Category: Consciousness
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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…
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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…