Brain Hammer

It’s common for people to speak of the computer metaphor and a recent post over at the Brains blog inspired the following thought.

There is a sense of the verb “compute” whereby many, if not all, people compute insofar as they calculate or figure stuff out. Insofar as they literally compute, they literally are computers. Further, the use of “compute”, “computing”, and “computer” as applied to non-human machines is derivative of the use as applied to humans.

It strikes me as a bit odd, then, to say that calling people or their minds “computational” is something metaphorical.

Chapter 3 of The Subjective Brain is up now, and it’s called Beware the Unicorn: Consciousness, Intentionality, and Inexistence.

In case you think you’ve heard it (and hated it) all before, pause and appreciate this: you haven’t. There’s new stuff peppered throughout. See, for instance, the brand-spanking-new section 7. Enjoy!

The conclusion of the Unicorn argument is incompatible with HOT and FOR. HOT and FOR derive much of their plausibility from Transitivity and Transparency, respectively. If the lesson of the Unicorn is something that we can live with, then perhaps we must either (1) learn to live without Transitivity and Transparency or (2) find a way of accepting Transitivity and Transparency while rejecting HOT and FOR. Option (1) is the best option. Option (2) is unwelcome because it is hard to see how Transitivity and Transparency don’t just lead relatively directly to HOT and FOR, respectively. Further, a direct case for (1) can be made, and it is the aim of this section to make it. Resistance to abandonment of Transitivity and Transparency may be due to the fact that both theses are prima facie plausible and arguably useful. However, I think that their plausibility can be explained away and their utility can be had by much more plausible substitutes.

[…]

My case against Transitivity will have three parts: (1) its plausibility can be explained away, that is, its plausibility can be explained without supposing it true, (2) if Transitivity is supposed to be analytic, then a certain situation which is not obviously incoherent would be obviously incoherent, and (3) if Transitivity is not supposed to be analytic, but instead defended on grounds of theoretical utility, then it may just as well be replaced by what I’ll call Deflationary Transitivity.

Origami unicorn from Blade Runner. A non-existent representation of a non-existent.

The next chapter of The Subjective Brain is up: Ch. 2, Introspecting Brain States as Such.

If the neuro-reductionism of the previous chapter is true, then also true is the following thesis about introspection: when we introspect our conscious states, what we introspect are actually brain states. However, if we can’t in fact introspect brain states, then that fact, the alleged non-introspectibility of brain states, would count against neuro-reductionism.
One point about introspection that even a neuro-reductionist must grant is that when we introspect it doesn’t usually seem like we are introspecting brain states. Now, if it is additionally true that how conscious states are is identical to how conscious states seem, and it is further true that conscious states never (not just usually, but in no possible situation) seem like brain states, then those propositions would form the bases for a very powerful case against neuro-reductionism.
In this chapter, I plan to defend neuro-reductionism against such a threat.

Detail from the cover of Zap Comics #8 by Robert Crumb