aspects of the world can be studied at various levels
nevertheless, over some period this was reinterpreted and given the contemporary naturalistic approach namely aspects of the world can be studied at various levels and that whatever property they have so we can factor– I can affect the moon by moving my arm, sounds crazy but that’s the way it turns out okay. Intuitions are relevant. Furthermore, there’re meaning levels which we can study this reality whatever it is. we’are going to try integrate them, that’s the sensible version of the unification problem.
there is no notion of non-existence of reality apart from what figures an err best explanatory theories. In particular, there is no theory at all of the physical or the material. Therefore we have no coherent question to ask about what lies outside the physical. There no longer is a mind-body problem except by just arbitrary stipulation and the reason is there is no such thing as body till somebody tells us what physical means, there is no question about what lies beyond physical.
and physics has no concept of the physical just whatever we come to understand or maybe more narrowly whatever we come to understand in such a way there is at least a reasonable prospect of integrating with co-natural sciences kind of loose idea but there is no concept of physical reality beyond that training in the case of thinking or solving problems or speaking a language.
Right now, we’re more in this sense of physical reality where we’re most confident about the physical reality of computation representational system at least by naturalistic criteria. so let’s take an actual case there are recent studies in the case of language, interesting studies of, within the study of computation representational systems, you find many different categories of expressions, i won’t give details but for exam–there is category well-formed expression perfectly grammatical and then various deviant expressions and they fall to all sorts of different types.
that is integral to the study of computational representational systems.on very recently, there’s been some work on electrical activity of the brain called vent related tentrials in which people have pretty surprisingly but interestingly discovered specific collate for these categories.
So a particular kind of category of deviant expression yield characteristic event-related potential of specific kind of electrical activity of the brain.
that is interesting. But why is it interesting?
Well, it is interesting because the thing we’are committed to from a scientific point of view is the categories of expression given by computational representational systems. those of the categories that come out of the background of theoretical explanations
the event-related potentials are just curiosity. What is interesting about them is that they correlate with what we understand to some extent and therefore maybe they’re interesting.
notice these are two different studies of the brain at two different levels: one is electrical activity one is computational activity.
in the case of computational activity, we have reasonably well-grounded theories with explanatory character and so on. In the case of electrical activity we know nothing just noise up there. But now the studies of electrical activity, the brain has made progress because it has found something that correlates with what we understand much better namely the computational representation systems.
if the correlations are extended and placed in a richer theoretical framework we’ll actually begin to rely on them for some inquiry that will tell us something about computational representational systems. But that’s the order of priority and groundedness from point of view the natural sciences.
the usual interpretation is the opposite unmistakenly. Of course, in this naturalistic approach we would never ask such utterly pointless questions as whether airplanes fly or whether the computer is sync or whether algorithms sync triangles or whatever–
Now, what are the real empirical questions and the reasonable research programs?
Well, I think they are the ones sketched earlier since if we want to learn something about humans or pigeons or whatever… We should begin by considering something that they do well and we should try to figure out how they do what they do well. We postulated some particular faculty of the mind meaning the brain and the particular level of obstruction…