Engineering the Mind  No contemporary philosopher has tried
harder to demystify the mind than Fred Dretske. But how to
demystify it without eviscerating it? Can consciousness be
explained? Many philosophers think that no matter how detailed
and systematic our knowledge becomes of how the brain works and
how it subserves mental functions, there will always remain an
"explanatory gap." Call it a brute fact or call it a mystery,
trying to explain consciousness, they think, is as futile as
trying to explain why there is something rather than nothing.
Dretske is not exercised by the explanatory gap-he'd rather
exorcise it. He thinks we can get all the explanation we need by
understanding what consciousness does. Consciousness is at
bottom sensory experience and what it does, essentially, is to
represent the world. Explaining consciousness, therefore, comes
down to understanding the representational character of
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