Category: Consciousness

  • Three Teleologies

    Evolution, the saying goes, is blind. The general view is that a blind process can’t have a goal, it can only seem to have a goal — the intentional stance, as Daniel Dennett famously put it.  But if evolution is a goal seeking process, then it has a goal.  And evolution is most certainly a…

  • A Cybernetic Theory of Representation

    When it comes to mental representation, I think the teleosemanticists are largely right, except that they are overfocused on biology and evolution rather than the more general underlying principles that I believe are in play. Teleosemantics is a theory of representation that says that mental representations reference the external world via their purpose, not their…