18 ideas
| 7508 | Good reductionism connects fields of knowledge, but doesn't replace one with another [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: Good reductionism (also called 'hierarchical reductionism') consists not of replacing one field of knowledge with another, but of connecting or unifying them. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.4) | |
| A reaction: A nice simple clarification. In this sense I am definitely a reductionist about mind (indeed, about everything). There is nothing threatening to even 'spiritual' understanding by saying that it is connected to the brain. |
| 8510 | 'Socrates is wise' means a concurrence sum contains a member of a similarity set [Williams,DC] |
| Full Idea: 'Socrates is wise' means that the concurrence sum (Socrates) includes a trope which is a member of the similarity set (Wisdom). | |
| From: Donald C. Williams (On the Elements of Being: I [1953], p.119) | |
| A reaction: Resemblance has to be taken as a basic (and presumably unanalysable) concept, which invites Russell's objection (Idea 4441). |
| 8508 | A 'trope' is an abstract particular, the occurrence of an essence [Williams,DC] |
| Full Idea: I shall divert the word 'trope' to stand for the abstract particular which is, so to speak, the occurrence of an essence. | |
| From: Donald C. Williams (On the Elements of Being: I [1953], p.115) | |
| A reaction: Thus tropes entered philosophical discussion. Presumably the precedent for an 'abstract particular' would be a particular occurrence of the number 7. |
| 8509 | A world is completely constituted by its tropes and their connections [Williams,DC] |
| Full Idea: Any possible world, and hence, of course, this one, is completely constituted by its tropes and connections of location and similarity. | |
| From: Donald C. Williams (On the Elements of Being: I [1953], p.116) | |
| A reaction: Note that Williams regularly referred to possible worlds in 1953. This is a full-blooded trope theory, which asserts that objects are bundles of tropes, so that both particulars and universals are ontologically taken care of. |
| 7510 | Connectionists say the mind is a general purpose learning device [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: Connectionists do not, of course, believe that the mind is a blank slate, but they do believe in the closest mechanistic equivalent, a general purpose learning device. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This shows the closeness of connectionism to Hume's associationism (Idea 2189), which was just a minimal step away from Locke's mind as 'white paper' (Idea 7507). Pinker is defending 'human nature', but connectionism has a point. |
| 7513 | Is memory stored in protein sequences, neurons, synapses, or synapse-strengths? [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: Are memories stored in protein sequences, in new neurons or synapses, or in changes in the strength of existing synapses? | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a neat summary of current neuroscientific thinking about memory. If you are thinking that memory couldn't possibly be so physical, don't forget the mind-boggling number of events involved in each tiny memory. See Idea 6668. |
| 7658 | Obviously there can't be a functional anaylsis of qualia if they are defined by intrinsic properties [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: If you define qualia as intrinsic properties of experiences considered in isolation from all their causes and effects, logically independent of all dispositional properties, then they are logically guaranteed to elude all broad functional analysis. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Sweet Dreams [2005], Ch.8) | |
| A reaction: This is a good point - it seems daft to reify qualia and imagine them dangling in mid-air with all their vibrant qualities - but that is a long way from saying there is nothing more to qualia than functional roles. Functions must be exlained too. |
| 7655 | The work done by the 'homunculus in the theatre' must be spread amongst non-conscious agencies [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: All the work done by the imagined homunculus in the Cartesian Theater must be distributed among various lesser agencies in the brain, none of which is conscious. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Sweet Dreams [2005], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: Dennett's account crucially depends on consciousness being much more fragmentary than most philosophers claim it to be. It is actually full of joints, which can come apart. He may be right. |
| 7509 | Roundworms live successfully with 302 neurons, so human freedom comes from our trillions [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: The roundworm only has 959 cells, and 302 neurons in a fixed wiring diagram; it eats, mates, approaches and avoids certain smells, and that's about it. This makes it obvious that human 'free' behaviour comes from our complex biological makeup. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: I find this a persuasive example. Three hundred trillion neurons cannot possibly produce behaviour which is more than broadly predictable, and then it is the environment and culture that make it predictable, not the biology. |
| 7657 | Intelligent agents are composed of nested homunculi, of decreasing intelligence, ending in machines [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: As long as your homunculi are more stupid and ignorant than the intelligent agent they compose, the nesting of homunculi within homunculi can be finite, bottoming out, eventually, with agents so unimpressive they can be replaced by machines. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Sweet Dreams [2005], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: [Dennett first proposed this in 'Brainstorms' 1978]. This view was developed well by Lycan. I rate it as one of the most illuminating ideas in the modern philosophy of mind. All complex systems (like aeroplanes) have this structure. |
| 7656 | I don't deny consciousness; it just isn't what people think it is [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: I don't maintain, of course, that human consciousness does not exist; I maintain that it is not what people often think it is. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Sweet Dreams [2005], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: I consider Dennett to be as near as you can get to an eliminativist, but he is not stupid. As far as I can see, the modern philosopher's bogey-man, the true total eliminativist, simply doesn't exist. Eliminativists usually deny propositional attitudes. |
| 7511 | Neural networks can generalise their training, e.g. truths about tigers apply mostly to lions [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: The appeal of neural networks is that they automatically generalize their training to similar new items. If one has been trained to think tigers eat frosted flakes, it will generalise that lions do too, because it knows tigers as sets of features. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.5) | |
| A reaction: This certainly is appealing, because it offers a mechanistic account of abstraction and universals, which everyone agrees are central to proper thinking. |
| 7512 | There are five types of reasoning that seem beyond connectionist systems [Pinker, by PG] |
| Full Idea: Connectionist networks have difficulty with the kind/individual distinction (ducks/this duck), with compositionality (relations), with quantification (reference of 'all'), with recursion (embedded thoughts), and the categorical reasoning (exceptions). | |
| From: report of Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.5) by PG - Db (ideas) | |
| A reaction: [Read Pinker p.80!] These are essentially all the more sophisticated aspects of logical reasoning that Pinker can think of. Personally I would be reluctant to say a priori that connectionism couldn't cope with these things, just because they seem tough. |
| 7654 | What matters about neuro-science is the discovery of the functional role of the chemistry [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Neuro-science matters because - and only because - we have discovered that the many different neuromodulators and other chemical messengers that diffuse throughout the brain have functional roles that make important differences. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Sweet Dreams [2005], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: I agree with Dennett that this is the true ground for pessimism about spectacular breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, rather than abstract concerns about irreducible features of the mind like 'qualia' and 'rationality'. |
| 7505 | Many think that accepting human nature is to accept innumerable evils [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Pref) | |
| A reaction: The point is that modern liberal thinking says everything is nurture (which can be changed), not nature (which can't). Virtue theory, of which I am a fan, requires a concept of human nature, as the thing which can attain excellence in its function. |
| 7516 | In 1828, the stuff of life was shown to be ordinary chemistry, not a magic gel [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: In 1828 Friedrich Wöhler showed [by synthesising urea in the laboratory] that the stuff of life is not a magical, pulsating gel, but ordinary compounds following the laws of chemistry. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: Wöhler synthesised urea in the laboratory. |
| 7515 | All the evidence says evolution is cruel and wasteful, not intelligent [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: The overwhelming evidence is that the process of evolution, far from being intelligent and purposeful, is wasteful and cruel. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.7) | |
| A reaction: This is why opponents should reject evolution totally, rather than compromise with it. Stick to a 6000-year-old world, fossils sent to test our faith, and species created in a flash (with no pain or waste). |
| 7514 | Intelligent Design says that every unexplained phenomenon must be design, by default [Pinker] |
| Full Idea: The originator of 'intelligent design' (the biochemist Michael Behe) takes every phenomenon whose evolutionary history has not yet been figured out, and chalks it up to design by default. | |
| From: Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate [2002], Ch.7) | |
| A reaction: This seems to summarise the strategy very nicely. The theory essentially exploits the 'wow!' factor. The bigger the wow! the more likely it is that it was created by God. But research has been eroding our wows steadily for four hundred years. |