On Thursday, March 20, 2014 1:01:43 PM UTC-4, Gabriel Bodeen wrote: > > > > 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. >
Most conserved = earliest words that are still in use. > > >> 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. > Computationalism need not have anything to do with the brain. It's about consciousness arising from computation, i.e., it supports strong AI, which would not be about brains. > 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. > The brain doesn't figure into this at all. My point was that if consciousness is computation, and qualia are just complex computational labels, then we should expect languages to develop from simple, modal-independent forms to modal-dependent forms in which computations become so diversified that the lose any common vocabulary. Would you agree that this is precisely the opposite of what is seen in nature? > > If we keep CTM but reject these assumptions, then we can't conclude that > language should develop independently of modality > But it doesn't. > 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 brain is constrained, even more reason to presume modality-independence from the start. If you don't have a lot of RAM, then your text is more likely to have fewer fonts, and the first digital systems have only a single font. What we see in nature is that everyone but us has lots of alphabets and fonts but they don't share a common logic. They don't reduce to a binary code like we would expect them to in CTM. > 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. > The reason is that computation is based on simple logical rules which are independent of complex labels that are supposed to be interpreted as qualia. > > 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. > I think that they apply to any philosophy or theory which is sympathetic to the idea that computation or information is more fundamental than qualia or consciousness Craig . > > -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.
