Category: Epistemology and Method

RESPONSE

As far as he goes – which is nowhere – he’s wrong of course. All our language consists of analogies to experience. All our words are symbols. That humans are born with intuitions (tendencies) is different from being born with facts. Moreover, we can divide our language into the scientific (independent of emotion) and the aesthetic (dependent on emotion). And the reason we use this language of computer science is that it is the closest analogy to experience that we have produced for the discussion of mental phenomenon free of the loading and framing and deceit of the past.

The only testable statement he is making is that recall-memory is limited. Even that doesn’t hold up, since a person can fairly often identify a counterfeit bill visually, even if he cannot draw it. Furthermore, some people CAN draw a bill (or entire city) from recall – even at a glance. It’s just EXPENSIVE For a brain to remember things that way, so those of us who CAN do it, learn not to do it. (I build a large 3d model of my city as a child, complete with all the houses sculpted from wood – just out of memory. I can still drive all over Connecticut from memory, but not even across Kiev today.)

I will tell you what he is really doing: trying (like a woman) to maintain that psychologism (emotions) are a cause rather than a consequence of information processing.

So, as a person who has stated an opposing argument (no one thinks the brain is like a computer, we merely use that language because nothing else is close enough of an analogy), testimonialism would tell me that he is trying to justify his priors of using sympathetic testing (emotions) to understand the brain rather than TRYING TO DEVELOP AN OPERATIONAL LANGUAGE for discussing the brain.

ANd as a person who claims that the first principle of the mind is ‘acquisition and inventory of resources’ (property), and that emotions consist only of reactions to change in state of those resources, I would say that the brain is in fact a computer that assists us in acquiring resources, and emotions that assist in motivating us to choose between various possibilities.

Humans are in fact, fairly mechanical, in the biological sense (as are proteiens, as is chemistry, as are all physical phenomenon.

The magic of humans is that we do it with fragmentary information in order to predict the future course of events, so that we can outwit those current events, and alter them for our benefit -allowing us to capture resources, which we then consume and radiate as heat.

IN this sense, our brains do not COMPUTE as today’s computers do, but they do SEARCH (sense-percieve-associate) and we do CALCULATE (reason), and we do it for the purpose of finding ways of outwitting the dim physical unverse.