Intentions, Will, Goal, Consciousness, and Humanness
Intentions, Will, Goal, Consciousness, and Humanness
This chapter first describes the way in which some phenomena, such as flexibility, intentionality, free will, and empathy, play an important role in the understanding of what humanness is, and also shows the way in which humanness is often described negatively, as something lacking, in non-human figures of fiction such as robots and monsters. It then describes some essential features in the cognitive constitution of man's mental model of himself and this model's importance for understanding the structure of the canonical narrative. The description is compared to psychoanalytical models such as the ‘mirror stage’. The chapter goes on to analyse the way in which models of non-humanness in many film genres are used not only for representing negatively evaluated phenomena, but also to represent social and superhuman phenomena. It concludes with an analysis of the role of repetition in narration.
Keywords: flexibility, intentionality, free will, empathy, humanness, mental models
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