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By Root 655 0

might not work. In ones that work slower, changing the still pictures at the rate of one every hour (as in time-lapse photography) could work. But there is no movement of any of the images in any of the pictures, nor does anything move from one photo onto the next. Of course, the projector is moving, and the photons are moving, and the actors were moving. But all the movement that the movie watcher detects is in the eye of the beholder. That is why the movement is illusory.

The notion that thoughts are about stuff is illusory in roughly the same way. Think of each input/output neural circuit as a single still photo. Now, put together a huge number of input/output circuits in the right way. None of them is about anything; each is just an input/output circuit firing or not. But when they act together, they “project” the illusion that there are thoughts about stuff. They do that through the behavior and the conscious experience (if any) that they together produce.

The neural circuits in the brain are much more exquisitely organized than the still photos on a 35 mm filmstrip. They are related to one another in ways that produce many outputs, behaviors of all sorts, that are beautifully adapted to their local and global environments. It’s because of the appropriateness of these outputs to specific circumstances that we credit their causes—the neural circuits—with being about those circumstances. That is the illusion: somehow neural circuits must literally be about those circumstances, carrying descriptions of them, statements about them that make the outputs appropriate to the circumstances. The cumulative output that all these millions of simple input/output circuits produce is so appropriate to the brain’s environment that we are tempted to identify a statement expressed in some language we happen to speak as what all those neurons working together must be thinking. And the subject of that statement must be what they are about. There is no such statement. It’s an illusion, a trick, like a lot of still pictures conveying the illusion of motion.

But our analogy needs a little fine-tuning. Still pictures don’t show movement. Putting them together into movies projects the illusion that there is movement by the images in them. But in the real world there is movement, and the illusion of movement in movies tracks the reality of movement in the world. However, the illusion of aboutness projected by the neurons in our brain does not match any aboutness in the world. There isn’t any. Maybe we could improve the force of the analogy if we focused on Disney movies or kids’ cartoons or Avatar. There are no Na’vi in reality. There is no aboutness in reality.

BUT INTROSPECTION is making you respond, “It can’t be an illusion.” It may grant that the brain is so fantastically complex that it can navigate the world even while looking through the rearview mirror. And for all it knows, maybe conscious acts of will are not what cause the body to move. Maybe the brain stores information in neural circuits that aren’t really about stuff. But surely, the thoughts I am conscious of right now have to be about something. These conscious thoughts aren’t just input/output circuits, empty of content. I can be tricked by the movies into the illusion of motion. But introspection can’t be tricked into the illusion that its thoughts are about stuff, even if the thoughts are illusory. Right now, I am thinking about the problem of how conscious thought can be about stuff. Introspection is telling me, firsthand, exactly what I am thinking about. How can anyone deny that?

No matter how hard it is to deny, we have to do so. Appearances to the contrary, it’s no easier a trick for conscious thoughts to be about stuff than for nonconscious thoughts—brain circuits—to be about stuff. Let’s quickly run through why this is.

You’re consciously thinking that Paris is the capital of France. So your thought is about Paris, about capitals, and about France, right? Whatever it is in your brain that the conscious thought consists of, there will have to be 3 or 20 or 100