Minds, Brains and Turing

Turing set the agenda for (what would eventually be called) the cognitive sciences. He said, essentially, that cognition is as cognition does (or, more accurately, as cognition is capable of doing): Explain the causal basis of cognitive capacity and you’ve explained cognition. Test your explanation by designing a machine that can do everything a normal human cognizer can do – and do it so veridically that human cognizers cannot tell its performance apart from a real human cognizer’s – and you really cannot ask for anything more. Or can you? Neither Turing modelling nor any other kind of computational r dynamical modelling will explain how or why cognizers feel

Doing, Feeling, Meaning And Explaining

It is “easy” to explain doing, “hard” to explain feeling. Turing has set the agenda for the easy explanation (though it will be a long time coming). I will try to explain why and how explaining feeling will not only be hard, but impossible. Explaining meaning will prove almost as hard because meaning is a hybrid of know-how and what it feels like to know how

Why and How We Are Not Zombies

A robot that is functionally indistinguishable from us may or may not be a mindless Zombie. There will never be any way to know, yet its functional principles will be as close as we can ever get to explaining the mind

The Annotation Game: On Turing (1950) on Computing, Machinery, and Intelligence

This quote/commented critique of Turing's classical paper suggests that Turing meant -- or should have meant -- the robotic version of the Turing Test (and not just the email version). Moreover, any dynamic system (that we design and understand) can be a candidate, not just a computational one. Turing also dismisses the other-minds problem and the mind/body problem too quickly. They are at the heart of both the problem he is addressing and the solution he is proposing

Microfunctionalism: Connectionism and the Scientific Explanation of Mental States

My goal in the present treatment is to sketch and compare two scientific approaches to understanding the mind. The first approach, that of classical cognitivism, depicts mind as a manipulator of chunky, quite high-level, symbols. The second approach, that of connectionism (Artificial Neural Networks, Parallel Distributed Processing) depicts mind as a product of the complex interactions between multiple so-called sub-symbolic elements. I shall try to clarify this contrast by associating classical cognitivism with the development of what I shall call semantically transparent systems, and connectionism with the deliberate eschewal of this strategy. Connectionism, I then argue, represents a subtle twist on the standard philosophical view of mental states as functional states. For it suggests a kind of microfunctionalism in which the inner roles do not map neatly onto roles determined by our everyday, contentful, purposive characterizations of the mental. (For the reader unfamiliar with some of these terms, such as functionalism, sub-symbolic, etc. don't worry: these will be explained as we go along)

From knowing how to knowing that: Acquiring categories by word of mouth

ABSTRACT: Nature is only interested in know-how, not "know-that": Foraging, feeding, fleeing, fledging, etc. So if know-how were all we had, then naturalizing epistemology would be easy (but neither epistemology, nor even language would have fledged). So is it enough just to add that knowing facts and formulas is part of the cognitive competence subserving our know-how? The answer may be a bit subtler than that, because the evolution of sociality and language have themselves "commodified" knowledge, so that acquiring a fact can be as much of an adaptive imperative as acquiring a fruit. But there is a bootstrapping problem, getting here from there: Acquiring facts cannot become like acquiring fruit until we have language. So it's down to the origins and adaptive value of language. Here is a hypothesis: Categorization is, at bottom, know-how: It's knowing what's the right thing to do with the right kind of thing (what to feed, flee or fledge, and what not) in order to survive, reproduce, and beat the competition. But if categories are based on our practical know-how, then the ones we already have can also be named (another case of know-how). And if categories can be named, then still other categories (that you have but I haven't, yet) can be described, even defined (for me, by you), by stringing those names into propositions with truth values. This is the capacity that sets our own species apart from all others: Every species that can learn can acquire categories by trial and error from direct sensorimotor experience, detecting the invariant sensorimotor features and rules that reliably distinguish the category members from the nonmembers. But only our species can also acquire categories from hearsay. And that not only opens up a vast wealth of potential categories, all the way from the practical to the platonic: more important, making all those invariant features and rules explicit and communicable saves us a lot of time, effort and risk in acquiring our adaptive know-how --enough to have radically altered the brains of our ancestors at least 100,000 years ago, and turned them into us. It also made possible that form of distributed, collaborative, collective cognition we call culture. Philosophers have long worried about the origin of knowledge: What do we know, and how do we know it? Knowing-How vs. Knowing-That. What we know consists of two kinds of things : (1) Knowing-How, which is the things we know how to do and (2) Knowing-That, which is the things that we believe to be true (when they are indeed true). Strictly speaking, knowing-that is itself just a special case of knowing-how, in the sense that we can state verbally the propositions that we take to be true and we can also state that they are true. Being able to do that is itself a form of know-how. If you reply that underlying that special verbal know-how is something further --say, that it also includes some information that we must possess --rather than merely consisting of our ability to state something --then it has to be pointed out, symmetrically, that information has to be possessed in order to have ordinary know-how too: It's just that that information is (usually) not as explicit when it underlies our ability to do something as it is when it is formulated as a proposition, and when the something we need to do is to state (and perhaps justify) that proposition

On some issues concerning symbols and the study of cognition

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1988.Includes bibliographical references.by Jay Aaron Lebed.Ph.D