RE: Mind is the brain?
March 31, 2016 at 8:00 am
(This post was last modified: March 31, 2016 at 8:20 am by The Grand Nudger.)
If your objection hinges upon refusing to accept comp sci for what it is, and how it defines it's own terms, you're not actually objecting to comp sci. Let alone comp theory of mind. As ever, you can imagine any number of ways to use the same terms...but they mean something specific and not necessarily tied to your laymans use (and certainly not tied to your ability to equivocate upon them), when referring to the science of their study and application. A great many information processing devices and structures simply do not qualify as computers. A calculator, for example, is not a computer, though some computers are used as calculators.
This is immensely important in context, ofc, as a calculator is orders of magnitude more robust as an information processing device than, say, a photon...or even a rock - which might contain much much more interaction than a single photon - and yet it doesn't qualify, under ctm...as a candidate for mind,because it's -still- not a computer and has a -long- way to go to get there. From this POV, you're doing little more than insisting that material interaction is "spark of mind"...rather than, oh...IDK...material interaction? From this POV, that's a "not even wrong" type of proposition, and grossly insufficient. It's not that there's incompatibility with your reduction, in that sense, as I also think that mind is dependent of material interaction (as is computing)....the trouble arises when you attempt to float back "up" to mind with those inferences made from the bottom. You reduce mind, yourself, to processing, then quixotically argue against mind as "just processing". I;ve never understood why, or why you respond to me with those comments, as CTM doesn;t consider mind "just processing" either. It considers it a specific type of processing by a specific set of structures. A computational system. Not material interaction, not information exchange, not processing, not calculation. Computation. That I can go through these subsequent distinctions based upon ever increasing specificity leaves me scratching my head any time you call it arbitrary. Computation is the polar opposite of "arbitrary", so different and so sufficient fhat that it can -turn- abstraction into distinction, itself.
Help me understand?
This is immensely important in context, ofc, as a calculator is orders of magnitude more robust as an information processing device than, say, a photon...or even a rock - which might contain much much more interaction than a single photon - and yet it doesn't qualify, under ctm...as a candidate for mind,because it's -still- not a computer and has a -long- way to go to get there. From this POV, you're doing little more than insisting that material interaction is "spark of mind"...rather than, oh...IDK...material interaction? From this POV, that's a "not even wrong" type of proposition, and grossly insufficient. It's not that there's incompatibility with your reduction, in that sense, as I also think that mind is dependent of material interaction (as is computing)....the trouble arises when you attempt to float back "up" to mind with those inferences made from the bottom. You reduce mind, yourself, to processing, then quixotically argue against mind as "just processing". I;ve never understood why, or why you respond to me with those comments, as CTM doesn;t consider mind "just processing" either. It considers it a specific type of processing by a specific set of structures. A computational system. Not material interaction, not information exchange, not processing, not calculation. Computation. That I can go through these subsequent distinctions based upon ever increasing specificity leaves me scratching my head any time you call it arbitrary. Computation is the polar opposite of "arbitrary", so different and so sufficient fhat that it can -turn- abstraction into distinction, itself.
Help me understand?
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