Oh Hey There

re Today's Lesson

tristn:

Argument about the insufficiency of computational modeling: “We can model weather patterns, economies and the cosmos with computational models, but this does not imply that these things are computers. Similarly, the existence of a working computational model of the mind does not imply that the mind is a computer.”

Gut-feeling response: Cognition is fundamentally different from those systems in that we take in and process stimuli. The mind processes information, so a computation model of the mind and the properties of such a model provide pertinent knowledge about the nature of the mind.

I’m too tired/distracted to make a good response to this, but allow me to enter that I firmly disagree with you. I think from reading other of your thoughts that you have a hope of a hyper-rational possibility of our understanding understanding whereas I’m not against reason, but I don’t think it’s very useful in itself.

There was someone who I suspect’s name begins with an A, but I could be wrong, who said that if we were to be able to stand inside the brain and look at what’s going on inside there we still could not understand what it is that’s going on. That’s to say that maybe there’s a difference between, say, brain and mind. I understand that you’re not any brand of supporter for behaviorism, therefore I wouldn’t think that you would think that thinking is reducible to a physical process; ie, understanding how the brain works tells us some facts about people qua organisms, but it fails to tell us anything as people qua humans.

To put it another way, there is no there there. When you say something about ‘the nature of the mind,’ you’re already presupposing the wrong sort of thing. The question you’re asking sets yourself up for receiving a misleading or totally incorrect answer. I think there probably is a physically explicable ‘nature of the brain,’ but the idea that there’s a ‘nature of the mind,’ seems kind of vaguely incorrectly rendered.

Of course, I’m offering nothing by way of counter-argument, explanation, or citation. =\

I suppose I was being a bit sloppy with my language and assumptions. Implicit in my thoughts is the assumption of strict materialism: the brain is basically the mind, or to put it more safely, the brain is the physical realization of the mind. This is why I tend to conflate brain/mind as “the mind”. I also subscribe to the hypothesis that the mind—this abstract thing that the brain physically realizes (whatever it is)—is ultimately an information-processing system, which is to say that it performs symbolic manipulations on various mental representations.

I do not believe that the mind is the same thing as the brain, and this is due to the “multiple realizations” argument which says that the same computational device can be realized by different physical forms. So by the info-processing assumption and multiple realizations, the brain and the mind are distinct things: namely, a set of physical hardware vs an algorithmic/procedural system carried out by that hardware.

Thus statements about “the nature of the mind” are not red herrings because of the deliberate assumptions being made (materialism, cognition = information-processing, multiple realizations). Of course, these are merely methodological assumptions being posited because they set the groundwork for the productive inquiry about cognition.

Posted October 5, 2009 at 10:37pm | Comments || home