Why exactly are we all wasting so much effort here?
This chap is absolutely sure he’s right. I’ve been here a while now and he’s not given an inch to anyone on anything. No minds are going to get changed here, it’s old tedious ground and it’s a waste of time and effort that could be used on new ground that might get interesting...
We could do other stuff too.
On that, why don't you believe in beliefs? That's been something I've never quite understood you saying. And I think it's sort of on topic, or would be if beliefs were qualia (which I am going to assert).
So there's two possibilities. You can help me understand your thinking on beliefs and/or we can disagree on my assertion.
Cool.
Ironically, of course, Dennett would claim that qualia are beliefs, so claiming beliefs are qualia has a neat symmetry to it.
Ok.
The way I see it, there were two cognitive explosions - the first when language developed and the second when we adopted something like Dennett's Intentional Stance, Aristotle's practical syllogism and everyone else's Folk Psychology.
The brain is fucking complicated. Mesolithic man had no chance at all of understanding it. Thus, prediction and explanation through actually understanding the processes leading to behaviour and working through them simply wasn't an option. Any mesolithic theory of mental content, mental function or anything else really is bound to be wrong.
The intentional stance is, without doubt, a theory of content: its putative content is framed in terms of beliefs and desires and assumes that the agent is rational.
Now, we know that brains have content in fact, to some degree, they are content. information is stored across a massively distributed network with literally billions of processing units, the connections between them, the interactions between them, the shape, myelination and recovery times all play a role in processing, remembering, forgetting and so on.
The brain is far from rational in any Cartesian sense - it holds contradictory things as true, it satisfices, it pattern completes, it relies on a vast range of what look like biases but are in fact almost always features not flaws. However, compared to something that is just plain random, it's close enough to rational that treating it as rational is almost always going to pay off and it's certainly going to pay off better than any other strategy available then and (to a lesser degree) now. As the nineteenth century put it: 'the laws of logic are the laws of thought'.
So treating us as rational is rational. Kinda.
Beliefs give themselves away immediately: A belief is a mental state with a distinct truth value that has as its content a proposition which is expressed as a declarative sentence. Beliefs have sod all to do with brains and everything to do with the ever evolving public mind tool language. We are, as Andy Clark puts it, 'natural born cyborgs'. Mesolithic man, when trying to make sense of the brain, reached for the best informational tech he had available: language.
Desires: Desires are a little more complicated. On the one hand we clearly have occasionally rather powerful urges, call them, following Hume, Passions. These have sod all to do with language and quite a lot to do with bonding, fats, sugars, survival and sex, not to mention addiction and a host of supporting characters. However, we use the word desires in two distinct ways: one as an adjunct to beliefs; the so called propositional attitudes - the attitudes we take to proposition: wanting, hoping, fearing and so on. Desires bridge the divide between biological and the language.
So we have this hermeneutic circle: we act on our beliefs to bring about our desires and we explain our actions by invoking the beliefs and desires that it makes sense we'd have if we acted thus. It's all very neat. However there are problems.
First, brains just don't remotely work like that. (Ramsey, Stitch and Garon)
Second, as Churchland spent an entire series of books arguing, this is clearly a theory of mental content and it's clearly wrong.
Third, it's obviously an instrumentalist theory - at no point does adopting this approach even bother to look inside - we use it because it works better than any of the alternatives. It's not even trying to be feasible, merely indispensable.
Fourth, whisper it quietly, but psychology really hasn't made a great deal of progress since, say, Aristotle - if you look at any endeavour apart from psychology and theology the change has been massive - no Greek, no matter how clever, would remotely cut it in any other domain. in Theology and psychology they could fit back in and be up to speed in a week or two. Either theology and psychology got it so right before Greece existed that no progress was possible or they got it so wrong that they were stuck in a local maxima so crippling that they couldn't progress anywhere across the space of possibilities.
It's often said that we have made more progress in the last couple of decades than we have in the last couple of millenia and many say that because of non invasive scanning. I disagree. it's because of two largely unheard of people called Rumelhart and McClelland who re-popularised the work of another almost unknown called Seymour Papert on what he called perceptrons. This opened up the cognitive sciences with a knife and got people looking at neural function with a metaphor that didn't mislead. We have never looked back.
Because the mind's eye view of the brain is wrong. The laws of logic have little to do with cognition unless they are actually self consciously applied by someone in words. Even then it isn't clear how much work is being done by the virtual machine supporting them - as the old quote goes - how do I know what I think until I hear what I say?
So, on the one hand, belief talk looks wide open for rejection as a theory of mental function.
However, that's only half the story.
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