p.21 Humans are famously bad at describing their sensations - of tastes, of aromas, of feelings - but we
are famously good at discriminating, enjoying, and suffering them... Our capacity for verbal description comes nowhere
near our capacity for sensory discrimination.
p.91 After all, the ultimate point of having a conceptual framework, for humans as well
as animals, is to produce and steer well-tuned behavior.
p.93 The problem is how to produce behavior that is appropriate or intelligent relative to a perceived
situation.
p.114 On the account [of human cognition] proposed, we are not playing a different cognitive game from all
of the "lesser" creatures. Rather, we are playing the same game, but playing certain aspects of it very much better than other
creatures.
p.130-131 we should be wary of the assumption that perception is first and foremost the perception of purely
physical features in the world... We should be wary because we already know that humans and other social animals are
keenly sensitive, perceptually, to social features of their surroundings. And because we already know that
humans and social animals manipulate their social environment as well as their purely physical surroundings... What
I do wish to suggest is that, in learning to represent the world, the brains of infant social creatures focus naturally
and relentlessly on the social features of their local environment, often slighting physical features that will later seem
unmissable... As social infants partition their activation spaces, the categories that form are just as often social
categories as they are natural or physical categories. In apportioning neuronal resources for important cognitive tasks, the
brain expends roughly as much of those resources on representing and controlling social reality as it does on representing
and controlling physical reality. [JLJ - our game-playing machine should likewise focus attention on the interaction of the
resources on the game board and the constraints imposed by the pieces on each other. I'm not saying that the game pieces have
a social life, but rather that experts playing a game effortlessly and perhaps subconsciously examine the potential interactions
of the pieces, much as they would scan the room at a party, a convention, or an important business meeting, for cues that
help to predict the outcome of possible future interactions.]
p.157 Visual imagination, it would appear, involves heavy use of the same brain areas that sustain
visual perception in the first place.
p.193 Here once again we see ignorance parading as knowledge.
p.206 How things seem to us too often reflects only our own ignorance or lack of imagination.
p.207 People regularly find it difficult to redeploy an unfamiliar scientific prototype within a domain
that has habitually been grasped in terms of well-worn commonsense prototypes. This difficulty - this conceptual inertia
- can prevent new understanding even after it has become clear to the scientific community that the old prototypes are hopelessly
inadequate compared with the new.
p.214 Consciousness displays steerable attention.
Consciousness is something that can be directed or focused - on this topic instead of that, on these things
rather than those, on one sensory pathway over another, even if one's external sensory perspective on the world is held constant.
p.214 Consciousness has the capacity for alternative interpretations of complex or ambiguous data.
Once one's attention is fixed , on a particular visual scene, for example, a conscious person is still able
to generate and explore competing interpretations of the contents or he nature of that scene, especially if the scene is in
some way confusing or problematic.
p.217-218 Attention is by nature selective: some possibilities are attended to at the expense of
others... a frame of mind is adopted that remains constant over the flux of sensory inputs, a frame-of-mind that
tends to enhance the potential recognition of certain kinds of things at the expense of others. The price paid is quite real:
while paying close attention to one aspect of a situation, one may well miss events and features that would normally
have been recognized. But the payoff is equally real: careful attention yields a local enhancement in cognitive performance,
at least on the topic at its focus.
p.271 But consciousness itself need be nothing different in humans from what it is in animals, namely, a
peculiar and rather special form of cognitive activity that displays, for starters, the seven cognitive features explored
in the last chapters: short term memory, input independence, steerable attention, plastic [JLJ - alternative ] interpretation,
disappearance in sleep, reappearance in dreaming, and unity across the sensory modalities. In these respects, we are little
or no different from the animals.
