Barry ‘Banny’ Arrington has a new, rather confused post at UD:
On Invoking Non-Physical Mental States to “Solve the Problem” of Consciousness
Many of us are banned at UD, and those who aren’t banned are in danger of having their comments purged at any moment. Let’s avoid that cesspit and respond here at TSZ, where open discussion is encouraged and Arringtonian censorship is anathema.
Thanks, KN. You’ve posted most of these before, and some are on my list to get to after Evan Thompon’s last two books, but I have not seen Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature before. It’s too expensive for me to buy until I catch up on others, but I’d be interested in any thoughts you have after reading it.
Here is one more suggestion to consider after your Enactivist/Dynamicist Book-of-the Month Club subscription expires (grin). You may want to take a look at Chris Eliasmith’s philosophy papers (scroll down in linked CV). His Moving beyond metaphors: Understanding the mind for what it is is a nice overview.
He criticizes GOFAI, standard connectionism, and dynamicism all for lacking a biologically realistic version of time. He also questions the view of some enactivists that the body/environment link cannot be borken-down using standard scientific systems analysis for decomposition/re-synthesis. He believes the bandwidth boundary introduced by the sensorimotor system makes such a decomposition appropriate.
His model ia based on a dynamic, representational, and computational approach, using biologically realistic neural networks (for time) linked to control-theory models (for the cognitive aspects). Of course, his version of representation and computation are nothing like Fodor’s CTM.
I am not posting so much these days, but I do enjoy reading your thoughts at TSZ..