On Thursday, March 20, 2014 11:16:19 AM UTC-5, Craig Weinberg wrote: > > > On Thursday, March 20, 2014 11:09:39 AM UTC-4, Gabriel Bodeen wrote: > > >> It formed increasingly high-level associations between bundles of >> sensory data, eventually also combining sounds and vocal behavior into >> those associations. There's nothing obviously intractable about describing >> such data input and analysis in computational terms. >> > > If that were true, the oldest words would describe things like danger or > food, but they don't. They are concepts like I, who, two, three and five ( > http://media.tumblr.com/8b5d411063f5291737c4a36681474205/tumblr_inline_mmrdbhECQY1qz4rgp.png > ) >
BTW, that chart is about the most-conserved words in the Indo-European family of languages. It says nothing either way about what the earliest words were. > Sure, yeah I'm not saying that animals can't reason abstractly, I'm > pointing out yet another example where the computationalist theory fails to > match up with what it would predict. If we apply CTM to communications, we > should expect all language to develop independent of modality and develop > modal dependence through increasing layers of complexity. CTM demands that > qualia is complex, not simple - that something like pain is not actually a > feeling but in fact a tremendously complex computation that is labeled as a > feeling by a complex computation (for no particular reason, other than > labels could theoretically be feelings). > Pardon? The computational theory of mind is an attempt to explain what the mind is and how it relates to the brain. It doesn't make any predictions about how the brain should function unless you add a host of additional assumptions. To get to your prediction, you'd need CTM plus assumptions like these: * The mind-computation is fundamental and the brain is derivative of it. The brain is a physical reification of the mind-computation that "fleshes out" the mind-computation with somewhat arbitrary additional physical detail. * The mind-computation underlying the brain is an indepedent process from any computation underlying the brain's environment. If we keep CTM but reject these assumptions, then we can't conclude that language should develop independently of modality and develop it due to the outworking of the mind-computation adding increasing layers of complexity. If instead the mind-computation is derivative of the brain, as most advocates of CTM suppose, then the brain's development would constrain the computation, not the reverse. If the mind-computation is embedded in a larger computation, say, of the universe, then there is no reason to expect it to develop independently. All that is to say that I think you're using a very particular variation on CTM. Your conclusions are sensible regarding it, but they don't apply to CTM generally. -Gabe -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
