On 20 Mar 2014, at 18:01, 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.
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.
I agree. In fact CTM, taken seriously, is capable of refuting all the
CTM metaphors, which are usually based on some working analogy, but
unprovably so, as it would determine or fix our level of substitution.
The metaphor can be inspiring, but are conceptually misleading. CTM
does ask for a counter-intuitive bet.
Bruno
-Gabe
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