It is often said that the mind is to the brain what digestion is to the stomach, or the mind is what the brain does. This is not true.
The stomach digests, or it breaks down food into usable energy.
The mind uses the brain to enact its desires and the mind translates the sense-data that the body encounters into feelings and images.
I’m not going to focus on all the aspects of the mind rather there is one aspect that I want to draw attention to that few people thing of. It seems that Gilbert Ryle and the behaviorists never thought of this. They saw pains and pleasures as pure input and behaviors as pure output. Sense-data goes into the brain and the brain spits out behaviors in the exact same way that food goes into the stomach and the stomach spits out waste and energy. Bear in the mind that the following deductions are not 100% valid. I write them out first, then I later make them more valid, but it sometimes takes two hours to do just one 5 step deduction.
The categorization of objects is not algorithmic
The mind categorizes objects.
Therefore the mind does not operate in an algorithmic fashion.
If the mind does not operate in an algorithmic fashion, then it is not deterministic.
Let me explain what I mean by algorithmic. Algorithmic means for every one input, there is one output, though of course two different inputs can have the same output.
The number of different possible objects is infinite.
An algorithm for an infinite number of objects is infinite.
Humans are finite.
Therefore, humans cannot use an algorithm to categorize objects.
One might also posit that it takes an infinite amount of time to use an infinitely long algorithm. Just about everyone believes that what you put in your body affects your mind, just drink a beer for evidence of that. But not everyone believes that the mind affects your body, or that the mind moves your body.
Putting objects into categories causes your body to move, for example, you move differently depending on if you categorize an object as harmful or not.
The mind puts objects into categories.
Therefore the mind causes your body to move.
I now want to prove that the mind is not a collection of fermions or objects.
The laws of nature apply to a variety of objects.
That which applies to a variety of objects is not itself an object.
That which is not itself an object is not observable.
In plain English, laws are hidden. They affect objects but we do not literally see gravity, we only see its affects. Gravity most likely is the result of the graviton but laws which operate on gravitons are hidden. It’s the same with the mind:
That which applies to a variety of objects is not itself an object.
That which is not itself an object is not observable.
The mind applies to a variety of neurons in the brain.
The function of the stomach is to assimilate what it encounters into usable components (nutrients).
The function of the mind is to assimilate what it encounters into usable components (associations).
That is not a stipulation or requirement for an algorithm. An algorithm is merely a particular process involving a beginning and an end. For that assertion to be true, “one input” would have to include all inputs at any one moment as well as any memory elements involved. What you are probably trying to say is that “for any equal input there will always be an equal output, equal in => equal out”. When considering all actual inputs (including memory), that statement is true by definition because an input is defined merely by whatever can change the output.
I think that falls into the category of “so what?”
Your mind seems to have one particular logic oriented algorithm down very well, yet is missing another almost entirely. Make sure that your premises are absolutely irrefutably correct. It isn’t easy, but without it, every logic syllogism you make is only as accurate as the premises upon which you have presumptively founded it.
I don’t think Ryle ever said this, and given he was strongly influenced by phenomenology, it seems an unlikely stance for him to take. Ryle looked at the use of language to talk about the mind, not the nature of mind itself. Have you read The Concept of Mind? Perhaps I was misled by your mentioning him, but your post doesn’t really address the points he makes.
I also think you misunderstand algorithms. An algorithm can act on an infinite range of inputs - very many common, simple, non-infinite mathematical algorithms work on any number you care to give it. There’s no “one input → one output” definitional restriction algorithms. It’s a calculation procedure, that’s all.
Redness applies to many objects, of which we say they are red. Is redness not observable?
Redness can be categorized by a properly algorithmic mind as an object.
I gave him the grace of allowing any possible physical identity to be in the “object” category.
It’s a “thang”.
What you’re talking about with “equal” is just redundant. I think what you mean by equal is identical. Philosophers distinguish between qualitative identity and numerical identity. Here we mean qualitative identity. If two inputs are not identical then that is a different input and for a different input there will usually, but not always, be a different output. But I like the way you read each premise and write true or false. It seems that with most amateur philosophers they really don’t engage with what you write.
Let me explain better what I mean because I guess those words are not very precise. It is true that you can put an infinite number of inputs into an algorithm and it will spit out outputs forever provided conditions stay the same. But those inputs have to be classified into a finite set of types. Our universe however is composed of an infinite step of categories. It has a finite number of atoms, 10^80, but you can categorize those collection of atoms in an infinite number of ways. You can’t write up a list of an infinite set of categories.
To make this debate less abstract let’s discuss a real life example, Watson, the IBM Jeopardy computer. You can ask it an infinite number of questions and it will categorize these questions properly a certain percentage of the time. I don’t know what that percentage is. It can do this because I think it has about 4 terrabites of data, that’s 10^12 bites (humans have 10^10 neurons, and 10^14 synapses). What Watson cannot do however is produce its own data. It cannot handle new information. In 100 years the large majority of that data will not help it categorize objects. Just ask Watson in 10 years who won the 2016 election and it will not know. It has to be fed that information by a human. Without free will Watson is severely limited in its ability to categorize objects.
Let’s grant however that Watson is daily fed with new information, what are its limitations? It has to be told how to categorize information. We now have a problem of infinite regress.
A can categorize objects because it was told how to categorize by B
B can categorize objects because it was told how to categorize by C
C can categorize objects because it was told how to categorize by D
There was a time on Earth when no one could categorize.
Therefore, there must be a being that can categorize without being told how to categorize.
That first being that could categorize is not doing it with the aid of an algorithm.
If the mind is unobservable and if it controls the body, then that refutes physicalism which is the dominant philosophy of our time, even though I would assert that a lot of physicalists call themselves physicalists but are really dualist. According to the Chalmers survey I think 57% of philosophers are physicalists and 25% are non-physicalists, the rest are something else.
Like I said it takes about two hours to write out a valid and hopefully sound argument in standard form. It’s not easy. These are rough drafts, I polish them up later. Try it yourself and tell me how hard it is.
Any fixed process is a fixed algorithm. An algorithm is merely a process. Every living thing is made of processes (and if you want to get extremely exact, everything spec of matter is a process as well, just unobservable).
An Electroencephalogram displays the activity of “the functioning of the brain”, thus obviously that functioning is physical.
Could you slow down? Here, you merely posit that the mind is indeed an entity. But nowhere do i see an argument for that. You’re just off to the races, telling us what the mind does. You are trying to counter the claim that the mind is in some way the result of brain activity (which is the claim that I would, have and do make, btw). But you never claim that brains do not exist. Just about eveyone will agree that brains exist - so that’s not controversial.
What is controversial is that minds exist in some literal way. Where is your case for this? I’m not sure what it matters what minds do if they don’t exist.
A process is merely the changing of a situation. An entropic process is the changing from more orderly to less orderly. An expansion process is is the increasing of volume. A sorting processes is relocating items. The input is the initial state and the output is the final state.
A particular algorithm is merely a particular order of processing such as, “first do this then do that then…”
Physical is anything that could be measured. Physicality is merely the affecting of things. If something isn’t affecting anything, it isn’t physical. If it is affecting anything, then it is physical. The universe is made strictly of the affecting, “affect upon affect”.
I prefer Kyle. I guess I should have chosen a screenname like that.
Could you slow down? Here, you merely posit that the mind is indeed an entity. But nowhere do i see an argument for that. You’re just off to the races, telling us what the mind does.
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I share your frustration. Too often philosophers jump right in to their own private universe and assume that everyone understands the meaning of the words they use. For this reason I have written a 10,000 word essay which sums up what I believe to be the most basic units of the universe and lays out the definition of all the words I need to answer the key paradoxes of our time. I think I’m just going to go ahead and post that.
So given that our ability to notice (effects) seems to be expanding and is certainly officially considered to be expanding, we don’t know, for example, how much of mind we can notice from the ‘outside’ with our devices, senses and anything else one believes on can notice with. Perhaps what can be noticed is a mere squiggly, distant outline in the desert of the man walking towards us.
Smaller? They might be much larger, especially for the mind in question. I was making two points in my first post. One about the inappropriateness of the word physical. Your definition is a good one, but another word should be used, one without that one’s metaphysical bagagge. The other point was around what we do not know about what or how much we can observe of another’s mind - via current science at least. Remote viewing - used here as an near literal metaphor - is another can of fish.
Less easily measurable given our scientific tools, possibly picked up by direct sensing however. I am not sure that makes something smaller, to be picky about words. Like say when elephants were indeed communicating with infrasound, but the tools we had did not pick this up - and those natives or zoologists who thought there was something going on at a low level were dismissed. Then, later, we did pick up these really rather large sounds. An important ongoing communication was completely missed. In some sense or other it may be small, though the wavelengths would be large, if I am not messing it up, but really, I think the word is misleading. Hence my quibble on the use of smaller.
Why talk about consciousness? I mean, people have caught on to stuff before science and later science confirmed it. Now you may be including this in measuring, human sensing/awareness, but I just want this all to be clear. I doubt EEG’s are picking up very much of what is going on in brains or minds. I think we are still in tip of the iceberg time.
Sure, physical was an adjective to describe a set of things that was nothing like, say, neutrinos, magnetic fields and so on. ‘Measurable’ on the other hand does not have this bagagge. In some sense it is metaphysical, but I would not call it bagage.
Thought I’d share a little tidbit I read recently about the actual neuroscience of categorizations (I know some of you philosophers HATE referring to science, avoid it like the plague, but sometimes science has the best stuff to say about shit, like the mind for example)
OPs discussion of categories is, I think, pretty misled.
Just because there are infinite (not really infinite, just astronomically large) ways to categorize things in the universe, doesn’t mean HUMANS use an infinite amount of categories. It’s a big, big big and, frankly, clearly unjustified leap from “There are infinite possible categories” to “The human mind is infinite.”
There are infinite numbers as well, the human mind doesn’t have to be infinite to understand that, or to use numbers – we know this because finite computers use numbers – so the leap in logic is definitely not justified.