this is how we think of things, then linguistic individuals — embodied lexicons — are not stable in the way that embodied genomes are, for such things as morphology, phonology, and syntactic and semantic roles in a lexicon change over time.

This article offers some reflections on some features of human consciousness that are in need of an explanation. I wish to see if these features could be understood as solutions to design problems, solutions arrived at by evolution, but also, in the individual, as a result of a process of unconscious self-design. I consider this issue in the context of work in AI on the attempt to design intelligent robots- not "bed-ridden" expert systems, but systems that have to act in real time in the real world. How then does one partition the task of the robot so that it is apt to make reliable real time decisions? Any real, finite deliberator must partition the states of its world in such a way as to introduce the concept of possibility. This idea of partitioning the world into "possible" alternatives that remain "open" is very clearly the introduction of a concept of epistemic possibility. The article concludes with some reflections on the Frame Problem.

A naturalistic view of consciousness depends on a naturalistic view of agency, which draws a distinction between things just happening and things doing things. Agents depend on control, which depends on information used by agents to anticipate outcomes, so agents must situate themselves in time, with a distinction between past, present and future.

Potential competing interests: No potential competing

We know that computers are amazing machines. But, can computers think? This question has been and continues to be widely discussed, especially as computers become more complex and are able to perform more functions. The issue is one aspect of the rapidly growing field of Artificial Intelligence (or, to use its common abbreviation, AI).

About thirty years ago I attended a summer ‘retreat’ of the Harvard Medical School MD/PhD programme in neuroscience and I vividly remember one lab director’s opening remarks in the first session. ‘In our lab, if you work on one neuron, that’s neuroscience; if you work on two neurons, that’s psychology’ — a term of abuse in his corner of the world. This bottom-up approach to neuroscience is still advocated in many quarters, and there are not a few neuroscientists who dismiss the ‘cognitive’ neurosciences as mere headline-grabbing speculation, but while the brute empirical researchers have provided a wealth of hard-won data in recent years, they have had next to nothing of importance to say about the mind or consciousness. This is not surprising when you confront the fact that the brain has literally trillions of moving parts. Billions of individual cells, each a complicated and rather autonomous micro-agent with an agenda, and no two exactly alike, are somehow coordinated to produce impressively accurate intelligence on the world outside the skulls they labour in, generating appropriate behaviour under most circumstances. How can anybody think responsibly and creatively about such a complicated organ? Clearly, one needs a model at a higher level which can systematize and rationalize the astronomical number of transactions and interactions between the parts. Fortunately, we have one example of a physical phenomenon whose trillions of micro-actions can be understood: digital computers. Digital computers, unlike brains, have blissfully regular structures, composed

Veissière et al. disrupt current debates over the nature of mindreading by bringing multiple positions under the umbrella of free-energy. However, it is not clear whether integrating the opposing sides under a common formal framework will yield new insights into how mindreading is achieved, rather than offering a mere redescription of the target phenomenon.

I applaud the ambition and optimism with which the authors lay out their case for a “single, coherent explanation of consciousness” that can unite GW, HOT and illusionism into a “standard model” ba...

Paweł Grabarczyk explores the shortcomings of my meme theory, concentrating on my rather perfunctory treatment of meaning in BBB. He notes that I deem words the best examples of memes and claims that if I don’t have an account of the meanings of words as memes, I can hardly use memes to explain comprehension. He is right, but I think that I have provided the elements of an account of meaning of words that can be readily united and presented to meet his excellent challenge. In BBB I concentrated on phonology and semantics, leaving syntax largely untouched, since I couldn’t see through the fog of war among the linguists on this contentious topic, and Grabarczyk also sets syntax aside, but recently my own thinking on how to handle it has been informed by Daniel Dor’s remarkable book, The Instruction of Imagination (2015), which analyzes language as a “social communication technology,” banishing most of the Chomskian innateness dogmas and replacing them with reverse engineering of culturally transmitted habits and dispositions. Dor ignores meme theory and doesn’t rely as much as he should on evolutionary processes (and free-floating rationales), but he has clearly set out a reimagined set of specs for language, filling in many details only dimly suggested by my sketchy account. I recommend it to all serious thinkers about the phenomena of language.

ABSTRACT Solms' unusual project of translating Freud's “Project for a Scientific Psychology” into contemporary cognitive science terms is hard to assess. The most important theme, to my way of thinking, is Solms' support, in present-day terms, of Freud's insistence that emotion lies at the heart of all cognition. Taking this one idea seriously will require significant alterations to the working assumptions of many in cognitive science.

The philosophers' concept of qualia is an artifact of bad theorizing, and in particular, of failing to appreciate the distinction between the intentional object of a belief (for instance) and the cause(s) of that belief. Qualia, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, have a history but that does not make them real. The cause of a hallucination, for instance, may not resemble the intentional object hallucinated at all, and the representation in the brain is not rendered in special subjective properties (qualia).

While we agree in broad strokes with the characterisation of rationalization as a "useful fiction," we think that Fiery Cushman's claim remains ambiguous in two crucial respects: (1) the reality of beliefs and desires, that is, the fictional status of folk-psychological entities and (2) the degree to which they should be understood as useful. Our aim is to clarify both points and explicate the rationale of rationalization.