[Wittrs] Re: [Wittrs]: Nominalism / Sean
- From: "jrstern" <jrstern@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 18 Sep 2009 01:31:59 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, brendan downs <wittrs@...> wrote:
>
>
>
> I havent read much on this subject, but I tend to think the mind is
> identical to the brain or that the word "mind" is cross categorial usage of a
> word to describe the brain. e.g. an anthropologist might refer to a cat as a
> feline, and say a vet it might call it a cat. a prehistoric example but I
> think it express my point. I more or less accept sciences thought on the
> subject. I'm not to sure on thinking, maybe I could use the same example and
> as above, thinking being the process of chemical and electrical activity.
> sorry it doesnt help you much, computational process umm...Chomsky might have
> some ideas for you, symbolic brain models, fuzzy logic, neural networks and
> pattern recognition. I hope that can be of help...naturalising "computational
> nominalism" a nominalist would say the mind doesnt exist, it is not a
> physical entity. they would go further and say it is a descriptive concept
> for the brain.
Oh, well, if you want to see what the debate looks like, I think Stuart and
Bruce are pretty well covering it!
But a nominalist, by your own recommendation, doesn't hold any
particular view on whether "the mind exists", that's either an
epistemological or an ontological statement, as you like. It may
well be that a particular set of physical states constitutes a
mind, with nothing abstract about it except its membership in an
abstract class that includes other minds.
Certainly, Chomsky, and Dennett, and Fodor, and Searle, and some
others, but not so much Wittgenstein, I guess.
But we don't even need to ask about minds in order to find
the limits of our knowledge. Even asking about computation,
just the simple stuff that runs your browser or prints your
paycheck, is enough to show some great divides, just look at
the last message from Rob. What on earth is computation?
And isn't it just amazing, that we hardly have even the start
of a credible answer for that question!
After all, Wittgenstein brought up even a simple numeric
sequence, and stirs up great arguments about something even
that simple, and if that's not clear, are we ready to even start
to talk about computation? Or perhaps, if we consider computation,
we can say something more about those sequences.
Josh
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