Combining Texts

Ideas for 'Saundaranandakavya', 'To be is to be the value of a variable..' and 'LOT 2'

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4 ideas

18. Thought / B. Mechanics of Thought / 4. Language of Thought
12643 Ambiguities in English are the classic reason for claiming that we don't think in English [Fodor]
     Full Idea: That there are ambiguities in English is the classic reason for claiming that we don't think in English.
     From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.5)
     A reaction: I have always been impressed by this simple observation, which is my main reason for believing in propositions (as brain events). 'Propositions' may just be useful chunks of mentalese.
18. Thought / B. Mechanics of Thought / 5. Mental Files
12647 Mental representations name things in the world, but also files in our memory [Fodor]
     Full Idea: Mental representations can serve both as names for things in the world and as names of files in the memory.
     From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3 App)
     A reaction: I am laughed at for liking this idea (given the present files of ideas before you), but I think this it is very powerful. Chicken before egg. I was drawn to databases precisely because they seemed to map how the mind worked.
12649 We think in file names [Fodor]
     Full Idea: We think in file names.
     From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3 App)
     A reaction: This is Fodor's new view. He cites Treisman and Schmidt (1982) for raising it, and Pylyshyn (2003) for discussing it. I love it. It exactly fits my introspective view of how I think, and I think it would fit animals. It might not fit some other people!
18. Thought / B. Mechanics of Thought / 6. Artificial Thought / a. Artificial Intelligence
12655 Frame Problem: how to eliminate most beliefs as irrelevant, without searching them? [Fodor]
     Full Idea: The frame problem is, precisely: How does one know that none of one's beliefs about Jupiter are germane to the current question, without having to recall and search one's beliefs about Jupiter?
     From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.4.4)
     A reaction: Presumably good chess-playing computers have made some progress with this problem. The only answer, as far as I can see, is that brains have a lot in common with relational databases. The mind is structured around a relevance-pattern.