 Such a proposal requires we recognize some significant, “in kind” difference between the minded and the mindless, between those capable of understanding and those devoid of comprehension. Such recognition is not universal. On Dennett’s (1981) view, there is fundamentally nothing more to your being, as he puts it, “a true believer”—and thus nothing more ultimately to mind and understanding—than being interpretable by observers in the right way, via “the intentional stance”, so as to facilitate successful predictions of your behavior. Dennett points out that even the behavior of simple mechanisms like thermostats and natural phenomena like lightning can be regarded in this way. He of course recognizes a significant psychological difference between human beings and such marginal case “intentional systems”. This is, however, conceived of as a (considerable) difference of degree. Given your patterns of behavior, observers will be able to use much more complex intentional state attributions to predict what you will do, so as to get a much bigger pay-off in predictive value, than they will in other cases. But there is no more profound division among “intentional systems” than this, to be marked by talking about what is conscious and what isn’t. For consciousness is either just some mythical raw feel of atomic, non-intentional, ineffable “qualia”, or else it has to do with the fact that a predictive advantage accrues from regarding systems as possessed of some assortment of capacities, the exercise of at least some of which one is inclined to call “conscious”. But such differences are again a matter of degree, and the capacities in question exhibit no deep unity (Dennett 1991).