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I Of all categories of the real, the mental has undoubtedly received the most philosophical attention. this is doubtless due in the first instance to the fact that philosophers are human beings with particularly cerebral leanings and orientations, and what has characteristically seemed most distinctive and impressive about ourselves, particularly when the selves are philosophical ones, is that we are thinking things (in descartes’s celebrated phrase). As in other spheres, human egoism has a lot to do with what inquiry chooses to focus upon. However, there is clearly more to it. the mental is difficult and complicated, and has proved remarkably resistant to repeated attempts to come to summary theoretical judgment. the foundational questions for the investigation of the mental may be stated as follows. What is it to be a thinking thing? What is it to think? Moreover, how do both—being a thinking thing, and thinking—connect with other parts of the world? the general investigation of mind is so multifaceted that no attempt will be made here to exhaust even the contours of the topic. Moreover, partly for manageability of the inquiry and partly because they do seem evident to me, i will make assumptions that some philosophers would challenge. First, i assume without argument that there are thinking beings and mental states or events—thinkers and thinkings. (i will try not to assume anything in particular about what either is, or involves.) this all by itself will put the themes and methodology of this chapter out of serious C H A P t e R X i V Mind Mind 223 contention for some philosophical readers. nonetheless, i shall assume (with most philosophers and non-philosophers) that there are thinkers and thinkings; or at least the latter (i shall pause, at least, to consider whether we ought to believe that there are thinkers). the mental is not merely appearance but reality. Second, i assume, contrary to descartes, that there are, in the animal kingdom, non-human as well as human thinkers and thinkings: i.e., at least some other animals besides ourselves think. third, i assume that the correct account of thinking is broadly naturalist. By this i do not mean that it is necessarily physicalist, but that it is not merely consistent with, but actively to be sought within, the broad framework of a unitary system of natural processes and objects that science tries to explore. this is vague, of course. nonetheless i assume that the idea has intuitive resonance and that it is correct. i note, however, that the naturalist assumption does not, as i understand it, carry with it any assumption that the tools and resources for, much less the outline of the correct theory of, the mental are on the current conceptual agenda of “hard” science. three features of mental states and events have seemed to some philosophers to make accommodation of the mental to even a broad naturalism problematic. One is the fine-grained character of mental states—e.g., the fact that someone’s consciousness of a red Macintosh apple is, or can be, a different state from that person’s consciousness of a red Spartan apple. A second is the representational character of mental states, their being of things (objects, states, or anything else, real or unreal), often called their intentionality. these features seem obviously related, though they are logically quite distinct. even more than these two evident characteristics of the mental, as found in humans, many philosophers think that there is to be located profound challenge, for a scientific or a naturalist view at large, with the so-called phenomenality of the mental, the fact of phenomenal, including sensory, consciousness at all, and in general. i will signal at the outset, in brief, my own conviction that there is ground for scepticism, or at least for complicating reflection, on the third of the allegedly naturalism-challenging features of the mental enumerated. the (sizeable army of) philosophers of mind who worry about phenomenal consciousness and its implications for a naturalist or scientific view of the world seem to me insufficiently to take account of how simple some of the organisms are which patently have some variety of phenomenal mental life. Consciousness as such may be problematic, or bedevilling, particularly if it is understood (as many philosophers do understand it) as something only found, on earth, in humans and possibly a small number of (so-called) higher animals, perhaps (some) anthropoid apes, dogs, dolphins, and maybe one or [18...

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