Some Inflection Points in the Philosophy of Mind

This post, like those that precede it, is based on reacting to an article that one way or another has captured my imagination.?In this case, the article was actually about Artificial Intelligence and whether it could really be called intelligence or not.?What interested me, however, was the way it organized itself around a set of philosophical positions that evolved historically.?What I have done, therefore, is to cut and paste those bits in order to create a context for discussing my own philosophy of mind.?This is, of course, totally unfair to the authors of the article, hence I post a link at the end where you can go read their work for its own sake.?For the time being, however, please bear with my approach, at least long enough to see if you think it bears any fruit.

The 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes was combating materialism, which explains the world, and everything in it, as entirely made up of matter.[2] ?Descartes separated the mind and body to create a neutral space to discuss nonmaterial substances like consciousness, the soul, and even God. This philosophy of the mind was named cartesian dualism.[3]

Dualism argues that the body and mind are not one thing but separate and opposite things made of different matter that inexplicitly interact.[4] ?Descartes’s methodology to doubt everything, even his own body, in favor of his thoughts, to find something “indubitable,” which he encapsulated in his famous dictum Cogito, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am.

Where Descartes gets off track is in believing his mind to be independent of his social history.?We know from the examples of feral children that without socialization, there is no language, there are no narratives, there are no analytics, and hence there is no mind.?Because he was using words to communicate, words that he did not invent but were taught to him by his mother and others, what Descartes should have said was, I think, therefore we are.?

Mind, in other words, emerges from brain under conditions of socialization.?As described in The Infinite Staircase , consciousness comes into being with brain, whereas mind comes into being with language and narrative.?Even though our mental experience is private, our mind is not.?This touches on our very identity which can never be completely independent of our social situation.?There simply can be no mind and no self, without social underpinnings.?Thus, it is that mind can never be reduced to brain any more than life can be reduced to a handful of elements from the Periodic Table.

It wasn’t until the early 20th?century that dualism was legitimately challenged.[6] [7] ?So-called behaviorism argued that mental states could be reduced to physical states, which were nothing more than behavior.[8] ?Aside from the reductionism that results from treating humans as behaviors, the issue with behaviorism is that it ignores mental phenomena and explains the brain’s activity as producing a collection of behaviors that can only be observed. Concepts like thought, intelligence, feelings, beliefs, desires, and even hereditary genetics are eliminated in favor of environmental stimuli and behavioral responses.

Consequently, one can never use behaviorism to explain mental phenomena since the focus is on external observable behavior. Philosophers like to joke about two behaviorists evaluating their performance after sex: “It was great for you, how was it for me?” says one to the other.[9] [10] ?By concentrating on the observable behavior of the body and not the origin of the behavior in the brain, behaviorism became less and less a source of knowledge about intelligence.

It is easy to patronize behaviorism, but we learn nothing by so doing.?Instead, we should note first that behaviorism arose from a desire in the social sciences to become more like the physical sciences.?It was specifically interested in coopting the latter’s ability to apply mathematics to measurable data as a means for expanding the domain of verifiable knowledge.?That desire itself was prompted by a prior era’s unacknowledged reliance on narratives and anecdotes, especially in psychology, ethics, and metaphysics, all of which could be compelling, none of which could be conclusively tested.?In such situations, research cannot build reliably upon prior findings, and so knowledge can only develop through dialectical disagreement as opposed to linear extrapolation.?Thus, Newton could build upon Copernicus in ways that Aristotle could never build upon Plato.

The fatal flaw in behaviorism is that it is impossible to explain human behavior without reference to narrative.?All societies convert their competence in language into storytelling, and the stories they tell are core to everyone’s self-understanding.?These stories are simply too central to human affairs to?eliminate as relevant data.?To be fair, they may not be reliable sources of data about the topics they address, so instead, we need to treat them as data in and of themselves.?That is, they may not accurately represent the phenomena they purport to describe, but they are nonetheless a force in the world they occupy, and for that reason, we need to include them if we are to gain a full understanding of what is going on around us.

Behaviorism saw a decline in influence that directly resulted in the inability to explain intelligence. It was displaced by a reorientation of psychology toward the brain dubbed the?cognitive revolution. The revolution produced modern cognitive science, and functionalism became the new dominant theory of the mind. Functionalism views?intelligence?(i.e., mental phenomenon) as the brain’s?functional organization?where individuated functions like language and vision are understood by their causal roles.

Unlike behaviorism, functionalism focuses on what the brain does and where brain function happens.[16] ?However, functionalism is not interested in how something works or if it is made of the same material. It doesn’t care if the thing that thinks is a brain or if that brain has a body. If it functions like intelligence, it is intelligent like anything that tells time is a clock. It doesn’t matter what the clock is made of as long as it keeps time.

Functional organization is an important step forward because it aligns both brain and mind with strategies for living.?All living beings manifest strategies for living—that’s what unites us all.?One of the functions of language is that it enables us humans, through the mechanisms of narratives and analytics, to explore strategic possibilities, both in fictional and historical terms, and to critique them through analytics, using natural language and/or mathematics.?It also allows us to engage and enlist others in our undertakings by communicating, both intellectually and emotionally, the strategic rewards of so doing.?Functional organization, in this context, bridges the gap between private mental experience and public social interactions, both of which are required for intelligence to be operational in the world.?

The American philosopher and computer scientist Hilary Putnam evolved functionalism in?Psychological Predicates?with computational concepts to form computational functionalism.[17] [18] ?Computationalism, for short, views the mental world as grounded in a physical system (i.e., computer) using concepts such as information, computation (i.e., thinking), memory (i.e., storage), and feedback.[19] [20] [21] ?Today, artificial intelligence research relies heavily on computational functionalism, where intelligence is organized by functions such as?computer vision ?and?natural language processing ?and explained in computational terms.

Unfortunately, functions do not think. They are aspects of thought. The issue with functionalism — aside from the reductionism that results from treating thinking as a collection of functions (and humans as brains) — is that it ignores thinking. While the brain has localized functions with input–output pairs (e.g., perception) that can be represented as a physical system inside a computer, thinking is not a loose collection of localized functions.

The meaning of the word think in the paragraph above is unclear, and as a result, the rest of the paragraph does not lead to any useful conclusion.?But there is another dimension of computational functionalism that is important to note: it is entirely analytic.?Indeed, the whole of both AI and machine learning is entirely analytic.?We need to ask ourselves, what might that be leaving out?

The short answer is, biochemistry.?The analytic model of mental activity, with its embedded metaphor of computers and computing, is based entirely on electronic signaling.?There are no hormones at work.?But among living things, long before there were any nerves to carry sensory information, there were chemical signals that served the same end.?Such signals circulate from cell to cell, activating receptors that, in turn, generate some response out of which behavior emerges, something we see every day in the way flowers turn to the sun or the way sleepiness takes over our minds.?

Now, to be fair, you won’t survive very long as a mobile animal if you don’t have an electric nervous system, so we are talking about an and here, not an or.?But it is an incredibly important and because biochemical signals are the mechanism by which homeostasis is maintained.?Homeostasis is what the AI/ML models leave out.?It is a big miss.

Homeostasis is a condition of equilibrium in which an organism is best fit to operate.?All living things seek homeostasis all the time.?Thus, both emotionally and intellectually, we humans are wired to seek it, and it shapes everything we do.?Strategies for living, in this context, are simply mechanisms for achieving a more desirable condition of equilibrium, one in which we are better fit to operate.?We can experience this phenomenon as desire or need or fear or hope, but by way of one emotion or another, we will be motivated to act.?That is what separates human intelligence from all forms of computational functionalism.

John Searle’s famous?Chinese Room thought experiment ?is one of the strongest attacks on computational functionalism. The former philosopher and professor at the University of California, Berkley, thought it impossible to build an intelligent computer because intelligence is a biological phenomenon that presupposes a thinker who has consciousness. This argument is counter to functionalism, which treats intelligence as realizable if anything can mimic the causal role of specific mental states with computational processes.

If you are not familiar with this thought experiment, click on the URL in the paragraph above before reading further.?While Searle’s argument is correct as far as it goes, it is misleading because it does not honor the idea that a competence achieved without understanding could convert to true understanding at some later date.?That is contradicted by many commonplace experiences.?Think of the way you learn multiplication tables.?You don’t need to understand why 8 X 6 = 48.?You just have to memorize that it does.?But sometime later on you do realize that a rectangle that is 8 inches on one side and 6 inches on the other actually does contain 48 square inches, and the world becomes a little less mysterious.?Now, to be fair to Searle, this may be exactly his point, that the two are not the same, and I of course, would agree.?But I would argue that the two are connected more closely than he implies.?And that leads me to believe that a computationally functional system might be able to evolve future understanding from current competence by hypothesizing strategies and testing to see if they can be fulfilled by using the mechanisms it has already mastered.?At minimum, I think AI and ML will eventually want to develop a philosophy of mind in order to take their discipline to the next level.?

That’s what I think.?What do you think? P.S. You can read the original article?here .

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