I was thinking about coming up with a unifying theme for the history of mind and the history of computation and the term "emergence" seemed appropriate for both. However, my imagination took the wrong off ramp as it often does and I started visualizing the physical emergence of man as it would be seen by a Man from Mars. He would discover evidence of termites or algae not just by finding the "organism" but by discovering their impact, constructions and byproducts. Even if time had erased all direct evidence of human organisms, there would be no problem discovering Man, just as we discovered dinosaurs. There is a link between this view and the problem we have fining boundaries for "mind". I think that "mind" cannot be seen as "emergent" in one organism but something that happens in a society of organisms, especially in their language or technology. Similarly, what an organism is - what counts as species for all other living things - is ...

This talk introduces a recent book by Dennett, rehashing and updating his theories on the mind. I have the hard copy of the book on order. These comments refer to his summary of it delivered as part of the Google Talks series. It is much to Dennett's credit that, as he goes along, his ideas become more precise and articulate. His examples are more apt, his analogies closer to the "essence". He never seems to say, "I was totally wrong about this", but he does make progress - partly by not taking himself too seriously. It is much to Dennett's credit that he is rarely caught in an "argument" -- he sees an element of truth in almost everything, always putting his own ideas on the table without allowing opposition to get personal. This is good because he gets a lot of opposition. " Consciousness Explained " (1991) was a serious over-reach. Rather a mess that didn't come close to delivering on the promise in its title. Yet, in the interveni...

This is a series of Massey Lectures , available on-line through the Ideas archive or as a book . The lectures are well-worth reading. Franklin is a deep and original thinker. For the purposes of this blog, her most significant idea is the way that technology turns society into a collection of compliant robots - a specific reference to the "Dragon Theory" idea. How does this work? Technology demands "work" to be parcelled out into steps or specialized components. Each piece of work needs to "fit" with all the others, so "good" work is basically work that tightly complies with specifications. Human qualities of judgment are ruled out. Any identification with the end product is removed. This in what Marx called "alienation". But Marx traced alienation to the fact that the worker no longer owned the means of production or the product of his labour. Perhaps the deeper reality was the switch to mass production, centralized because the power s...

Dennett's "Intuition Pumps" has inspired me, at last, to write a book. Maybe. I'd call it "Better Intuition Pumps" (BIP). Dennett's book is a lovely "intuition pump" in its own right, but it cries out to be rewritten, refuted or at least challenged. In other posts, I'll flesh out possible chapters in BIP, but I can outline some main points here. Dennet champions as "Scientific" discipline for the study of mind, which he calls heterophenomenology  "H". The idea is that anything important about the mind can be learned from the "outside", through experiments, interviews etc.  The data "H" works with is the set of observable, documented "observations" along these lines. My problem with H is that it doesn't actually study the mind. Dennett is making the assumption that the mind is , for all intents and purposes, the brain. But one would think this is exactly what he needs to prove. "Pump...

Laughlin's " A Different Universe " provides a sweeping re-examination of the idea of "emergence", along with a telling criticism of the doctrine of reductionism.   Although I'm not sure Daniel Dennett would admit it, he's a poster child of reductionism. He basically claims that the "mind" can be completely understood by examining a subject (i.e., the brain of the subject) from the "outside". The mind is "nothing more" than the activity of neurons in the brain. Opposed to this view is the idea of emergence: that a system of "simple" components can spontaneously reorganize itself into something new, specifically something with properties and behavour that cannot be derived, even in principal, from laws governing the components. That's Laughlin. Laughlin's book is a bit of a disorganized mess, but it's possible to glean some very important ideas from it. He makes some powerful general observations about t...