The Mechanical Mind pdf

[...]... the world Another thing which a mechanical explanation of the mind must do is give the details of generalisations which describe causal regularities in the mind In other words, a mechanical explanation of the mind is committed to the existence of natural laws of psychology Just as physics finds out about the laws which govern the non-mental world, so psychology finds out about the laws which govern the. .. world, he placed it outside the mechanical universe of matter But many mechanistic philosophers in later centuries could not accept this particular view of Descartes’s, and so they faced their biggest challenge in accounting for the place of the mind in nature The one remaining mystery for the mechanical world picture was the explanation of the mind in mechanical terms As with the mechanical explanation... calling the mechanical view of the mind Representation is thought to be a problem because it is hard to understand how a mere mechanism can represent the world – how states of the mechanism can ‘reach outside’ and direct themselves upon the world The purpose of this introduction is to give more of an idea of what I mean when I talk about the mechanical mind, by outlining the origins of the idea The mechanical. .. that the behaviour of animals could be explained entirely mechanically And as the mechanical world picture developed, the watch, rather than the animal, became a dominant metaphor As Julien de La Mettrie, an eighteenth-century pioneer of the mechanical view of the mind, wrote: the body is but a watch man is but a collection of springs which wind each other up’.3 So it’s not surprising that, until the. .. seems, the ability of organisms to reproduce themselves can be explained, in principle, in chemical terms The organic can be explained in terms of the inorganic 4 Introduction The mind Where did this leave the mind? Though he was perfectly willing to regard animals as mere machines, Descartes did not do the same for the human mind: although he did think that the mind (or soul) has effects in the physical... solve them In broad outline, I try to do two things in this book: first, to explain the philosophical problem of mental representation; and, second, to examine the questions about the mind which arise when attempting to solve this problem in the light of dominant philosophical assumptions Central among these assumptions is the view I call the mechanical mind Roughly, this is the view that the mind. .. that, according to the mechanical world picture, things do what they do not because they are trying to reach their natural place or final end, or because they are obeying the will of God, but, rather, because they are caused to move in certain ways in accordance with the laws of nature In the most general terms, this is what I mean by a mechanical view of nature Of course, the term mechanical was –... woman symbolised life forms rather than chemical elements, that the diagram of the solar system symbolises our part of the universe rather than the shape of the designers of the spacecraft And – perhaps most absurd of all – even if they did figure out what the drawings of the man and woman were, they would have to recognise that the raised hand was a sign of peaceful greeting rather than of aggression, impatience... human beings, the solar system – but the story suggests that there is something puzzling about how they do this For when we imagine ourselves into the position of the aliens, we realise that we can’t tell what these symbols represent just by looking at them No amount of scrutiny of the marks on the plate can reveal that these marks stand for a man, and these marks stand for a woman, and these other marks... one main theme of this book It is one of the central problems of current philosophy of mind And many other philosophical issues cluster around this problem: the place of the mind in nature, the relation between thought and language, the nature of our understanding of one another, the problem of consciousness and the possibility of thinking machines All these issues will be touched on here The aim of . so they faced their biggest challenge in accounting for the place of the mind in nature. The one remaining mystery for the mechani- cal world picture was the explanation of the mind in mechanical. 30 Brentano’s thesis 36 Conclusion: from representation to the mind 40 Further reading 41 2 Understanding thinkers and their thoughts 42 The mind body problem 43 Understanding other minds 47 The causal. is the problem of mental representation: how can the mind represent the world? This problem is the thread that binds the chapters together, and around this thread are woven the other main themes