Miles Jackson wrote:
>> Miles Jackson asks:
>>
>>> Consider: what if we learn more and more about human
>>> cognition and we discover it's nothing like
>>> machine output?
>>
>> Then we'll design machines that utilize what we know of
>> human cognition to perform cognitive functions better.
>>
>> Why is there such a tendency to deny that cognitive
>> functions are beyond the eventual reach of a technology that
>> is now scarcely even newborn?
>>
>> Shane Mage
>
> Good point. We'll have to see what happens. Given the fact
> that psychologists--after 100 years of theory and research!--
> have not even come to a consensus on what intelligence is in
> human beings, I guess I'm not expecting rapid advancements.
This can't be done. Defining "thinking" and "cognition" as machine replicable routines leaves out essential features of human thinking and cognition that aren't replicable by a machine.
Whitehead, in pointing out that deduction can't be the main method of "philosophy" (which for him means ontology), makes the main method "direct intuitive observation." This is what Husserl means by "phenomenology," This is the ultimate basis of thinking and cognition.
It requires and is the activity of what Husserl calls a "transcendental subject" i.e. a consciously self-determined being whose consciousness provides direct experience of an external world and whose subjectivity (whose "ego") is able through this consciousness to cognize reality by means of direct intuitive observation.
The being of such a subject is not coherently thinkable as a "machine."
The conception of the latter derives from the scientific materialist ontology that became dominant in the 17th century. It assumes reality to be a set of externally related material entities (i.e. a set of material "substances" in the sense of Aristotle and Descartes) in which self-determination and final causation play no part.
This has no logical space for a transcendental subject and, hence, no logical space for thinking and cognition (in so far as we retain as part of their definition the meaning that they are the conscious activities of a subject). In fact, it has no logical space for consciousness of any kind. Even if consciousness were possible, the conception of consciousness to which the rest of the ontology leads creates an impossible problem for epistemology since the object of this consciousness is not, given the ontology, direct experience of an external world. This problem was elaborated in Hume's skepticism. Its full logical implication (not completely worked out by Hume) is "solipsism of the present moment."
The "argument" that consciousness, thinking and cognition can all be characteristics of a "machine" assumes that being is a machine. All characteristics of being must therefore be characteristics of a machine. Consciousness, thinking and cognition are characteristics of at least one kind of being, human being. They must therefore be characteristics of a machine and there is no ontological barrier to their becoming characteristics of another machine. To eliminate any such barrier, the terms are redefined so as to get rid of those meanings which are inconsistent with the idea of a machine i.e. with the premises of scientific materialism.
Whitehead demonstrates that this still leaves problems of logical incoherence. His main effort, however, is to work out an alternative ontology, an ontology of internal relations so conceived as to be consistent with self-determination and final causation and with transcendental subjectivity. This ontology sublates the positive content of "science" developed on the ontological foundation of scientific materialism. It can, he claims, be grounded in direct intuitive observation once we rid ourselves of the mistaken interpretation of conscious experience in terms of scientific materialism that, since the 17th century, has been mistakenly identified with conscious experience per se.
The essential features of this ontology are also what Marx means by "historical materialism."
Ted