Inquire about purchasing the book | Table of Contents | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind
These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
|
Mediation Over the last few decades,
psychologists have been deeply influenced by the architecture of the computer.
When it appeared, it was immediately apparent that the computer was capable of
performing sophisticated tasks that went beyond mere Arithmetic, although they
were performed by a complex layering of arithmetic sub-tasks. The fact that the
computer architecture was able to achieve so much with so little led to the
belief that the human mind could also be reduced to a rational architecture of
interacting modules and sequential processes of computation. In the second half of the 19th
century, the German physiologist and physicist Hermann Helmholtzpioneered modern thinking about
cognition when he advanced his theory that perception and action were mediated
by a (relatively slow) process in the brain. The "reaction time" of a
human being is high because neural conduction is slow. His studies emphasized
that the stimulus must first be delivered to the brain and the idea of action
must first be delivered to the limbs before anything can occur. Helmholtzthought that humans have no
innate knowledge, that all our knowledge comes from experience. Perceptions are
derived from unconscious inference on sense data: our senses send signals to
the brain, which are interpreted by the brain and then turned by the brain into
knowledge. Perceptions are mere hypotheses on the world, which may well be
wrong (as proven by optical illusions). Perceptions are hypotheses based on our
knowledge. Knowledge is acquired from perceptions. This paradigm became the
"classical" paradigm of cognition. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Cognition: A General Property of Matter " | Back to the index of all chapters |
| 
| 
| 
|
