You might also want to look at John von Neuman’s little 1958 book on The Computer and the Brain. Don’t let the ancient publication date fool you. It’s an insightful discussion of what’s required to get physical matter to perform computations.

And then there’s my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. I’d say the most important thing in that book is the argument I make in chapters 2, 3, and 4, about how music is fundamentally a collective process among different people. I make that argument at the neural level, using the neuroscience of Walter Freeman and some stuff on coupled oscillation (fireflies and handclapping). There is a chapter on the evolution of music, though it’s not on the EP line.

I fear I can’t give you direct reading material (non-blog at least, since I do have a blog) as I assembled this over the years. Except for the usual – and already named – suspects there’s Kyburg, Eddington and Grice (for technical stuff), Quine & Davidson (for all of the theory), Habermas (links to morality), Gibson & Bergson as inspirations, works on bounded (or what’s it called,) rationality I guess and much more. The peak of modular computational model is fairly recent and although being abandoned I don’t know of an individual that has undone it and put something alternative in place.

Anyway, hope you weren’t ironic, if you are really interested, I can send you my stuff.

Both of you are making exceedingly interesting arguments. Any recommendations for non-blog reading on these questions?

I’m hard-core: I don’t even buy analog ‘processing’ as it still would entail something in the head that’s somehow directly representing something outside of it. It’s tempting, & I’m sure to cover ground we need to revert to that way of speaking, but it’s wrong (and not innocently wrong in an academic way but really damagingly wrong day-to-day – an example of which is the EP-stuff and sexism with which this started).

My inspiration was with Gibson – for anything sophisticated one just cannot isolate the process of perceiving from the activity of perceiving (sorry, too hermetic).

The interesting bit really is to discover how with such limited means ( i.e. association, correlation and vocalization) we have gotten to the incredibly expressive languages & how there is no limit to the creativity that can be expressed in it – not even the limit of recursion. It should not remain a miracle or just a Bergsonion drive. That’s where I’ve tried to study, before the reality of keeping my current standard of wealth for the kids kicked in and I had to start frequenting blogs ;-)

I’m sure the next Darwin will be the one cracking the cognitive science mess.

Sorry for misspelling your name before. (But then, ya know, all lymies look alike to me). But I fail to grasp what intelligible points you making in the nits you pick. 1. The definition of “concept” is deliberately minimal, even privative, aimed at how concepts might be physically instantiated, therefor possibly innate, but also acquired through behavioral learning. 2. just reminds me of Strawson famously declaring Kant guilty of a “non sequitur of numbing grossness”, when Strawson plainly mis-read Kant. Temporal succession, at any rate, would not plainly count as a sense percept, would it. 3. Well, percepts are events/tokens, except that they require categorization/memory to occur, and hence must have already occurred. I didn’t invent that paradox; it’s just there. Concepts are clearly tokens, hence repeatable. Any structuring of percepts, innately or behaviorally, tends to yield “concepts”. But then it’s a standard saw that any system needs to “de-paradoxicalize” itself, if it is to at all get going. And I have know idea how a relation could be an object of perception. That sounds like the sort of “philosophy of mind” that old Ludwig was attempting to undo. One doesn’t, e.g., perceive one’s self or one’s own thoughts: that’s just a mis-use of the word/concept “perceive”.

Digital means operating and processing “information” through discrete units, such as phoneme-and-morphemes, or numbers. Analog means operating and processing “information” without units and yes/no, either/or decisions, just a continuum of more or less, similar or different, like a wave function. (And it’s very tempting to talk of neural processing by means of a wave metaphor or analogy).

But then I have no idea what, if any, position your arguing for. If we’re arguing over a dead parrot, then who bought it?

For the rest JoB has straighted out any dispute about “computation”.

Anyway I now have absolutely no idea what this waiter is supposed to symbolise, in relation to this ‘knock-down’ business or otherwise. A dead parrot reference would be more appropriate here I think.

The idea of the modular mind with innate modules adapted to specifically human skills such as language, deductive reasoning and morality has dominated cognitive science for some time – an excellent book was written by Jerry Fodor (where he explicitly makes the link with phrenology by the way whence one can link back to the original topic of the thread). Chomsky, Pinker, and many others here referenced joined in that discussion. Modularity and computationalism – not the analog variant if you insist to use the word computation for this – are intimately connected, as is the notion of the brain as an information-processing device, a computer. The link with EP is also intricate because, wrong as I think they are, they were honest people and needed to have a plausible account of how these modules could have been perfected for such specific needs.

This consensus has been attacked from two sides.

It has been attacked by denying the central tenet of modularism and computationalism: ‘there is lack of information in our childhood phase to account for the exceptional human competences of children & adults; hence there has to be a specific genetic predisposition’. The attack centers on (see John above) the ability to account for the emergence of these competences by a cultural (and basically learned and therefore non-discriminative) progression making use of only a basic number of functions (concepts, categories, association, probabilistic trends and vocalization of words) that are (except the latter) not unique to the human race. Advances in neural networks, or analog computers if you insist, have made this claim very plausible.

The other attack is on the consistency of the idea itself. It basically is an argument against some kind of dualism which is unavoidable in the computational view. In essence it isn’t very far from what somebody like Dennett says on the matter (and where he is endebted to a scientific outcast by the name of Julian Jaynes). But the real work has been done by Quine & Davidson on the real irreducibility of language to a single individual or a single brain; on the inconsistency of what we understand to be expressible in a definitive way without interaction. By the way, progress of AI is mostly in the direction of creating modules that ‘learn’ from each other; not in programming, not even with large assistant neural networks, specific functions emulating the external powers of reasoning of human beings.

(I don’t imagine for a moment that I was a good waiter here. I’m not in the knock-down business)

Analog computation is a perfectly coherent notion, as is digitical pattern matching.

BB re: ‘The ball hit Fred with the bat’ – Did Newton or Einstein assign agency to inanimate objects?
Not AFAIK unless it featured in Newton’s mystical alchemy. Perhaps stretching proper usage a bit, I was allowing ‘hit with’ as an agency-neutral ‘impacted via’. Thinking equal-and-opposite reactions/Relativity.

JH -
To revisit #47: A “concept” would be any relation between percepts that is not itself a percept:
But this 1. is too idiosyncratic to be recognisable as a conception of the concept |concept| – hence stipulation-quotes I suppose; 2. Would entail that, say, percept a’s occurring earlier than percept b counts as a concept; 3. Seems to refer to percept tokens rather than types, so leaves concepts (or “concepts”) unrepeatable. And re: there’s no redundancy in the relative clause – so a relation between percepts might itself be a percept (rather than at best an object of perception)? If you would say I’m reading too literally, I’d say you’re not writing literally enough.

On which subject, digitalization and recombination of initially analog vocalization signals sounds pretty metaphorical to me. What digits? A no-less-apt metaphor might be the move from base 1 (like Roman numerals 1-3) to some higher base.

Darwin having solved these issues once and for all
Not those issues – just the one about all chickens coming from eggs but not vice versa. (Or if you stipulate ‘egg’= ‘chicken’s egg’, only vice versa.) It does seem to me odd that no-one seems to have pointed this out as a genuine achievement of Darwin’s theory – nor indeed as a mere curiosity or anything else.

A navel full of coarsely chopped logic really sets you up for the day, I find. Or, the fourth ‘S’ of the morning routine – semantics.

Different time zones, no doubt, but…

No, there’s no redundancy in the relative clause; it was plain English, and an organism can respond sequentially to different percepts, -(too hot, too cold),- without the imputation of any relation between percepts, whether innate, acquired, or directively learned.

As to “who says”, I’m following Gerald Edelman’s neural theory, with my own convolutions or elaborations, in the first part, Arnold Gehlen’s ,- yes, another ex-Nazi,- in the concluding coda about the organic insufficiency/plasticity of “human nature” requiring cultural structuration.

As to the analytic/digital distinction, it’s no “metaphor” and I’m sorry if it doesn’t accord with your mere taste. But, it’s basic, among other matters, to general systems theory, which most especially was developed to deal with the modeling of biological organisms, though it’s, by no means, a simple distinction, as the establishment of a boundary, which must occur for a system/environment relation to take hold, let alone any internal differentiation within a system, always involves a digitalization of that boundary. But I’ll state, quite dogmatically, that brains/neuro-physiological systems must be primarily analog pattern-matching systems rather than digital computational devices for good biological/evolutionary reasons.

And I have no idea what you might mean by Darwin having solved these issues once and for all, as if he had conceived of them within his particular quest/problematic entirely. At any rate, the main burden of my comment/post is that there is a large middle ground between biologically innate/genetically pre-determined and entirely open-ended/environmentally “determined”, and most of the realistic answers would likely be found, though variously distributed, within that “excluded middle”, which mistaken framings of the issues construct. I might as well say that Whitehead’s “reform” of focusing on processes rather than substances resolved the mind/body problem once and for all, though I think it was a constructive suggestion. At any rate, even within a post-Darwinian, evolutionary perspective, the appeal to 17th century rationalist “innate” ideas, as per Descartes, Leibniz, and those Cambridge Platonists that Chomsky was so enamoured of, as equated with biologically innate causal processes, would hardly suffice, as the causal explanation of a capacity doesn’t forthwith translate into a causal determination of that same capacity, by plain logic, though it might entail structural constraints or limits on that capacity. You’d think that a step-wise approach to causal explanations, as implied by a “Darwinian” evolutionary approach, might at least hint at why more generalized, less narrowly determined capacities emerge. And at why natural language might imply a semantic “explosion”, as compared with a strictly biologically self-enclosed semantic capacity.

‘The ball hit Fred with the bat’.

Did Newton or Einstein assign agency to inanimate objects? The physics wouldn’t require it I wouldn’t think.

What I meant was that in languages without category markers, you could infer from the fact that certain combinations were or weren’t permitted by convention that there was some such category – in the same way as you would initially infer the meaning of a category marker.

On reflection I suppose category markers would only limit the use of metaphor, flights of fancy and (as you suggest) Sci-Fi if they were undetachable – which I unjustifiedly assumed they would be.

Given the addition of ‘the’,’the’ and ‘with’, Newton (or maybe Einstein) might be happy enough with ‘The ball hit Fred with the bat’.

That’s what conventions of word order the markers are for. I genuinely can’t work out what this should say. I’m guessing ‘the’ should be ‘and’.

Anyway that’s enough hijacking for one night.