enjoy to our own minds. We can, it is true, extend our concepts some distance beyond these starting-points, but we cannot extend from them entirely. Thus our concepts of consciousness are constrained by the specific form of our own consciousness, so that, we cannot form concepts for quite alien forms of consciousness possessed by other actual and possible creatures. |
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