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small human shape in the sperm, which was thought to grow into the human shape of the fetus and infant. Explaining the form and development of a very complex thing as the result of the growth of something equally complex but much smaller doesn’t cut it in embryology. The same goes for psychology; you can’t explain the aboutness of one part of the brain by assuming the aboutness of another. The problem is to explain “original intentionality.”

The temptations of homuncularism in contemporary psychology were first diagnosed in the development of psychological theories of vision and mental imagery by scientists like Stephen Kosslyn and Zenon Pylyshyn. Get a handle on the problem at “Mental Imagery” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The issue goes much deeper than just visual imagery storage. One graphic way to see the problem is in John Searle’s famous essay “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1979; online, too), where the expressions ”original intentionality” and “derived intentionality” got their recent currency.

A generation of naturalistic philosophers tried to solve the problem of “original intentionality”—showing how neural circuits could be about stuff—using the only tool available: Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Just as blind variation and environmental filtration produce adaptation in nature, so, too, do they produce adaptation in brain circuits. True. Could neural content be a very finely tuned adaptation? This idea got started with Daniel Dennett’s Content and Consciousness (1969) and reached full flourishing in Ruth Millikan’s Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories (1984), along with Fred Dretske’s Explaining Behavior (1991). Too bad it didn’t work, as Jerry Fodor (among others) showed in A Theory of Content and Other Essays (1990). Fodor carried this argument much too far in What Darwin Got Wrong (2010).

Besides his best-selling autobiography, Eric Kandel has written a great book with Larry Squire on how the brain stores information, and does so without any aboutness. The book is Memory: From Mind to Molecules (2008). A lot of his technical papers on somatic neurogenomics can be found on his personal website. You are probably familiar with rats and people, but not Kandel’s lab pet, the sea slug, Aplysia californica. Google-image it just for fun: it’s an escargot as big as your foot.

Watson, the supercomputer that plays Jeopardy!, is the star of a couple of IBM websites and the darling of more than one article in the New York Times. But the details of the software Watson is running are as proprietary as Google’s search protocol.

FAREWELL TO THE

PURPOSE-DRIVEN LIFE

As early as 1960, the great American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine had recognized the impossibility of thought being about anything and had begun developing its implications in Word and Object.

Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct (1994) is a gateway to recent work in linguistics, cognitive psychology, and neurogenetics. His best sellers How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate (2002) argue for a sophisticated evolutionary account of several cognitive capacities critical for speech. More recently, The Stuff of Thought (2007) shows how language reflects cognition (even though language misleads us about how cognition does it all).

Psychologists are increasingly able to test hypotheses about the infant mind by clever experiments on babies as young as a few weeks. Philippe Rochat’s The Infant’s World (2001) reports on the trail he blazed with inspired use of cutting-edge technology and careful attention to the slightest behavioral changes.

The way our brain has been shaped to make us prefer narratives and to anthropomorphize everything is something evolutionary psychologists noticed long ago. Darwinian processes have selected the human mind for rejecting Darwin’s theory, just another example of how natural selection is not much good at uncovering truths. What this book has been calling our tendency to engage in conspiracy theory, to see whodunits everywhere, cognitive scientists