Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Durnavich
Not necessarily. I don't work in the field of cognitive science, so I am in no position to throw the blanket claim of folk psychology over their industry. (Dennett grumbles about some of them, however, but blames the philosophers for misleading them. See his Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness.)
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Well, Dennett has great fun at everyone's expense. There's more than a hint of the straw-man in some of his funnier lampoons.
But you did
seem to be attempting to tar the whole of cog-sci with some sort of Cartesian brush, so it's useful to know that isn't your intention.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Durnavich
Just look at how often people bring up "filling in the blind spot" in these types of discussions. The suggested model is that there is some sort of Faculty of Awareness downstream of a filler-inner process that peruses the front end's patchwork. Look at how FriedPhoton (and most everyone else) tries to explain the Muller-Lyer illusion as the brain somehow altering things so that one arrow looks longer than another. Look at what Doodler just wrote: "Losing chunks of brain function would be like listening to an orchestra with whole sections of instrument missing. You'd recognize the tune, and maybe even the melody, but it would clearly be a very different sound that is produced with only echoes of the original." The implied model is that there is a Faculty of Awareness downstream of everything else unaffected by the lobotomy that hears a "different sound" handed to it by the lobotomized the brain.
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And yet both
Doodler and
FriedPhoton have also talked about consciousness as an emergent property of brain function, so they have a more complicated picture in mind than you're trying to make out.
With reference to Müller-Lyer, there's no doubt at all that
something in the brain codes the lines as being of different lengths: lines of the same length are projected on the retina, and the words "These lines are different lengths" come out of the mouth. Between those two events lies nothing but brain activity (if you'll allow me to include retinal processing under the umbrella of the brain). So saying that somewhere in the brain the lengths of the lines are perceptually altered is a truism, unless you believe that there really is a "liar" in Müller-Lyer.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Durnavich
People almost always explain cognitive failure in the form of "my brain told me the wrong thing."
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It's a
style of expressing the failure, certainly. But in my experience, people just as often blame them
selves, incorporating the cognitive failure into their own person; or they blame their sense organs, or (in performance related tasks) blame their effector organs.
So from where I stand you seem to be tilting at non-existent windmills.
Grant Hutchison