ABSTRACT
The most widely employed metaphor for the inaccessibility of perceptions in other minds has come to be that of the black box. As cognitive psychology imported the jargon of information theory into experimental psychology, the metaphor of the black box was probably adopted in part because it seemed to dissipate or dispel the subtlest and most inconvenient philosophical problems concerning other minds. Computer simulations are models for the processes that cause perceptual appearances. When they are successful, simulations reproduce the processes that underlie perception, that is to say, the chain of occurrences, physical, physiological, neurological, that leads to seeing, hearing, tasting, and touching things in the world, as they are defined intuitively by most people. However, a simple fact about simulation must be borne in mind. When constructing a simulation, one does not attempt to replicate the very occurrences described by some theory of perception or those that were conceived by God.
