Since the publication of The Embodied Mind (1991), the cognitive sciences have been turning away from the mind-as-program analogy that dominated early cognitivism towards a conception of cognitive functioning as embodied in a living organism and embedded in an environment. In the past few years, important contributions to embodied-embedded cognitive science can be found in Noe (Action in Perception), Chemero (Radical Embodied Cognitive Scie Rnce), Thompson (Mind in Life), Clark (Being There and Surfing Uncertainty), and Wheeler (Reconstructing the Cognitive World).
[A note on terminology: the new cognitive science was initially called “enactivism” because of how the cognitive functions of an organism enact or call forth its world-for-it. This lead to the rise of “4E cognitive science — cognition as extended, embedded, embodied, and enacted. At present the debate hinges on whether embodied-embedded cognitive science should dispense with the concept of representation in explaining cognitive function. Wheeler and Clark drop “enaction” because they retain an explanatory role for representation, even though representations are action-oriented and context-sensitive.]
The deeper philosophical background to “the new cognitive sciences” includes Hubert Dreyfus, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Dewey, Wittgenstein, and J. J. Gibson (who was taught by one of William James’s students). It is a striking fact that embodied-embedded cognitive science promises to put an anti-Cartesian, anti-Kantian critique of intellectualism on an scientific (empirical and naturalistic) basis. Embodied-embedded cognitive science is a fruitful place where contemporary cognitive science meets with the best (in my view) of 19th- and 20th-century Eurocentric philosophy.
That’s important for anyone who thinks, with Peirce, that science has some uniquely epistemic position because scientific practices allow the world to get a vote in what we say about it (Peirce contra Rorty).
The philosophical implications of embodied-embedded cognitive science are quite fascinating and complicated. Here’s one I’ve been thinking about the past few days: embodied-embedded cognitive science can strengthen Kant’s critique of both rationalist metaphysics and empiricist epistemology.
Kant argues that objectively valid judgments (statements that can have a truth-value in some but not all possible worlds) require that concepts (rules of possible judgment) be combined with items in a spatio-temporal framework. But Kant was never able to explain how this “combination” happened; and as a result subsequent philosophers were tempted to either reduce concepts to intuitions (as in Mill’s psychologistic treatment of logic) or reduce intuitions to concepts (as in the absolute idealism of Fichte and Hegel). As C. I. Lewis and Sellars rightly saw, however, neither Mill nor Hegel could be right. Somehow, receptivity and spontaneity are both required and they must somehow be combined (at least some degree). But how?
Andy Clark’s “predictive processing” model of cognition (in Surfing Uncertainty) offers a promising option. According to Clark, we should not think of the senses as passively transmitting information to the brain; rather, the brain is constantly signaling to the senses what to expect from the play of energies across receptors (including not only exteroceptive but also interoceptive and proprioceptive receptors). The task of the senses is to convey prediction errors — to indicate how off the predictions were so that the predictions can be updated.
And this bidirectional flow of information takes place between any different levels of neuronal organization — there’s top-down and sideways propagation from the ‘higher’ neuronal levels and also bottom-up propagation from the ‘lower’ neuronal levels (including, most distally, the receptors themselves).
Now, here’s the key move: the bidirectional multilevel hierarchy of neuronal assemblies matches (but also replaces) the Kantian distinction between the understanding (concepts) and the sensibility (intuitions). And it explains the one major thing that Kant couldn’t explain: how concepts and intuitions can be combined in judgment. They are combinable in judgment (at the personal level) because they have as their neurocomputational correlates different directions of signal propagation (at the subpersonal level).
But if embodied-embedded cognitive science allows to see what was right in Kant’s high-altitude sketch of our cognitive capacities, and also allows us to vindicate that sketch in terms of empirical, naturalistic science, it also thereby strengthens both Kant’s critique of empiricism (because top-down signal propagation is necessary for sense receptors to extract any usable information about causal structure from energetic flux), and his critique of rationalism (because the proper functioning of top-down signal propagation is geared towards successful actions, and our only source of information about whether our predictions are correct are not is the bottom-up prediction errors).
And because we can understand, now, both spontaneity and receptivity in neurocomputational terms as two directions of information flow across a multilevel hierarchy, we can see that Kant, C. I. Lewis, and Sellars were correct to insist on a distinction between spontaneity and receptivity, but wrong about how to understand that distinction — and we can also see that Hegel and neo-Hegelians like Brandom and McDowell are wrong to deny that distinction.
I don’t blame you. I don’t have the background to carry my side of the argument, and it would be a very frustrating and tiring discussion for you.
From where does the idea of “error” arise, if this is not based on a high level view (roughly what I meant when I mentioned the manifest image)?
I’ve been working my way through his The Philosophy of Nature: A Guide to the New Essentialism. Only a couple chapters left.
I have liked it. Seems about the right level for me. Not too weighty. Doesn’t require a lot of background knowledge. A good introduction.
Other titles:
Scientific Essentialism
The Metaphysics of Scientific Realism
Neil Rickert,
As I understand it, in Bayesian computational neuroscience the “errors” are defined relative to the discrepancy between top-down action-oriented dynamic representations and bottom-up dynamics triggered by energetic fluxes at sensory receptors.
That is, the error is defined endogenously, in terms of the discrepancy between top-down and bottom-up processing — not in terms of whether the cognitive system is accurately modeling How The World Really Is.
Embodied-embedded cognitive science inherits ecological psychology’s implicit criticism of metaphysical realism.
Mung,
Thanks, mung. Looks like interesting stuff. He’s a student of JJC Smart’s, I guess. That’s a good lineage IMHO.
Count me as a Bayesian skeptic.
There’s nothing wrong with Bayes rule. But I see the associated philosophy as some kind of wild goose chase.
I’m not sure what you mean by the “idea” of error. Perhaps you mean the idea of error as expressed in the theory? The theory is just a way of describing what the neurons are doing. It’s like the genetic code. We don’t have to accept it as real to use it in explanations.
The error in the theory refers to neural patterns.
The source of these patterns is the difference of neural input from perception from expected neural input; the latter being generated by neural representations of priors.
One way the priors act is by helping to generate efferent copies. So here the error is a comparison of expected versus actual interoceptive perception and the efferent copy.
Another source of priors is the experience as captured by learning (which amounts to past adjustment of priors at various levels).
A third source of priors is evolution as captured in the genes as expressed during development.
Except it’s neuroscience, not philosophy.
(Plus name calling is not an argument of course)
Well crap. Since when?
Thanks for the straight up answer on KN and the reply to me.
My understanding of the necessary a posteriori stuff (from SEP for example) is that it involves three things:
1. There is a natural kind with essential characteristic “number of protons = 79” as justified by science; natural kinds are rigid designators.
2. The name “gold” for the shiny stuff is a rigid designator.
3. Gold = that natural kind.
If two rigid designators are found a posteriori to be equal (to co-refer), then that identity must be necessary.
I suppose the causal theory of reference could come in by saying the identity (3) was due to the (re-)dubbing of the reference by science. I think there is a proviso in causal theory for that sort of redubbing by the experts in certain cases.
So (1) and (3) seem to me to involve some assumptions about how to find essential characteristics of natural kinds and how to create identities between names and natural kinds.
Anyway, I just typed that to see if I could type something semi-coherent. No need to reply.
No, I had not heard of Ellis before, although he looks like my kind of philosopher from the Amazon blurbs on the book.
I’ll probably add him to the list.
—————-
ETA: For any other philosophical duffers reading this, I found Papineau’s overview book very clear on these issues. He also has a short but very helpful explanation of de re/de dicto in modal contexts.
Both Gregory and I were brought up in Canada, where I learned an important philosophical truth
“Sticks and stones may break my bones,
but names will never hurt me [or my arguments].”
I find Piccinin helpful on physical computation. He has an SEP article on it. Plus many papers here with his 2013 Neural Computation and the Computational Theory of Cognition on that page probably most relevant.
(Functionalism 6.3.1 is also fun and informative)
He just published a book which is a bit pricey for me, especially given I expect it covers a lot of the same ground as his freely available papers.
He is founder of the the Brains blog.
Thanks for the long response on the Myth of the Given which I’ll need time to work through.
The rigidity of the designation requires (at least something like) a causal of reference. Because if names were, e.g., short for definite descriptions or clusters of predicates they would not name the same item (or kind of item) in every possible world. So, the idea is that essentialism requires rigid designation, as the article you cite indicates, and rigidity requires (at least something like) a causal theory of reference.
That article has responses from many neuroscientists and philosophers, with replies by Clark; you may find that section interesting. Among the philosophers, Noe, Block, and Dennett show up.
Skip Hohwy’s Predictive Mind. Not that it is bad but it covers similar ground to Clark at the same level.
ETA: I believe he revisits his replies to Block and maybe Noe in the book.
I guess you don’t see this as depending on a high level view. Bayesian methods are often seen as a way of generating something like the laws of classical physics. But that way of looking at things was precisely what I disagreed with.
Well, there’s some evidence that some decision-making processes in the brain are Bayesian. I made this point here (I’ve linked before, but in case people haven’t seen it, not that it’s necessarily right).
It’s just standard mathematics/statistics; the science part is showing that this is a successful model of some brain processes.
It seems by your arguments that much of physics or just about any science with mathematics is based on a questionable use of the manifest image.
No, not at all.
However, I do distinguish between science as it is actually done (as I see it), and science as described by philosophy of science. Your comment is perhaps applicable to the latter.
There is no single way in which philosophy is described by “philosophy of science.” It’s a huge field, full of widely disagreeing theories and philosophers.
It’s weird that you apparently think that there’s lots of ways to do science but only one (particularly stupid) way to do philosophy. I’m guessing you really don’t know that much about the latter.
BruceS,
Names may not hurt us, but sometimes can help us to explore and even follow the work of different people than the ones we so far knew.
I meant to follow-up on a previous thread when you said you were interested in the Philosophy IN Science work. Here are two links, the second closer to the main themes of the OP (note: I haven’t finished the Brozek piece).
http://www.philosophyinscience.com/index.php/en/essays/325-m-heller-how-is-philosophy-in-science-possible
http://www.philosophyinscience.com/index.php/en/essays/137-bartosz-brozek-philosophy-in-neuroscience
Right now I don’t have time for more here. And as I said, this place comes across as largely uninspiring. KN’s philosophistry just strikes me as empty in the end, but at least he is humble enough to admit he doesn’t really have things figured out yet (other than the times he is celebrating his ‘philosophical’ intellect). As an anti-ID venue, fine, helpful & valuable (e.g. Lizzie has tied into fits several IDists, especially re: Bayesianism). As a ‘skeptical pit of misery,’ not so welcome or uplifting. But, ‘whatever floats your boat,’ fellow Canadian. 😉
The Brozek article, “Philosophy in Neuroscience” is quite good. I worry Brozek slightly misunderstands the Hacker/Bennett criticism, but that’s a minor point.
Quite good: Of course it is, KN. Did you think I habitually deal with skeptical chicken-feed intellectual posers? Have you no shame or awareness that your disenchanted, horizontal, secularist philosophistry might somehow poison your students, even if unintended?
Just watched that Holy Rollers film (suggested by stc) about Jewish drug dealers; at least someone is living real about their Judaism, not against their ancestors.
Philosophy IN science is imo a significant contribution to the ‘science wars’. If you do actually reject ideological scientism, which you have loosely suggested here, KN, then what actually have you written to show it? It doesn’t seem to be much if anything.
Keep going KN.. Backwards high-jump it!
Thank god for small favors!
Thanks for taking the time to post these links, Gregory. I have read and enjoyed the first article and will tackle the other in time.
I also took the time to read Heller’s Aug 14 essay (book excerpt) at the top of the essays list; co-incidentally it talked about the semantics versus syntax issue for the genetic code and for mental representation (the neurological code). Didn’t use the word “intentionality”, as far as I noticed, though!
I have to admit, I don’t understand how you can post helpful things like this and at the same time what strikes me as vitriol like your last post to me in the latest genetic code thread.
You’re a man of mystery, Gregory; to me anyway.
My Canadian friends say that too! 🙂 The links are from quality, international scholars outside of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ origin.
You seem a decent guy, BruceS, even if currently (personally) lost in atheism. We’d probably have a fair conversation. B&W text is difficult.
Back off Gregory. I’m the mysterious one.
Mung,
You’re actually not really that mysterious, Mung. 😉
Well, more interesting than Gregory, that’s for sure.
Gregory is interesting, in his own way. But not mysterious.
Me, otoh. My lack of mysteriousness is part of what makes me so mysterious.
By the way, KN, I’d like to thank you for the OP.
Unfortunately the topic is way over my head and I have too many other research initiatives going on take up enactivism.
But I appreciate the desire to try something new and not having the topic hidden deep within other threads.
I honestly hope you’ll continue with additional OP’s.
I think Gregory couldn’t be more transparent.
I was only seconding it. Fact is, I do have respect for you as an intellectual and as a scholar. It’s always puzzled me why that respect is not reciprocated. I respond to you with hostility only because that’s how you treat me. I’d like nothing more than to begin all over between us with a clean slate.
One would have to observe my teaching and my interactions with my students to know first-hand whether there is any such danger. To date, none of my religious students have complained about me (that I know of). They don’t know that I’m a naturalist and a secularist because, quite frankly, it’s none of their business. My students also don’t know whether I’m single, married, gay or straight because, again, it’s none of their business. My job is to help them become better readers, writers, and thinkers.
Not that it’s any of your business, but for all you know, I come from a long line of secular Jewish socialists. I might be honoring my ancestors with my views!
Firstly: all the philosophers I’ve written on, with the exception of Sellars, are vocal critics of scientism in one version or another: Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, McDowell, Brandom, Adorno, Levinas, Rorty, and Merleau-Ponty. I’ve sympathetically defended McDowell’s criticism of the disenchantment of nature in my piece on McDowell and animal minds, and I’ve criticized McDowell’s conception of the disenchantment of nature using Adorno and Hegel in my piece on ‘the ideology of modernity’. You seem to know my work and can easily confirm this for yourself, should you (or anyone else here) chose.
Secondly: I haven’t addressed scientism explicitly (yet) because there are too many different versions of what counts as “scientism”. Existentialists, phenomenologists, pragmatists, Kantians, and Hegelians all have different versions of what “scientism” is and why it is ethically (politically, spiritually, aesthetically, epistemologically, metaphysically) problematic.
As an example: for Margolis, the problem with “scientism” lies in Quine’s extensionalist semantics and the resulting neglect of the distinction between Geist and Natur. That much seems quite right to me — I find Margolis’ critique of scientism deeply compelling — but it’s hard to see how to align it with Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of “objective thought” or Adorno’s criticism of “the domination of nature”. They might, at the end of the day, simply be talking about different things.
Thank you, Mung!
You mentioned that you were reading retrieving realism so I purchased a copy, which then contributed to my request that you create an OP on the subject. I had also purchased the book by Hall that walto recommended.
I guess I’m just saying that I’m willing to entertain the idea that I am not the only person here at TSZ who has something interesting to say. 😉
I finished Retrieving Realism two weeks ago. I found it deeply disappointing. But I’d be willing to write a (very critical!) review of it for us here.
I had not recognized that relation of the Myth of the Given and inferential semantics.
I take section 7.16 of the book as Clark’s attempt to relate PP to the personal, first person perspective as revealed in qualia and intentionality.
He says that we can make small, tentative start at qualia and at meaning through PP.
For qualia, one of his examples is how PP helps us to understand the experience of presence.
For meaning, he takes the role of PP in dealing with human-specific affordances in the environment as a starting point.
If third-person science helps us to understand the structure of first person experience (including that structure as depicted by phenomenology), is that acceptable as an approach to solving the hard problem as associated with qualia and intentionality? It seems so to me.
I think that a “true believer” in the hard problem would simply deny that a third-personal stance on subpersonal processes can tell us anything about what intentionality and consciousness really are. Clark acknowledges this in an end-note:
.
As I see it, Clark’s view on consciousness and content (intentionality) are basically Dennettian, which is to say, starting off by more or less denying that there’s a hard problem of consciousness over and above the easy problem of consciousness.
Though Clark can come across as much friendlier to phenomenology than Dennett — there’s a lot of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in Clark’s Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again — I suspect that Clark is using phenomenological results to supplement a third-personal account he’s building.
I will need to think very hard about whether Clark (and also Michael Wheeler, who is also in a similar position) is vulnerable to the objections to Dennett raised by Teed Rockwell and Taylor Carman — as well whether those objections are decisive or if (as Dennett would almost certainly say) those objection themselves rely on a version of the Myth of the Given.
Although, now that I’m thinking about it, I might be able to motivate a defense of those criticisms of Dennett, if I can appeal to my distinction between the epistemic Myth of the Given and the semantic Myth of the Given . . . hmmm. Back to work!
BruceS linked to KN’s post. So I have reread it and have some comments.
I think I’ve said this before. I don’t see the brain as a syntactic engine. In my opinion, it is entirely semantic.
Yes, neuroscientists may see it as syntax. But I think that’s something that they are imposing on the brain. It comes from what they are looking for.
I see syntax as emerging from semantics. Roughly speaking, an attempt to give a semantic analysis of the mechanism of speech divides the speech into parts (sentences, words, phonemes). Those are really semantic units in the analysis of speech as a mechanism (ignoring the message being conveyed by speech). Our notion of syntax comes from an idealization of this analysis. The idealization doesn’t actually fit language all that well, in my opinion.
We have since used that idealization in constructing formal languages, which are indeed syntactic. But, as a mathematical fictionalist, I should probably say that syntax doesn’t really exist except in a mathematical sense of “exist.”
This emphasis on the space of reasons is where I see philosophy as going wrong. I see it as a commitment to dualism. Thought is seen as central. But thought is usually seen as abstract, so immaterial. So you have made something immaterial the centerpiece of the analysis of human cognition.
I see perception as central. I see meaning as arising from the way that perception works. And I see thought as highly dependent on perception. As I see it, thinking is a simulating of behavior. We evaluate that behavior with our perception — particularly self-perception. But this is an evaluation system that we have calibrated in our actual behaving in the real world. So it is that perception of our thinking that connects it with reality and provides the kind of “friction” that you are looking for.
That description could be applied to predictive coding. The priors supply to semantics used to structure the speech. That very example is given in Clark’s book (section 6.9).
Perception-based rather than amodal representations; imaginative thought as re-using perception but without action; and an intimate connection between action, affordances, and perception, are all ideas which are central to predictive coding.
This should read, ….is where I see the philosophy KN likes (or has linked to, etc.) is going wrong.
Your definition of “philosophy” seems to be something like
Any general theory of nature or mind that I think is wrong.
PS: I enjoyed your remarks above on semantics and syntax. Very interesting and thought provoking (as much philosophy IS).
I agree that it is unlikely that a scientific explanation (if it is found) of first-person phenomenal experience will satisfy everyone. There are still vitalists too.
If the denial means, as per Chalmers, that a functional/scientific explanation won’t suffice, then I’d agree. But with the proviso that whereas Chalmers thinks it can be ruled out a priori, Clark thinks that it cannot be ruled out without doing a lot more science.
Chalmers is definitely close to Dennett. He says this in Mindware:
“I find myself increasingly tempted [references] by a Dennett-style deflationary approach” (p. 268 paperback second edition).
But then Dennett is also adopting some ideas from Clark. In his (pdf) latest (2015) paper on qualia, he uses Bayesian expectation as part of the explanation for the seemingness of phenomenal experience. However, he also involves a second-hand viewpoint which I have not seen in Clark.
If you want to see Clark, Dennett, Chalmers, and other luminaries from the world of analytic philosophy of mind discuss Dennett’s paper, check this out.
I think this paper is Clark’s latest on qualia; it is the latest one referenced in Mindware. He does compare his approach to the radical enactivist approach early in the paper.
What we have here are two contrasting ways of understanding the kind of tight relationship between action and perception argued for in section one. The camp occupied by Noë [and Clark believes most of the other radical enactivists] thinks we must appeal to action in understanding perception since perception is constituted by our understanding of how possible perceptions depend on what we might do. The camp occupied by Pettit and, as we shall see, by the present authors, thinks that in some way this story gets things in reverse, and that perceptual experience is constituted by our understanding of how possible actions depend on what we perceptually detect.
Now this is drawing an important distinction. But it is subtle. For both accounts emphasize embodiment and action in the world. Since the radical enactivist approach is looked on favorably by some phenomenologists, perhaps Clark’s account is not really that foreign to phenomenology.
Where Clark does differ, I believe, is that he locates the physical basis for phenomenal experience within the body, whereas, as far as I understand them, radical enactivists include the world in the physical basis for qualia.
If we take phenomenal experience as a representation of some sort (eg a PC type of representation), then I would agree that the content of that representation is individuated externally. But I think phenomenal experience involves a mode of presentation of that content that is explained subpersonally as depending solely by the body. I understand Prinz, Clark, and maybe Dennett as holding views somewhat aligned with that model.
The only Teed Rockwell I’ve tried was a paper I found online from a neuroprgamtism book you referenced at some point. But I did not get much out of it.
I did wander a bit around his acemia.edu site looking for something that might be the Dennett criticism. There is a precis of his book there, but the precis did not mention Dennett (based on quick reading).
However, I did come across this defense of pansychism. In a quick skim of it I came across the following, which to me illustrates the hand-waving use of DST concepts which I’ve seen in other radical enactivists, and which makes me suspicious their usage of those concepts.
If we discovered two interacting systems in today’s Universe, one of which impinges on the other in such a way as to create deterministic causal networks that surround a sufficiently sophisticated central system of strange attractors, we could legitimately describe the inner system of strange attractors as a mind, and the outerdeterministic system as that mind’s environment.
I think we have to be a bit careful here about why neuroscientists and philosophers have been tempted by the idea that the brain is merely syntactical.I suspect that it lies in the successes of computational neuroscience, machine learning, evolutionary robotics and so forth.
Those successes make it seem as if the relation between neurons is merely syntactical — the firing of one neuron modulates the firing of another, just as the activation of one gate in a microchip affects the activation of another — so if the latter is purely syntactical, then so too is the former.
The idea that brains are merely syntactical engines could be undermined if either (a) computers are not syntactical engines either or (b) brains are not computers, despite the success of computational neuroscience in modeling them as such.
Several different issues are being run together.
Firstly, no point have I ever endorsed the traditional picture as to how “thought is usually seen”. There’s no reason why my insistence on the role of rationality in human experience commits me to the Cartesian conception of what rational thought really is, and certainly not the immateriality of the intellect or anything like that.
Secondly, I quite agree that a theory of animal cognition is a theory of perception and action, and I’m quite frankly startled that one would think that is a point to make to me as if it were an objection.
However, I would also stress that I am interested in how enculturated cognitive systems differ from non-enculturated cognitive systems, or put in more ‘traditional’ terms, how rational minds differ from non-rational minds. So while perception and action are of course central to a theory of animal cognition as such, I’m also interested in what rationality is, how reason evolved, and how rationality is causally implemented. Telling that story requires understanding how rationality transforms animal cognition; it does not involve marginalizing the importance of perception and action in our animal cognition.
Clearly perceiving and acting do provide our thoughts with “friction” (and, I would maintain, that is the only way our thoughts get any friction; if so, the implications for the possibility of metaphysics are substantive). However, to some extent perceiving and acting are also affected by the conceptual framework one has available, and therefore we need to understand how the world can get a vote on what we say about it, given that perceiving and acting are conceptually-laden.
BruceS,
That is indeed a very subtle distinction! I’ll need to read the Clark et al. paper later on this week and see what I think of it I feel as if there’s a distinction between drawn here between “the possibility of movement” and “possible movements”, and I’ll need to puzzle out if that’s a distinction that makes a difference or not.
The piece by Rockwell I had in mind was “The Hard Problem is Dead; Long Live the Hard Problem“. Rockwell does (I thought) a very nice job of showing that Chalmers’ view of consciousness commits him to the Myth of the Given. But Rockwell points out that Sellars himself — unlike Rorty and Dennett — did think that there is a distinction between linguistic awareness and non-linguistic awareness, and did think that we needed a positive theory of what sensations are. Rockwell finds Dewey more helpful on this point than Sellars. I think that Dewey has basically the right views, but he doesn’t articulate them with sufficient conceptual precision.
One big question I’ll be considering as I finish Clark’s book — hopefully today or tomorrow! — is how the predictive coding model helps us understand the Sellarsian distinction between sensations and language.
I find the topic of the last section of Clark’s book — Scaffolding Prediction — the most interesting. I need to go back and read that section carefully. So please share your thoughts if you have time.
I forgot to mention that the Clark et al paper does not include the Bayesian perspective. I suspect the two would be a good fit, but I have not thought much about that.
Thanks for the Rockwell link.
Predictive coding and Bayesian learning cannot get started before there is data. So you first need to understand perception well enough to understand how data is acquired.
It turns out that once you understand perception well enough, you have pretty much explained everything without needing to assume that the brain is implementing fancy mathematical algorithms.
But those successes (IMO) depend very much on the intentionality of the human programmers. So I don’t see them as making a convincing case.
As I see it, human cognition differs from animal cognition in two ways. Firstly, speech behavior is an important part of human behavior. So if thought is about behavior, then we should expect a great deal of human thought to be about speech.
Secondly, we are social creatures. So we care how others see us. When we evaluate our speech behavior, we are trying to evaluate how effective it will be in communicating to others. For those of us in an academic environment, that probably requires a logical structuring of our arguments. For other, such as GOP presidential candidates, the appeal to emotions seems to be far more important.
As for “rational minds”, it depends on what that means. If “rational” just means engaging in arguments, then I don’t think it means much. If “rational” implies the use of logic, then I doubt that there are rational minds. That is to say, human thought is not limited to mere rationality (in the sense of using logic).
I was looking for a date for that paper but did not see one.
However, he does provide a contact email, and that gives a big clue: 74164.3703@compuserve.com
Oh, burn!
Seriously, though: there are no references after 1997, so it was probably written in 1997 or 1998.