Wei Wu Wei and Cognitive Science » Posts for tag 'objectivity'

Minds and Experience

Dualist psychology necessarily maintains an uncomfortable position with respect to the centrality of subjective experience in our account of what is.  Where behaviorism categorically outlawed any explanatory recourse to spooky, unverifiable and immeasurable mental states, latter-day cognitive psychology has constructed an elaborate hypothetical system, the Cognitive System, that plays many of the roles of Mind, without ever meaningfully addressing or even recognizing the absolutely fundamental place of subjective experience.  It is a baroque construction, whose parts, proponents trust, will ultimately be vindicated by being found in some recognizable form in the workings of the nervous system.  But the fullest account that can arise out of cognitive psychology is a mechanistic account, describing the workings of a machine.

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