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"
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Representation The British psychologist
Kenneth Craik speculated in 1943 that the human mind may be a particular type of
machine which is capable of building internal models of the world (representing
knowledge) and of processing them to produce action (making inferences). Craik's improvement over Descartes' automaton (limited to mechanical reactions to external stimuli) was
considerable because it involved the ideas of an "internal
representation" and a "symbolic processing" of such
representation. Descartes' automaton
had no need for knowledge and inference. Craik's automaton needs knowledge and
inference. It is the inferential processing of knowledge that yields
intelligence. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Cognition: A General Property of Matter " | Back to the index of all chapters |
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