display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
19 ideas
| 3180 | Maybe behaviourists should define mental states as a group [Rey] |
| Full Idea: Defining most mental states seems to requiring citing other mental states - but perhaps behaviourists can define them all simultaneously | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 5.3) | |
| A reaction: This is an interesting strategy for trying to avoid the well known circularity of attempting to define mental states in behavioural terms. Behaviourism won't go away. |
| 3165 | Behaviourism is eliminative, or reductionist, or methodological [Rey] |
| Full Idea: There are three different views concerning behaviourism - the 'radical' view, which aims at eliminativism, the 'analytical' view, which is a reductionist enterprise, and the 'methodological' view, somewhere between the two. | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 4) | |
| A reaction: The first appears to be ontological, the second about relationships between areas of our language, and the third epistemological. You could attempt language reduction because we can only know behaviour, because that's all there is. |
| 3167 | Animals don't just respond to stimuli, they experiment [Rey] |
| Full Idea: Animals exhibit 'spontaneous alteration' in their behaviour (e.g. varying the route to the food), or improvisation (finding short cuts instead of following training). They use mental maps, or dead reckoning, not just conditioned responses. | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 4.1.4) | |
| A reaction: If we can't even get a decent behaviourist account of animal behaviour, presumably the chances for humans look even less good. 'Black box' behaviourism, rather than the eliminativist version, might allow internal mechanisms to modify responses. |
| 3173 | How are stimuli and responses 'similar'? [Rey] |
| Full Idea: Radical behaviourists say animals emit "similar" responses to "similar" reinforcements, but that is empty without specifying in what respect there is a similarity. | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: The point is that when you try to specify the similarity you are (supposedly) forced to use mental language to make the distinctions, thus contradicting behaviourism. It is not, though, self-evidently impossible to give a behaviourist specification. |
| 3179 | Behaviour is too contingent and irrelevant to be the mind [Rey] |
| Full Idea: The two main anti-behaviourist intuitions are that mind and behaviour only relate contingently, and that for much mental life (thinking, emotion) the resulting behaviour seems unimportant. | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 5.3) | |
| A reaction: Attractive intuitions, but not unquestionable. Since no two states of mind are ever fully identical, we can never test whether the resulting behaviour arises contingently or necessarily. The second point underestimates the physicality of mental life. |
| 3186 | If a normal person lacked a brain, would you say they had no mind? [Rey] |
| Full Idea: If many otherwise ordinary people turned out to have skulls which were empty or filled with oatmeal, would that mean that they didn't have minds? | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 7.1.4) | |
| A reaction: That's a John Locke sort of question, implying that 'persons' are logically independent of their implementation. Personally I would search for a radio receiver, because oatmeal is implausible as a thinker. |
| 3127 | Dualism and physicalism explain nothing, and don't suggest any research [Rey] |
| Full Idea: Neither dualism nor physicalism provides much serious explanation of any mental phenomena, or even much in the way of a program of research. | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], Int.2) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure if people who demand an "explanation of mental phenomena" are quite clear about what it is they want. God might just say "Mental phenomena are just brain events from the brain's point of view". |
| 3188 | Homuncular functionalism (e.g. Freud) could be based on simpler mechanical processes [Rey] |
| Full Idea: So-called 'homuncular functionalism' (such as Freud's or Plato's internal struggles of the soul) needn't lead to an infinite regress if eventually the homunculi become so stupid they could be replaced by a machine. | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 7.2.2) | |
| A reaction: from Fodor |
| 3216 | Is the room functionally the same as a Chinese speaker? [Rey] |
| Full Idea: The question for a computational-representation theory about the Chinese Room is: is what is happening inside the room functionally equivalent to what is happening inside a normal Chinese speaker? | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 10.2.1) | |
| A reaction: Certainly the Room lacks morality ('how can I torture my sister?'). It won't spot connections between recent questions. It won't ask itself questions. It will take years to spot absurd questions. |
| 3220 | Searle is guilty of the fallacy of division - attributing a property of the whole to a part [Rey] |
| Full Idea: You should no more attribute understanding of Chinese to this one part of the system than you should ascribe the properties of the entire British Empire to Queen Victoria. This is the fallacy of division. | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 10.2.3) | |
| A reaction: This very nicely pinpoints what is wrong with the Chinese Room argument (nice analogy, too). If you carefully introspect what is involved when you 'understand' something, it is immensely complex, though it feels instant and simple. |
| 3206 | One computer program could either play chess or fight a war [Rey] |
| Full Idea: It is always possible to provide incompatible interpretations of formal theories, so that a computer could use the same program one day to play chess, the next to fight a war. | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 9.1.3) | |
| A reaction: This seems to present a huge gulf between human chess players (who 'understand' what they are doing) and machines, but I don't accept it. Giving the machine cameras and multi-level software would fix it. |
| 3140 | If you explain water as H2O, you have reduced water, but not eliminated it [Rey] |
| Full Idea: Reduction is not the same as elimination; if chemists reduce water to H2O, or biologists reduce life to a complex chemical process, they have not shown that they don't exist. | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 1.2.1) | |
| A reaction: Depends what you mean by 'elimination'. It is important to be clear whether you are eliminating something from life, or from strict philosophical ontology. Ontologists never mention mountains. |
| 3134 | Human behaviour can show law-like regularity, which eliminativism can't explain [Rey] |
| Full Idea: There is clear evidence against eliminative materialism in the law-like correlations found among millions of answers in standardised school tests, for which it can give no explanation. | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], Int.3) | |
| A reaction: Not very persuasive. If neural networks got involved in complex competitions with one another, you would expect them to evolve similar tactics. |
| 3200 | Pattern recognition is puzzling for computation, but makes sense for connectionism [Rey] |
| Full Idea: Connectionism is a way of capturing the holism of pattern recognition, as stressed by many critics of computational theories of mind. | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 8.8) | |
| A reaction: I am drawn to the idea that arithmetic derives from pattern recognition, and the latter is basic to all minds (a kind of instant unthinking induction), so this seems to me a win for connectionism. |
| 3201 | Connectionism explains well speed of perception and 'graceful degradation' [Rey] |
| Full Idea: Connectionism is better than other AI strategies at capturing the extraordinary swiftness of perception, and of degrading in a 'graceful' way. | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 8.8) | |
| A reaction: A good theory had better capture the extraordinary swiftness of perception. Also the swiftness of recognition. Compare seeing a surprising old friend in a crowd, and recognising the person you are looking for. |
| 3202 | Connectionism explains irrationality (such as the Gamblers' Fallacy) quite well [Rey] |
| Full Idea: Connectionism offers promising accounts of irrational behaviour, such as people's bias towards positive instances, and their tendency to fall for the gamblers' fallacy. | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 8.8) | |
| A reaction: That is strong support, because the chances of a computational robot having such tendencies is virtually nil, but all humans have the biases referred to (even philosophers). |
| 3199 | Connectionism assigns numbers to nodes and branches, and plots the outcomes [Rey] |
| Full Idea: In connectionism, each node is given an activation level, and each branch a weight, according to possible degree of effect. This results in 'excitatory' and 'inhibitory' connections. | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 8.8) | |
| A reaction: Whether such a system could ever be 'conscious' is not the only interesting question. What could such a system do? Could it ever be good at philosophy? |
| 3150 | Can identity explain reason, free will, non-extension, intentionality, subjectivity, experience? [Rey] |
| Full Idea: Eight properties of mind are problems for the identity theory: rationality, free will, spatiality, privacy, intentionality, essential mentality, subjective content, and the explanatory gap. | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 2.7) | |
| A reaction: The list could go on: poetry, creativity, love, normativity... Actually, these are problems for every theory. |
| 3129 | Physicalism offers something called "complexity" instead of mental substance [Rey] |
| Full Idea: In physicalism the "ghost in the machine" is merely replaced by the "complexity" in it. | |
| From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], Int.2) | |
| A reaction: This is nonsense. No one thinks that mere complexity generates consciousness. The assumption is that we would begin to understand the mind only if we could somehow map the connections of the brain. |