4 ms·

Kurzweil doesn't believe individual neurons have mental processes. McGinn doesn't believe Kurzweil believes individual neurons have mental processes. It's just

• fmoralesc 14y ago
  On the first point, I think the difference is a quite more subtle. Remember I talked about properties, not processes. Maybe when I said "mental" properties I oversimplified. The model McGinn is criticizing works like this: The mind has mental properties because it is composed of agents (homuniculi) that exhibit a certain kind of mental, or at the very least, not-physical property (non-physical in the sense that they don't belogn to a physical theory). For example, one could try to explain mentality in terms of modules of the brain that are information processing agents. But then, how do we explain "information processing" in those agents? Btw, those agents need not be neurons, it could also be sets of them, of something else (they don't even need to be merely parts of the brain). It's true that McGinn is not very tolerant of Kurzweil loose way of talking, but I think it's because he regards the conceptual issues as quite important. He is a philosopher after all, his standards for accepting bullshit can be quite different. > even talk of “pattern recognition” by neurons is already far too homunculus-like for comfort: people (and animals) recognize patterns—neurons don’t. Neurons simply emit electrical impulses when caused to do so by impinging stimuli; they don’t recognize anything in the literal sense. The paraphrases you propose for Kurzweil's way of talking seem to remove homunculism from it, but maybe only partially. I think that can be McGinn's worry, and the reason he goes agains the idea of "information processing". See: > Even in sober neuroscience textbooks we are routinely told that bits of the brain “process information,” “send signals,” and “receive messages”—as if this were as uncontroversial as electrical and chemical processes occurring in the brain. We need to scrutinize such talk with care. Why exactly is it thought that the brain can be described in these ways? It is a collection of biological cells like any bodily organ, much like the liver or the heart, which are not apt to be described in informational terms. It can hardly be claimed that we have observed information transmission in the brain, as we have observed certain chemicals; this is a purely theoretical description of what is going on. So what is the basis for the theory? And then: > We have discovered that nerve fibers transmit electricity. We have not, in the same way, discovered that they transmit information. We have simply postulated this conclusion by falsely modeling neurons on persons. > ...there is theoretical danger in such loose talk, because it fosters the illusion that we understand how the brain can give rise to the mind. On Kurzweil's book being just pop-sience book: McGinn worries, I think, about the public having a wrong idea of what we really have in terms of our explanations of mentality because theoreticians can have a wrong idea of it. Others might think it enough to propose certain hypothesis as solutions of some sort to those problems. But with that, I've polemicized too much for now, I think.
  • pbw 14y ago
    Kurzweil is pointing at the brain and saying "pattern recognition" the way someone might point at a car and say "combustion". He's asserting this is the core mechanism that makes it go. McGinn instead expects him explain all aspects of thought, including solving the mind-body problem. They are just on completely different pages. Kurzweil is off building a spaceship, McGinn is criticizing the cocktail napkin where he drew the plans.
  • JabavuAdams 14y ago
    You raise some good points, but it's disturbing that McGinn's understanding of basic information-processing ideas is so weak. I thought that philosophers and computer scientists actually talked to one another.
    • fmoralesc 14y ago
      Some do. Hopefully that will happen more often.