From: Andrew Brown (andrew@LUBS.LEEDS.AC.UK)
Date: Sat May 29 2004 - 04:43:07 EDT
Hi Ian, You questioned relevance to the list. In general I would stress that the question of mind is central to materialism and to dialectics. There are implications for value theory but I am yet to be able to articulate them adequately in an email. I suspect they will eventually become clear in the course of discussion. > Mind does not only consist of activities of the body. Mind is > implemented in the body, but many mental processes require no bodily > activity in the usual sense of the term, e.g. dreaming. Dreaming may be done while we are asleep but the content of a dream is dependent upon our prior waking activities surely? Dreams reflect jumbles of experience (what else could they reflect?), and experience in general is correlative with 'bodily activity in the usual sense of the term'. > > Some readers thought Ryle was a behaviourist because he did seem to > claim that, for example, "happiness" was not a state of mind, but > simply a term that refers to a large set of counterfactual statements > about observable activities, the kinds of activities that happy people > normally perform. Ryle makes the mistake of 'missing out the mind' as Searle would put it. Certainly we have 'inner' subjective experience, in my view (do you agree?). The question is what is the objective material process that expresses this subjectivity. You seem to think it is neurophysiological processes / 'mechanisms'. I think it is outer bodily activity, at the core of which is social labour. This is a materialist dialectics view of thought, not prevalent within AI discourse. But although this may be a good theory of everyday > language use it is an incomplete theory of happiness - for it is the > case that types of happiness are types of mental state that we > experience, and much of that experience is private and not observable > in "outer bodily activity". To grasp 'happiness', you have to grasp objects, actions, ideas, sociality, language. Grasping neurophysiology doesn't do this, rather it (neurophysiology) should try to show one facet of how the activity and subjective state in question is enabled, *not* the nature of the action or the state. There are no 'happiness' mechanisms waiting to be uncovered. What is waiting to be uncovered is how the inner structures of the body enable subjectivity / human activity. Your argument re 'private' experience is of course heavily attacked by Wittgenstein. How do you avoid a collaspe to solopsism? > > I read the Copeland article some time ago and thought he was > stretching things to claim that Turing did not believe that human > intelligence is replicable by computing machines, particularly as > Turing was one of the founders of AI and orginator of the famous > Turing Test. Turing did claim that human mentality was a natural > phenomenon that in principle we could replicate. Clearly you and Copeland disagree. I feel that this has something to do with the conceptual matter we are discussing. Many thanks, Andy
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