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Monday, May 30, 2016

St. Joe

Here is a short movie by Joe Hanceviz of the old church before its closing.

https://www.facebook.com/joe.hancaviz/videos/1056316324449399/


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5 comments:

  1. Mr. Flynn, you might be very interested to read this:

    https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer

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    2. It would be truer to say that your brain does, in fact, store memories and "retrieve" knowledge—but computers don't.

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    3. Indeed, he seems to think "knowledge" and "memories" were terms coined for computers and which were then misapplied to humans (he even says that humans never develop "knowledge" or "memories", which is ludicrous), rather than (what actually happened) misapplying the terms relating to human cognition to the very different "data" processing that computers do.

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    4. Finally, he appears to be making the fundamentally erroneous assumption that an image (song, instruction, whatever) is actually "stored" in a computer. It's not. Everything we say about computers is precisely as metaphorical as when we talk about the cognition of humans in the terms of computers—not least because a bunch of the things we say about computers (like "knowledge", "memory", "reading") are analogies from humanity in the first place. (And, again, it is ridiculous—it actually made it very difficult for me to take the rest of the essay seriously—to say that applying those terms to human behavior—where they originated in the first place!—is inaccurate.)

      Also, anyone who denies that humans interact with external reality by means of mental representations of it, is, at the very least, going to have an uphill battle convincing Aristotelians. Because we call those "concepts", they're kinda the cornerstone of our epistemology? No, they don't exist in the brain...but someone who thinks the mind is the brain has a bigger problem than anyone who uses the information-processing metaphor, all its (many) sins on its head. (His example about catching the ball is correct in saying that we never actually process catching a ball "the way a computer does"...except of course that "keep the ball in a linear optical trajectory" is probably exactly how you'd program a robot to catch balls.)

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