Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

And because we have all to pass through a state of infancy to manhood, and have been of necessity, for a length of time, governed by our desires and preceptors (whose dictates were frequently conflicting, while neither perhaps always counseled us for the best), I farther concluded that it is almost impossible that our judgments can be so correct or solid as they would have been, had our reason been mature from the moment of our birth, and had we always been guided by it alone.

Thus also, those ancient cities which, from being at first only villages, have become, in course of time, large towns, are usually but ill laid out compared with the regularity constructed towns which a professional architect has freely planned on an open plain; so that although the several buildings of the former may often equal or surpass in beauty those of the latter, yet when one observes their indiscriminate juxtaposition, there a large one and here a small, and the consequent crookedness and irregularity of the streets, one is disposed to allege that chance rather than any human will guided by reason must have led to such an arrangement.

At the same time, the computational theory of mind is by no means empty or necessary.

The tape serves as the machine’s input, output, and working memory; the control unit can ‘look at’ one square at a time. The control unit can be in a finite number of states, and is governed by a finite transition network which senses the machine’s state and the visible symbol on the tape, and in response can change state, print or erase a symbol, and move the tape one square to the left or right.

For one thing, Turing machines aren’t, by design, sensitive to the structure of representations: they can ‘see’ only a single symbol at a time, and at best can be programmed to emulate systems that are sensitive to structure.

A common-sense inference, in contrast, is accomplished by a single brain working in seconds, doing its best with what it has, and scrutinized by cognitive scientists in real time, errors and all.

Physical objects occupy space, persist over time, and are subject to physical forces.

First, computing the truth has costs in time and energy, so a system designed for useful approximations (one that ‘satisfices’ or exhibits bounded rationality) might outcompete a system designed for exact truth at any cost.

There is little point, for example, in spending twenty minutes figuring out a shortcut that saves you ten minutes in travel time. Second, outside the realm of mathematics and logic, there is no such thing as a universal true-belief-fixer.

On the other hand, when too much time is occupied in traveling, we become strangers to our native country; and the over curious in the customs of the past are generally ignorant of those of the present.