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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The Origin of Categories The 18th century
German philosopher Immanuel Kantheld that experience is
possible only if we have knowledge, and knowledge evolves from concepts. Some
concepts must therefore be native. We must be born with an infrastructure that
allows us to learn concepts and to build concepts on top of concepts. Chomskyproved something similar for
language: that human brains are designed to acquire a language, that they
contain a "universal grammar" ready to adopt the specific grammar of
whatever language we are exposed to. We speak because our brain is meant to
speak. Kant, in a sense, stated the same principle for thinking in general: we
think in concepts because we are meant to think in concepts. Our mind creates
categories because it is equipped with some native categories and a mechanism
to build categories on top of existing categories. Just like Chomskysaid that grammar is innate and
universal, so one can claim that some concepts are innate and universal. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Memory" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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