Essay About Hidden Spot And Verbal Humor

How the Mind Works
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. . . Special consideration is given to a study of consciousness as opposed
to unconsciousness, with many helpful hints on how to remain conscious.
Verbal humor sets readers up with one meaning of an ambiguous word
and surprises them with another. Theoreticians also trade on the ambiguity
of the word consciousness, not as a joke but as a bait-and-switch:
the reader is led to expect a theory for one sense of the word, the hardest
to explain, and is given a theory for another sense, the easiest to, explain.
I dont like to dwell on definitions, but when it comes to consciousness
we have no choice but to begin by disentangling the meanings.
Sometimes “consciousness” is just used as a lofty synonym for “intelligence.”
Gould, for example, must have been using it in this way. But
there are three more-specialized meanings, nicely distinguished by the
linguist Ray Jackendoff and the philosopher Ned Block.
One is self-knowledge. Among the various people and objects that an
intelligent being can have information about is the being itself. Not only
can I feel pain and see red, I can think to myself, “Hey, here I am, Steve
Pinker, feeling pain and seeing red!” Oddly enough, this recondite sense
of the word is the one that most academic discussions have in mind.
Consciousness is typically defined as “building an internal model of the
world that contains the self,” “reflecting back on ones own mode of
understanding,” and other kinds of navel-gazing that have nothing to do
with consciousness as it is commonly understood: being alive and awake
and aware.
Self-knowledge, including the ability to use a mirror, is no more mysterious
than any other topic in perception and memory. If I have a mental
database for people, whats to prevent it from containing an entry for
myself? If I can learn to raise my arm and crane my neck to sight a hidden
spot on my back, why couldnt I learn to raise a mirror and look up at
it to sight a hidden spot on my forehead? And access to information
about the self is perfectly