There is an interesting article in The Atlantic on Mind and Technological Innovations.
‘One cannot help noting immediately that the theory echoes Kurzweil’s professional achievements as an inventor of word recognition machines: the “secret of human thought” is pattern recognition, as it is implemented in the hardware of the brain. To create a mind therefore we need to create a machine that recognizes patterns, such as letters and words. …
The process of recognition, which involves the firing of neurons in response to stimuli from the world, will typically include weightings of various features, as well as a lowering of response thresholds for probable constituents of the pattern. Thus some features will be more important than others to the recognizer, while the probability of recognizing a presented shape as an “E” will be higher if it occurs after “APPL.”
These recognizers will therefore be “intelligent,” able to anticipate and correct for poverty and distortion in the stimulus. This process mirrors our human ability to recognize a face, say, when in shadow or partially occluded or drawn in caricature.”
When we need the Mind to recognize patterns to perceive and be understood, we can say that while being studied becomes an Object of the Observed.
The Observer is some thing else.
The Mind is able to observe thoughts and There is something else that observes the Mind as well.
Indian Philosophy classifies three things in respect of Mind.
Brain,the activity of which leads to the
Mind, Buddhi, The Discriminator.
Chitha, the dispositions( not the predispositions of Indian Philosophy, which means Vasanas or tendencies acquired over years including the previous Births).
The Observer is different from the Observed at the mundane or Transitory world.
To recognize an Object as the object, for that matter as an Object, Recognition is required.
Recognition is possible only when there is Data stored already.
For instance, to recognize a Rose as a Rose, at the first instance, we need some one to describe it .
But extend the logic.
How a Rose would have have been identified as such for the First Human Being as such when there were none around?
This calls for apriori Knowledge.(Knowledge that is innate.
This is the foundation of Idealism of Philosophy. whic h has been explained by Rene Descartes in His Books Principia philosophiae (Principles of Philosophy),Regulae ad directionem ingenii (Rules for the Direction of the Mind)’
Mind lets us know what it wants us to know.
As Nature does.
“[H]omunculus talk can give rise to the illusion that one is nearer to accounting for the mind, properly so-called, than one really is. If neural clumps can be characterized in psychological terms, then it looks as if we are in the right conceptual ballpark when trying to explain genuine mental phenomena–such as the recognition of words and faces by perceiving conscious subjects. But if we strip our theoretical language of psychological content, restricting ourselves to the physics and chemistry of cells, we are far from accounting for the mental phenomena we wish to explain. An army of homunculi all recognizing patterns, talking to each other, and having expectations might provide a foundation for whole-person pattern recognition; but electrochemical interactions across cell membranes are a far cry from actually consciously seeing something as the letter “A.” How do we get from pure chemistry to full-blown psychology?
McGinn goes on:
Why do we say that telephone lines convey information? Not because they are intrinsically informational, but because conscious subjects are at either end of them, exchanging information in the ordinary sense. Without the conscious subjects and their informational states, wires and neurons would not warrant being described in informational terms.
The mistake is to suppose that wires and neurons are homunculi that somehow mimic human subjects in their information-processing powers; instead they are simply the causal background to genuinely informational transactions.
Related articles
- Memory Is…… Yoga Sutra 1.11 (ramanan50.wordpress.com)
- Identify The Tools of The Mind Patanjali Yoga Sutra 6 (ramanan50.wordpress.com)
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