Former neuroscientist here. It's indicative that this was written in the 80's. Brain/mind scientists have always adopted the science/technology of their time a

Former neuroscientist here. It's indicative that this was written in the 80's. Brain/mind scientists have always adopted the science/technology of their time as analogies, for better or worse. (Think of Freud's "pressures" and "venting" in the era of the steam engine.) The first cognitive scientists were borrowing from then-nascent computers and casting brains as information-processing modules. Unfortunately, this particular essay does a poor job of showing that cognitive science is as unsound as "domestic science". The value of an analogy or model is in its explanatory power, and cognitive science did not do too badly there. E.g., the hierarchy of the visual system: as it passes from one module to the next, retinal input gets turned into lines, line junctions get turned into corners, edges are combined into shapes, etc. One virtue is that, like any sequential process, this explains why damage in an earlier area stops later processing; if you damage V1, the later color area has no information to work with. (You can imagine an alternative where every visual area receives all retinal input, so you'd lose the ability to see lines/edges, but not colors.) The author seems to be writing a much larger treatise on our mistaken theories of the nature of mind, but this particular essay is unconvincing.