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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: Thought Question
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References: <3g42s1$jhl@agate.berkeley.edu> <3g6ff0$1e5@prime.mdata.fi> <1995Jan26.015947.22908@news.media.mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 1995 20:12:03 GMT
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In article <1995Jan26.015947.22908@news.media.mit.edu> minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:

>What you are *not* aware of is any significant amount of detail about
>yourself, that is, any more than you know about other people.  (In
>other words, I'm agreeing with the Gilbert Ryle stance.)

Actually, I know a great deal about myself that I do not know about
others.  For instance, I know what I was thinking about (and doing)
earlier today, while what I knew about other people did not include
anything that specific.  I knew some other people were in the
building, for instance, but not just what they were thinking or
doing.

>  You have
>virtually no ideas at all--and those that you have are probably
>wrong--about how you get ideas, what ideas are, where the words come
>from when you speak, how you move a finger, and all that sort of
>thing.  

Maybe so, but so what?  That doesn't stop me from knowing many
other things.

>We share the notion that we have something we call
>consciousness that reveals to us a great deal about ourselves, about
>our mind, about our feelings, and so forth--but consdiering that we
>evidently do not have much such ability, one must conclude that there
>is no such thing that actually corresponds to that myth.

Who says consciousness is supposed to reveal very much about "how you
get ideas, what ideas are, where the words come from when you speak,
how you move a finger, and all that sort of thing"?


