What kind of obstructions do characters and perhaps real people face in regards to the goals they set with their information-processing hardware and to the adaptations to life they have to make?
"Miss Darcy, on her brother's entrance, exerted herself much more to talk; and Elizabeth saw that he was anxious for his sister and herself to get acquainted, and forwarded, as much as possible, every attempt at conversation on either side. Miss Bingley saw all this likewise; and, in the imprudence of anger, took the first opportunity of saying with sneering civility,
'Pray, Miss Eliza, are not the -shire militia removed from Meryton? They must be a great loss to your family.' " (Pride and Prejudice p. 280)
"...it is clear that a functional perspective on real minds is the basis of a teleological perspective on fictional minds. Teleological analysis is the study of narrative in terms of its ultimate purpose and overall design. The teleological analysis of a text is based on the assumption that its parts function coherently toward a comprehensible end purpose." (The Whole Mind p. 90)
The general concept of "stream of consciousness" within a functional perspective is that the mind can set goals which requires a mind-set with distance between the present and the future, and that the mind adapts to the changes and surprises it faces in order to achieve these goals. So what happens when someone has a clear goal, but behaves in a way that shows they have not adapted to the new situation/will set them back in their trajectory. We see this with Miss Bingley in this classic moment when she clearly puts her foot in her mouth in front of the very object of her "affections" (or we could say "desire for money and status".) It makes the reader cringe because it is obvious she is definitely making herself completely unsuitable to Darcy in every way. On the other hand, on a teleological level, the narrator has set us up to believe the whole time that Caroline is the antithesis to Lizzie that will never get Darcy in the end, so on this level we stay calm because we know it is all so that Lizzie and Darcy can have the happy conclusion to their marriage plot. In a way, when reading something such as Pride and Prejudice, the reader is not only entering all the fictional minds of the characters, but that of the narrator him/herself. Perhaps this is even a basis for why we can analyze novels in this teleological way. Also, in regards to this moment with Caroline, perhaps her anger has caused her to adapt to the situation, but at the same time causes her to forget her main goal. She forms another goal, which is to embarrass and hurt Lizzie, and she succeeds here, but it has other consequences.
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