🚀 go-pugleaf

>>Even apart from the typo, this is just silly.  Presumably we're all
>>functionalists about car engines (to be a car engine is to be something
>>that plays the appropriate sort of causal role in a car), but you can
>>find out an awful lot about engines by looking under the hood.
>>
>It may, but it needn't, is the point. I may have overstated the case,
>but I was trying to distinguish type-identity theory from the
>token-identity theory for someone who apparently hadn't heard the
>news.

>-- 
>Christopher D. Green                christo@psych.toronto.edu
>Psychology Department               cgreen@lake.scar.utoronto.ca
>University of Toronto
>Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1

This is off on a slight tangent, but isn't it true that you find out a lot
about a car engine by looking under the hood only if you have some idea of
what the silly thing (the engine) is supposed to do in the first place. I would
imagine that if one presented a car at an art show to a group of people who
had never seen a car nor anything similar, a good hard look on their part 
would produce substantially different perceptions than would arise with 
someone who owned a car.
	It seems to me that filtering out the data from the noise requires that
one know what to look for and have a number of presuppositions about what is 
going to turn up. In the case of the brian / mind question, if we are looking
at neural activation vectors to determine the mental state of an individual,
we are going to have to know what sort of phenomena to pay attention to,  look 
for, as otherwise we will be be faced with ten or perhaps a hundred billion 
bits of information at any given time, most of which probably have little or 
nothing to do with whatever it is we are interested in. As such, to study a 
a pattern of activation, we have to start with some sort of physical or 
behavioral evidense and then study the neural correlates of those pattens.
	Upon a quick rereading, I realize that this is more of a tangent than
I had originally intended. Ah well. A quick swipe at eliminative materialism
can be a good thing too....


Loren Frank
frankl@carleton.edu