marvellous are Thy works;
Psalm 139:14
"Last week, University of Sussex cognitive philosophy prof Andy Clark was Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s guest on Closer to Truth on the question, “Is the Mind Like a Computer?”
Q: Does the mind work like a computer?
Q: Are mental processes the product of computation in that information processing is the essence of mind or consciousness?
This view is popular among computer scientists but rejected by most philosophers.
Q: What can we learn about the mind by considering this computational theory?
Clark, the author of The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality (Pantheon 2023), sees the brain as a “powerful, dynamic prediction engine, mediating our experience of both body and world.” Clark:… I am a computationalist so I think the question isn’t Is the brain a computer? but What kind of computer is the brain?
And it’s a very special sort of computer, solving very special
kinds of problems. It’s a probabilistic machine and what it does is deeply entwined with moving the body around so as to simplify the problems that it’s trying to solve.
This is pretty different to our original picture of a big Mainframe (that) sat in the corner doing its stuff. I think those are the important differences — though not in whether it’s a computer or not but just what’s it doing and how’s it doing it.
Kuhn then asks for something more specific about the mind.
Clark: You know, I think, at the bottom level, it could be zeros and ones. It is just a question of, if you like, What are the interesting program-level descriptions that are being implemented by that
underlying structure? And I think once we start to think that, the descriptions at the levels that will matter for the sciences of the mind are descriptions in terms of something like multi-level probabilistic encodings with distributed representation …
So it’s not like a little symbol for a concept like cat but instead it’s a widespread pattern of activity that can be more or less. There doesn’t have to be kind of all or nothing.
Once you start to think in those terms, then you’re beginning to look at this sort of very small corner of the class of possible computational mechanisms where I think we humans and biological animals in general live.
So if you think about some of the things we do — like we like to upload stuff and look at it … most of our computers don’t do that, you know. They don’t want to print something out and have a look at it and think about it some more. What good’s that going to do with them?
So somehow we have to understand that special corner of computational space in which you get real boosts from printing stuff out, if you like, and looking at it.
Indeed, we do have to understand that because that is, specifically, the mind at work. Pressed once again for a “new kind of computational theory of mind,” Clark points to Google’s work on Deep Mind, in which the system accesses external as well as internal resources to solve problems."
Clark, the author of The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality (Pantheon 2023), sees the brain as a “powerful, dynamic prediction engine, mediating our experience of both body and world.” Clark:… I am a computationalist so I think the question isn’t Is the brain a computer? but What kind of computer is the brain?
And it’s a very special sort of computer, solving very special
This is pretty different to our original picture of a big Mainframe (that) sat in the corner doing its stuff. I think those are the important differences — though not in whether it’s a computer or not but just what’s it doing and how’s it doing it.
Kuhn then asks for something more specific about the mind.
Clark: You know, I think, at the bottom level, it could be zeros and ones. It is just a question of, if you like, What are the interesting program-level descriptions that are being implemented by that
So it’s not like a little symbol for a concept like cat but instead it’s a widespread pattern of activity that can be more or less. There doesn’t have to be kind of all or nothing.
Once you start to think in those terms, then you’re beginning to look at this sort of very small corner of the class of possible computational mechanisms where I think we humans and biological animals in general live.
So if you think about some of the things we do — like we like to upload stuff and look at it … most of our computers don’t do that, you know. They don’t want to print something out and have a look at it and think about it some more. What good’s that going to do with them?
So somehow we have to understand that special corner of computational space in which you get real boosts from printing stuff out, if you like, and looking at it.
Indeed, we do have to understand that because that is, specifically, the mind at work. Pressed once again for a “new kind of computational theory of mind,” Clark points to Google’s work on Deep Mind, in which the system accesses external as well as internal resources to solve problems."
MindMatters
