Robert Owen wrote,
<rowen@technologist.com>
>Not only is there no need to explain mind, there isn't the slightest
>possibility of explaining mind. Tell us what you see when you see
>yourself seeing. Taste you tongue, and smell your nose, and tell
>us about your experience.
Well, Max is teaching the class, so I thought he should say why we need an
explanation. After reading Dennett's _Consciousness Explained_ (which doesn't
explain consciousness), it occurs to me that it's not an explanation the
inquiring mind desires so much as an analogy or metaphor which would allow
building a working model or artificial mind. It's rather like aeronautical
engineers not caring how birds fly, because what we really want is to fly
ourselves. So, we want to explain mind so that we can build one, and so we can
extend and expand our own, and so we can transcend mind, and so we can play
chess with an artificial one, and so on.
--J. R.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:04:35 MDT