It may be that because how the brain evolved representations might be too diffusely encoded to be reverse engineered, but that is a contingent biological fact rather than a philosophical difficulty.
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Replying to @robamacl @Meaningness and
I understand, re your parable of the pebbles, that representation is a relationship between the thing with behavior and the world, which has to be actively maintained.
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Replying to @robamacl @Meaningness and
This is very similar to Dennet's recent use of "aboutness" in his last book (which I have not finished). This is perhaps a less loaded term than representation.
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Replying to @robamacl @Meaningness and
I also understand that what we might call strong representationism form AI circa '80 did not pan out. This is is idea that we can "represent the world" in logic or whatever, then we can represent what we want to happen, and run SAT solver or whatever and get useful behavior.
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Replying to @robamacl @Meaningness and
This failure is unsurprising in hindsight. One clue is that this clearly is not how relatively simple organisms such as flatworms generate behavior.
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Replying to @robamacl @Meaningness and
I'd say that at least one thing I mean by representation is that it causally mediates mediates behavior. If I change the state of the representation, then the behavior will change.
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Replying to @robamacl @Meaningness and
So, we might say the position of the bimetal strip in a (old) thermostat resents the temperature. If I push on the strip, I can change that and make the furnace go on.
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Replying to @robamacl @Meaningness and
Likewise, if someone stole a stone from the shepard's basket, his behavior would change. But no such effect from the stones the passing girl has.
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Replying to @robamacl @OortCloudAtlas and
Well, this was the main topic of philosophy of mind in the 80s, and I think it’s reasonably fair to say that it ended with everyone giving up and moving on. Dennet was one major player. The problems are hairy and not easily summarized.
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Replying to @Meaningness @OortCloudAtlas and
Yeah, that's why I was asking if there was any book, ideally one that doesn't spend too much time explaining things I do understand in weird philosophical ways. Not too keen on reading Heidegger, and think I understand the high order bits of that anyway.
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When an intellectual movement fails, usually everyone is too burned out and disgusted to write up what went wrong, which means that the lessons are not available to subsequent generations, who make the same mistakes again.
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Replying to @Meaningness @robamacl and
This happened with logical positivism, and JUST as it collapsed in the 50s, cognitive science got started, and recapitulated all its mistakes, and when it collapsed around 1990, no one wrote it up, so cognitive neuroscience did round 3 of the same starting just around then.
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Replying to @Meaningness @robamacl and
Part I of The Eggplant tries to go through all the ways these movements made the same mistakes, which is super tedious, which is why no one has ever bothered to do it before.
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