/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11782353]

Its honestly crazy the amount of logic it takes to understand the nuances of any language. Programming a computer to understand our language is insanely harder then to make it do complex math. Are there any books about the schema of the mind, and how we get meaning from shit?

[Anonymous No.11782355]

>>11782353
t. Bugman

[Anonymous No.11782427]

>>11782353
There can be no true systemisation of this because the brain is best described as a messy pile of particular yet nearly indistinguishable functions and exceptions, compounded over each other forevermore. It is not logical at all, so, covering it in a general or fundamental way is nigh impossible. We are incapable of logic in the sense that our brains do not function in a way that allows us to truly wield it. We can approximate it, or even adhere to its rules perfectly, as to be indistinguishable- however, the actual mechanics of our brains are not logical and can never be any of our logics.

[Anonymous No.11782433]

>>11782353
Frege's begriffsschrift would have been the beginning of that. Formal logic and philosophy language going forward after him are interested in this when you are sticking just to meaning, not mind. Philosophy of mind would be more interested in that

[Anonymous No.11782447]

That's a great question and basically gets at the threshold of all of modern philosophy and most of the modern crises in science and engineering. I had similar questions in college when I was studying the philosophy of language, and because I had no one to guide me, I just started googling and researching in every direction I possibly could. I ended up finding everything from cognitive science and analytic philosophy to continental philosophy and Wittgenstein.

I would recommend you be very careful about how you research this, and go into it with the knowledge that the cogsci and analytic approaches, especially as they relate to contemporary AI and computer-related understandings of cognition, are HEAVILY criticised by the continental philosophy camps. For example, check out Hubert Dreyfus' What Computers Can't Do, which is a Heideggerian critique of the whole AI/cogsci movement's presuppositions about cognition/language being structured like a computer, with a set of linguistic ground-rules or ground-functions for implementing specific functions. The AI/cogsci movements mostly brushed off Dreyfus' critique for another generation, only to realize that that the "GOFAI" computer-like understanding of consciousness was horribly broken and that they needed critiques.

But despite this, they have recapitulated the essential problems of the GOFAI movement and continue to view consciousness in a functionalist way, having added arbitrary complexity (like recursive heuristics, algorithims, and "evolutionary" software), but not having actually re-thought how consciousness actually makes context-based decisions, learns, and has an internal model of the world. Modern cybernetics-influenced streams of thought often invoke the Turing test principle to say that a big enough recursive bundle of functionalist algorithms will eventually "act like" a conscious mind and so be indistinguishable from one. But that is merely sidestepping the question, not answering it.

To really make headway in understanding all this crap, you would probably eventually want to understand Heidegger, the late Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl's constitutive phenomenology, Uexkull, William James' Principles of Psychology and pragmatism, and many others. And always be very wary of cogsci/analytic knockoff versions - people like Lakoff and Johnson often present impoverished versions of the much more subtle analyses of people like Ricoeur, e.g., on the phenomenology of metaphor. They tend to reduce phenomenological methods to computer-like/functional metaphors, once again.

[Anonymous No.11782450]

>>11782447
Oh and also, Jean-Pierre Dupuy's history of cybernetics will be invaluable to you if you follow this approach.

[Anonymous No.11782453]

>>11782353
real cool study going on right now concerning the chemicals at play in our neurophysiological makeup when we "find something meaningful". not that it can explain anything outside of a flawed mechanistic schema anyway, but interesting for what it is. iirc the participants dosed on lsd and underwent fmri scanning while given audio and visual inputs

[Anonymous No.11782476]

>>11782447
Thanks, interesting post and will check out those authors. Funny you mention Heidegger, reading Heidegger is what sort of prompted the question.

[Anonymous No.11782494]

>>11782476
You're definitely on the right track then, in my opinion. It's surprisingly rare that people truly understand how fucking amazing the gestalt basis of human understanding is, the nestedness of all interpretive context and the hermeneutic basis of all meaning and communication. The first time you really fully appreciate how NON-computerlike human understanding is, how all interpretation and communication presupposes layers of gestalten that may extend all the way "down" to embodiment and that extend "outward" to the whole umwelt, it's trippy.

The worst thing IMHO is when these philosophies are naturalised in a degenerate way, such as the cogsci and AI people currently trying to naturalise phenomenology while barely understanding it.

[Anonymous No.11782580]

>>11782494
This area of study in particular seems like an area where philosophy is under appreciated hose from a natural science or STEM background.

[Anonymous No.11782593]

>>11782476
Id say be wary of Heidegger and other continental philosophers like him. Their inability to invoke logical entailment leads them to "interpretations" that have no necessity about them. At any point asking "why this point, why not another" usually undermines their work because the point they have decided on is just "interesting", not necessary for their "interpretation".

Also I cant remember
>>11782447
Wasnt Searle saying the same thing for years as Dreyfus in that the AI guys are too confident, just they thought the AI guys were wrong for different reasons?