Maybe I missed it, but you referred a lot to how representationalism doesn't work, but not to *why* it doesn't work. A good summary somewhere?
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Replying to @OortCloudAtlas @SpeakingSubject and
If you are up for reading a book, the “show notes” point at several that are squarely about this. Varela,
@evantthompson, & Rosch’s is probably the most readable! There’s lots of ways of coming at this, and it’s hard to write up in less than a book and more than a phrase.2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes -
Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
In a phrase: what physical properties could a thing-in-your-head have that would make it represent the fact that Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso?
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
By 1990 it became apparent that no answer to that was possible, even in principle. Once you bite that bullet, the whole cognitivist project collapses.
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
Then you can start to think about alternatives. There’s lots of appealing starting points, but so far none of them have led to a generative research program that can regularly crank out concrete substantive results. No “normal science” yet; it’s “pre-paradigm” in Kuhn’s terms.
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
Somewhat relatedly: I find Culadasa’s appeals to cognitive science and/or neuroscience unconvincing and potentially misleading. Very short on details/footnotes; it seems to be a vague rehash of mainly 1980s-era stuff that has been discredited for decades.
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
What do you have in mind in particular?
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Replying to @SpeakingSubject @OortCloudAtlas and
Well… a proper analysis would be a long post and would be interpreted as a nasty attack on a nice person. But, for example, >
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Replying to @Meaningness @SpeakingSubject and
He’s heavily influenced by Minsky’s 1985 _Society of Mind_, which he does cite (p441) although he gets Minsky’s first name wrong :(
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Replying to @Meaningness @SpeakingSubject and
I was a student of Minsky’s. He was a genius, and the book had a huge impact in 1985, but within a few years it was apparent that the theory is unworkable, and no one in cognitive science has taken it seriously since. It’s a fascinating historical curiosity of a dead end.
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Citing a 1982 article on drug hallucinations in the _International Journal of Quantum Chemistry_ is fundamentally unserious. You can get away with that if it’s clear you are trolling, but the rest of his scientific claims don’t convince the reader that it’s is not just ignorant.
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