Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

The order "red" cannot be said to describe a state of mind, e.g., a wish, unless it is part of a game containing descriptions of states of mind.

By what argument can it be proved, that the perceptions of the mind must be caused by external objects, entirely different from them, though resembling them (if that be possible) and could not arise either from the energy of the mind itself, or from the suggestion of some invisible and unknown spirit, or from some other cause still more unknown to us?

Fodor claims that ‘the mind doesn’t work that way’ because (1) Turing Machines cannot do abduction, (2) a massively modular system could do abduction but cannot be true, and (3) evolution adds nothing to our understanding of the mind.

Now if the mind attempt this affirmatively from the first, as when left to itself it is always wont to do, the result will be fancies and guesses and notions ill defined, and axioms that must be mended every day, unless like the schoolmen we have a mind to fight for what is false; though doubtless these will be better or worse according to the faculties and strength of the understanding which is at work.

In the same way, the idea that the human mind is an evolved computer aims to bridge the last major chasm in human knowledge, that between matter and mind, biology and culture, nature and society, the natural sciences and the humanities.

As the traditional conception of mind slowly gave way to the overwhelming campaign of natural sciences, so the idea that the concept of mind was something beyond the natural, causal order began to appear inherently problematic, and definitely incapable of serving as an 'unexplained explainer'.

For I am of the opinion that if men had ready at hand a just history of nature and experience, and labored diligently thereon, and if they could bind themselves to two rules — the first, to lay aside received opinions and notions; and the second, to refrain the mind for a time from the highest generalizations, and those next to them — they would be able by the native and genuine force of the mind, without any other art, to fall into my form of interpretation.

First, my claim that the mind is a computational system is different from the claim Fodor attacks (that the mind has the architecture of a Turing Machine); therefore the practical limitations of Turing Machines are irrelevant.

Since computational systems can have complex conditions, loops, branches, and filters which result in subtle, situationally appropriate behavior, the CTM allows the mind to be characterized as a kind of biological mechanism without calling to mind the knee-jerk reflexes and coarse drives and imperatives that have made people recoil from the very idea.

For the entities we mention to help specify a state of mind{ XE "mind" } do not have to play any psychological or epistemological role at all, just as numbers play no physical role.