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I tried to present some of the
foundational assumptions of Cognitive Science as it is currently
practiced and
in so doing to suggest why it is so hard to understand how the mind
works. I
provided 5 conditions that a theory would need to meet but stressed two
of
them, The first was what Brentano called the problem of intentionality
– the
fact that behavior is determined not by how the world is but by how it
is
represented to be, which includes representations of nonexistent things
and
what things are seen as.
The second major problem that
makes understanding the mind difficult is that most of what goes on in
the mind
is not available to conscious experience and what is available is
usually very
misleading. For one thing it is not clear what reports of our conscious
experience are reports of! I gave many examples of how one is mislead
by
accepting at face value the content one’s conscious experience. We are
misled
by our experience when we will our voluntary actions, when we reason
(and
experience it as inner dialogue or mental imagery) and generally when
we use
mental images.
Finally I briefly discuss what I
believe are some assumptions in Piet’s Life as a Laboratory treatise. I
agree
that a mature theory of mind will likely look very strange to us and
will have
many alien concepts. But it will also have to deal with the deep truths
that
are contained in “folk psychology” where we attribute behavior to what
people
believe and want. But the story of how these representations connect
with the
world they represent and how they are transformed into actions is far
from
understood and may well have to await new conceptualizations. I also
spoke
about the attempt to reparse the world so as to focus on the
subject-object
pair, rather than objectify the object as a separate entity. I argued
that
whatever the correct way of dividing the world up, it is very likely
that it
will continue to be a binary division and will have one side as the
Object of
Study and the other side the theory (and of course there is always the
third
implied entry -- the theorist).
I was a bit disappointed that
the Qwaq medium did not encourage a new way of presenting information.
On
Sunday I gave a lecture with the aid of PowerPoint that is just like a
lecture
I would give here at home. Perhaps it is my fault for not looking
around for
new ways of presenting ideas, but the medium really is designed around
the
usual classroom with boards and screens and projectors. Of course I was
able to
give a lecture that was watched simultaneously by people in very
different
parts of the world, so it is an amazing technology for that reason. But
I still
think it should allow a more radical reformulation of the whole notion
of a
lecture and I don’t know how to go about inventing such a thing based
on the Qwaq
infrastructure. That may be worth thinking about and discussing in the
WoK
forum.
Other relevant papers and
documents are available on my personal web site.
Zenon Pylyshyn