The Unexplained Intellect: The Importance of Rapport
An analogy may, at this point, be useful, even if the one that I propose — between satisfiable beliefs and colourable maps — can be grasped only by stretching.
Category: Philosophy of Mind
The Unexplained Intellect: Consequences of Imperfection
The previous post argued that Theoretical Computer Science can show things to be naturalistically inexplicable—(where this is much stronger than showing them to be inexplicable with a Classically Computational Theory)—by showing those things to require more time than the universe allows. I’ve not yet said anything about which things might …
The Unexplained Intellect: The Importance of Computability
Theoretical Computer Science has a broader import than its name suggests. To appreciate it, remember what Turing proved: that a certain hypothetical machine would be able to compute every recursively definable function in a finite amount of time. If we supplement that theorem with a plausible assumption about physics then …
The Unexplained Intellect: Computation and The Explanation of Intelligence
A lot of philosophers think that consciousness is what makes the mind/body problem interesting, perhaps because they think that consciousness is the only part of that problem that remains wholly philosophical. Other aspects of the mind are taken to be explicable by scientific means, even if explanatorily adequate theories of …
The Unexplained Intellect: The Mind is Not a Hoard of Sentences
In subsequent posts I’ll focus on The Unexplained Intellect’s main claims. In this one I’ll identify the cause that those claims serve. I’m grateful to the blog’s editor for the opportunity to do this (and to you for reading).
Affective Affordances
In my first post on Monday, I mentioned that emotions have a complex normative dimension and that noncognitive accounts do not pay enough attention to the normativity of emotions. Embodied accounts (as I argued in yesterday’s post) explain quite nicely the central role that internal arousal, bodily postures, and facial …
Embodied Action-Oriented Emotions
In this post I will try to lay out my own account of what emotions are in a nutshell. The claim that emotions are embodied, roughly speaking, is that emotions involve bodily reactions and that these bodily reactions realize, or constitute, a kind of intelligent behavior, or interaction, with the …