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falls.
     
     
    BENVOLIO
    Romeo, away, be gone!
The citizens are up, and Tybalt slain.
Stand not amazed: the prince will doom thee death,
If thou art taken: hence, be gone, away!
     
    ROMEO
    O, I am fortune’s fool!
    BENVOLIO
    Why dost thou stay?
    Exit ROMEO
    Enter CITIZENS, ETC. 4
     
     
     
    Why does Romeo linger at the scene of the sword fight, and why does he eventually leave it? Shakespeare engages us not because his protagonists’ motives, decisions, and actions are unfathomable. On the contrary, intuitively we probably know the answers to many of the questions that apply. We should therefore be glad to have come into possession of a conceptual tool kit that is honed so as to dispel whatever mysteries still cling to human nature—those attached to the as-yet-unanswered “why?” and “how?” questions.
    Let us arrange our tools on the bench, then. The no. 1 tool is the conceptual lens through which we can see everything as computation. The no. 2 tool is an assay for mindfulness, which helps us separate boring computing for its own sake (falling pebbles or flung penguins) from interesting representational computing (sensing, signaling, and behavior-inducing neurons, cogs, or transistors). The no. 3 tool is a zoom attachment that allows us to focus on various levels of explanation—from the more general “why” questions, whose likely answers will be couched in complex terms that in turn require further explanation (as in “Romeo killed Tybalt in revenge for the death of his kinsman Mercutio”), to the more specific questions about the “how” and the “what” of the corresponding computations (like those carried out by the neuropharmacological circuits that embody what Romeo proclaims to be his “fire-eyed fury” and that are too numerous to list here). 5
    By making use of these tools, we will be able to recognize the problems that all minds, natural or artificial, must contend with; to see which tactics may help solve the problems; and to convince ourselves that implementations of the tactics are possible that rely only on the available means and materials. Some of the necessary work we already did in the previous chapter, when it was made clear that the world is sufficiently well behaved, statistically speaking, to make attempted forethought pay for itself. This is where we should pick up the thread, then, starting with forethought and zooming in and out through the issues as they arise, wherever the quest takes us.

A Treatise of Human Nature
     
    Even if it seems natural to conceive of perception as a window through which the brain, in the safe house of the skull, monitors the neighborhood for any developments or portents, this conception is wrong. Suppose that an embrained but as yet sightless mind, desperately in need of distraction from its confinement, decides to watch a football game. Sawing through the front of its body’s face to make a window to let the light shine on the brain would be as futile in trying to get it to see as installing a little TV screen on the inside and connecting it to a camera looking out. To see things through such a window or on the internal screen, the brain would need something like an eye, along with the machinery that processes what the eye tells it. This, of course, is exactly what a regular human brain already has, which demonstrates that the window/TV simile merely postpones the explanation instead of providing one.
    The path to a real explanation begins with the realization that vision and other senses deliver variously interpreted representations of the world rather than snapshots or recordings of it. Thus, it is more useful to think of the process of seeing a football game play out not as a video transmission for the benefit of an internal viewer, but rather as a radio show in which a boxful of commentators, speaking all at once, describe the action to a bunch of listeners.
    Why multiple “commentators”? Because an analogy with a single running commentary