What Categories Reveal About the Mind I graduated from Oklahoma State University in January of 1959 with a BSEE (Bachelor of Science in Electronic Engineering) and went immediately to work for Hughes Aircraft Corporation in Southern California. In college I took an elective course in Symbolic Logic, this seminal decision was to determine the course of my engineering career and eventually my whole world view because symbolic logic is the heart of computer design. In 1960 I attended my first computer conference in San Francisco wherein the great excitement was focused upon the idea of AI (Artificial Intelligence). That is to say, the excitement revolved around the idea that humans could design and build computers that might adequately emulate human intelligence. Western society has long been under the assumption that human reason is disembodied and abstract. That is to say, that reasoning is distinct from perception and the body; furthermore reasoning is free from all the mechanisms of imagination, and is considered by many philosophers, psychologists, and others that reasoning fits the model of formal deductive logic: “Reason is the mechanical manipulation of abstract symbols which are meaningless in themselves, but can be given meaning by virtue of their capacity to refer to things either in the actual world or in possible states of the world.” Because the digital computer works through the process of symbol manipulation it can easily be understood as a partial model of reality. Many have taken to the understanding that the computer is essentially a symbol manipulation machine just like the brain. ‘Mind as computer’ is a commonly accepted metaphor by science as well as the culture in general. Our common world view, i.e. our classical view of categories, is that things are categorized on the basis of what they have in common. Dogs and trees belong in their particular category because of essential characteristics of dogginess or treeness that we can through conscious observation determine. Such a classical view is not entirely wrong; however, it plays only a small part in our comprehension of our world. “In recent years it has become clear that categorization is far more complex than that. A new theory of categorization, called prototype theory has emerged. It shows that human categorization is based on principles that extend far beyond those envisioned in the classical theory.” Quotes from Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind by George Lakoff
Let us look what the dictionary defines "reason" as... Middle English resoun, from Anglo-French raisun, from Latin ration-, ratio reason, computation, from reri to calculate, think; probably akin to Gothic rathjo account, explanation Date: 13th century 1 a: a statement offered in explanation or justification <gave reasons that were quite satisfactory> b: a rational ground or motive <a good reason to act soon> c: a sufficient ground of explanation or of logical defense ; especially : something (as a principle or law) that supports a conclusion or explains a fact <the reasons behind her client's action> d: the thing that makes some fact intelligible : cause <the reason for earthquakes> <the real reason why he wanted me to stay — Graham Greene> 2 a (1): the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking especially in orderly rational ways : intelligence (2): proper exercise of the mind (3): sanity b: the sum of the intellectual
Mmm... well, I wouldn't say mind is a computer. A computer runs on cold hardware, whereas there is no localization of the mind to any particular matter in the brain. You might want to read up on Libets work on consciousness, where conscious knowledge is processed before any material entropy has arisen in the brain. So what would this tell us about the nature of thought, and the current belief that consciousness is a totally material phenom?
The "mind as computer" metaphor has indeed been a very influential idea in Cognitive Science and in the broader culture. Of course, there have been several notable failures of this view, most clearly in the field of AI, which has failed to deliver on its early promise. Also, 20+ years of Connectionism and, more recently, Dynamical Systems approaches to cognition have raised serious questions about such abstracted, symbolic approaches to mind. Moreover, the close marriage between experimental cognitive psychology and the neurosciences has brought the question of how complex cognitive processes arise from the neurodynamical processes at work in the brain to center stage. Also, with respect to Libet's work, what he showed (or claimed to show) was that neural activity related to the performance of some volitional act preceded the subject's own awareness of their intention to act. That is, so called "volitional" acts appear to be generated through largely unconscious neural processes, which later get tagged as having been consciously generated. This is clearly different than conscious knowledge being "...processed before any material entropy has arisen in the brain," which, as gluon seems to imply, suggests that consciousness, volition, thinking, and so forth, may not rely on material processes (i.e., brain activity). Again, subjective awareness of the intention to act occurred AFTER the brain activity that generated the action. Awareness did not arise through some non-material means.
