Re: [Wittrs] Wittgenstein on Machines and Thinking
- From: "SWM" <swmirsky@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Wittgenstein's Aftermath <wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:15:08 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Han Geurdes <wittrs@...> wrote:
>
> Thanks. I read that Wittgenstein was concerned with things like 'following a
> rule'. f(n) = 2n + 1, is such a mathematical rule. When is this thinking in
> your x-grammar ( for instance it is not thinking in neurological grammar but
> it is in psychological grammar or in mathematical) and when is it like what
> a machine can do. Do we have a grammar that allows you to say the machine
> thinks in his grammar but I do not allow this to be called thinking in my
> own Han-and-Sean--define-thinking grammar of it ? Han and Stuart can share a
> grammar and call it thinking but then Sean enters and says... hey fellows
> that is not thinking becuse in my grammar ..... or do we have general
> categorical grammars? No personal Han-and-Sean grammars but
> science-this-and-that grammars? Then Stuart comes from Yes-it-is-thinking
> grammar and you from No-it-is-not. What have we gained?
>
>
Not much, I'd say, Han.
Sean rightly points out Wittgenstein's notion that language plays many
different roles (consists of many different language games) and a word that
means X in one situation may mean Y in another, such that there isn't a
necessary commonality between them except, perhaps, for some historical
affinities, some overlapping connections (family likenesses), some factual
elements which govern and constrain us as language users, etc.
But I don't think that can answer your question, nor do I think that
Wittgenstein would have simply said it's all a matter of what anyone chooses to
mean as Sean seems to me to be suggesting. For language to work it must be a
group enterprise which means there must be a mechanism (or mechanisms) to allow
for shared meanings. Otherwise there can be no real understanding. That means
the discipline of learning and adhering to common rules of usage. This doesn't
mean we shouldn't explore those rules when questions like this arise. But it
does mean, I think, that we cannot simply settle on an answer that it's all
rule driven and thereafter ignore the differences or similarities. THAT can't
solve these kinds of questions (what do we mean by "think" and can we just
assume we each mean something different whenever we disagree).
I would say that it's meaningful to expect some commonality in our uses and to
attend to these as much as we attend to and emphasize the divergences.
How many senses of "think" are there? I would agree that there are many, and
that many may be quite different from one another. Moreover, I would note that
there are some words whose meanings are much harder to pin down. I think words
about our mental lives fall into this category quite clearly. We speak of minds
as if we are denoting things in the way we denote baseballs or rivers (terms
whose meanings are relatively easy to pin down, even given multiple senses.
But the fact that a word like "mind" has the form (the grammar) of designating
a thing looks to be misleading. It prompts us at times to imagine (maintain a
mental picture) of some especially rarified object seated in the head, or the
brain. Such a picture suggests the possibility of co-existence and even
independent existence (dualism). Yet when we look inside the head, there's no
mind to be seen.
The word, in ordinary usage, seems to designate an array of things including
certain kinds of behaviors and certain kinds of experience we have. Since I go
with Wittgenstein in the notion that language is ultimately a public
enterprise, I conclude that the application of a word like "mind" (or
"thinking," for that matter) is mainly in the public sphere, i.e., it's used in
relation to certain criterial facts we observe in the world (the behaviors).
But I think it's pretty clear that we also mean by such terms what we
experience subjectively, within the context of our mental lives.
The feelings and motives and thoughts we have all seem to be part of what we
mean by a word like "mind" in this sense. And we typically relate these private
elements to the observed behaviors of the publicly driven usage.
Chalmers suggests, rightly I think, that we have a dual understanding of, or
dual usage for, mental words, though, with Wittgenstein, I think we have to
recognise that the public usages take precedence. As such, words like
"thinking" and "mind" can be hard to pin down because of their private
referents that cannot be easily extricated from the public ones.
So what do we mean by "think"? Is it the calculations a machine like a computer
does? Is it sophisticated programs, consisting of such calculating, which
enable these kinds of machines to make choices according to different data
received, seemingly mimicking the kind of considerations and choices we humans
make everyday? Is it such activity accompanied by an array of other features
(mental pictures, being aware, complex associations of ideas)? If so, can these
be produced computationally or are computer processes forever barred from this
achievement (as some, like Searle, seem to think and as many of us may want to
think)?
In a certain sense ALL are variants of what we mean by "think", on my view, but
this is only because thinking is not a particular thing but only a "thing" in a
more general sense of the latter word (i.e., as an object of reference).
Thinking is sometimes understood as a process (the stream of thoughts qua
mental steps we take when we think something through, say) but THAT process is
not the same thing as whatever brain processes underlie instances of thinking
in us, despite the use of the same word "process", in both cases.
So my view is that it is meaningful to ask what we mean by "think" (always as
long as we're attending to the contexts in which the word is used) and that we
expect to come up with enough commonality in usage to enable us to share the
meaning of the term and thereby understand one another. If not, if we cannot
share meanings, what's the point?
SWM
>
>
> On 21 June 2011 09:07, Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@...> wrote:
>
> > (Han)
> >
> > ... my sense is twofold. (1) to the extent that these things appear
> > different, they constitute senses of "think," each of which bear family
> > resemblance to one another. (2) Science finds information about the matter
> > that introduces technical grammar into the the language game, for whatever
> > purposes those grammars serve. To understand "think," one must understand
> > its uses in the language game and the information that arrives about it from
> > science (or whomever).
> >
> > And if a way of speaking comes along to say that X "thinks," no matter what
> > it purportedly said, it would seem to be confined to its sense and dependent
> > upon the information it was conveying. Imagine you say to yourself: "I'm not
> > thinking today." Or, "my thoughts aren't working." And someone else says:
> > "My parrot thinks." Neither of these ideas could be said to be
> > contradictory; they all say something meaningful.
> >
> > So I guess when you ask "what is think," we must ask back: what do you want
> > to know? What neurological grammar says about it? What psychological grammar
> > does? (I don't know these answers). Think how silly it would be for science
> > to say "the parrot doesn't 'think,'" when so much capital is exchanged in
> > the language marketplace with such an expression. I guess the real question
> > is this: how do technical senses of "think" differ from ordinary senses, if
> > at all? (Cf., "motion." -- the lay sense versus that of particles and so
> > forth).
> >
> >
> > Regards and thanks.
> >
> > Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.
> > Assistant Professor
> > Wright State University
> > Personal Website: http://seanwilson.org
> > SSRN papers: http://tinyurl.com/3eatnrx
> > Wittgenstein Discussion: http://seanwilson.org/wiki/doku.php?id=wittrs
> >
> >
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