2022-10-03, 10:07 PM
Chomsky on consciousness
See also this commentary by Feser
Quote:Noam Chomsky is an intellectual giant, who has made major contributions to linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science. In this episode Keith and Philip will explore Professor Chomsky's views on consciousness and the mind.
See also this commentary by Feser
Quote:...For rules always have an explicit content that must be understood before one can apply them. And to appeal to further rules in order to determine the interpretation of the first set just raises the problem again at a higher level, which threatens a vicious regress. (See e.g. the discussion of rule-following beginning at p. 174 of Dreyfus’s book What Computers Still Can’t Do.)
Moreover, Dreyfus points out, this computationalist model is an inheritance from the post-Cartesian approach to scientific explanation, according to which explaining a physical event involves identifying the laws by which it follows of necessity from antecedent events, in a manner that might be modeled by a machine. But this mechanistic model only works when we abstract out of it anything that smacks of the psychological – consciousness, intentionality, and so on. (This is precisely why Descartes had to relocate consciousness out of the material world and in a separate res cogitans, as Chomsky himself emphasizes later in the discussion with Goff and Frankish.) ...
Quote:...Gravitation seemed as “occult” as anything the medieval Aristotelians talked about. Newton’s work was nevertheless accepted because of the tremendous predictive success afforded by its mathematical representation of nature. Newtonian physics did not truly explain the phenomena with which it dealt, but carried the day because it described them so well.
In the history of physics after Newton, Chomsky says, the prevailing attitude came to be that anything was acceptable if it could be given a precise mathematical expression. The predictive success of such mathematical theories is what mattered, and the metaphysical question about explaining why things worked in the way the mathematics described receded into the background. For practical purposes, “matter” came to be treated as just whatever accepted physical theories happen to say about it. But, Chomsky notes, as early twentieth-century thinkers like Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington pointed out, physical theory actually tells us very little about what matter is actually like. It gives us only mathematical structure and is silent about what fleshes out that structure...