Stalking the Wild Epistemic Engine 论文

摘要

In some manner, devolving from Evolution's blind trials and blunders, densely crowded packets of excitable cells inevitably come to represent the world. The conglomeration which is the human brain standardly evolves an awesomely complex world-representation in short order and on the basis of scanty input. Less distinguished beasts such as slugs and sloths are presumed to have world-representations which are less rich, or anyhow, different. It is perhaps salutory here to bear in mind that some animals have sensory detectors where we are stony blind. Pigeons have tiny ferro-magnets for detecting the earth's magnetic field; rattlesnakes have infra-red detectors; electric fish have organs which discern small variations in electric fields, and so on [1]. It is remarkable also that in the human case the world-representation evolves, and it evolves not only during the lifetime of one human brain, but across the life-spans of collections of brains. Buthow can a brain be a world-representer? How can brains change so that some of their changes consist in learning about the world? How are representations used by a brain such that the output yields purposive and intelligent behavior? Broadly speaking, research on the question of how the mind-brain works follows one of two methodological colors. The first is in substantial degree part of the rationalist tradition, emphasizing the linguistic and rule-following aspect of cognition, and is now prominently represented by cognitive/computational psychology, or by a substantial movement within that field.' The second is naturalistic in character, and is part of the tradition containing such thinkers as de la Mettrie, Darwin, Helmholtz and Hebb, and is the guiding framework for most