“That we read our own minds the same way we read other minds is evident in what cognitive science tells us about consciousness and working memory — the dual imagistic and silent-speech process that we employ to calculate, decide, choose among options ‘immediately before the mind.’ The most widely accepted psychologist’s theory of consciousness identifies it as a mode of ‘global broadcast’ solely from sensory modalities to ‘executive’— deciding, and ‘affective’— feeling systems that act on this sensory input. Self-consciousness has nothing else to work with but the same sensory data we use to figure out what other people are doing and are going to do.”

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