The Analogy Between Minds and Computers

The Analogy Between Minds and Computers

"It's shocking how little we know about consciousness."
E. Dietrich

"Follow the argument wherever it may lead." old philosophical adage.


Such an excellent and helpful summary of mind-brain-memory-learning research by four professors at Binghamton University is presented by the summer '07 magazine (not online), written by Jim H. Smith in accessible layman's terms, it challenges a critical (but not unfriendly) philosophical overview and response.

"I'm an ardent supporter of computationalism," avers philosopher Eric Deitrich, who specializes in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. "He views the brain as a machine doing computations," Smith explains.

So ... we would-be intellectuals have an "-ism", here, based on a grand analogy. Brains and computers. Both "compute". "By understanding how computers can be 'trained' to gather and assimilate information, Dietrich and his students hope to better understand how humans analyze information." Humans gather and assimilate information; computers are programmed to do that as well. "Computation" applies to what what both do, as an operation on input to turn it into output. Perceptions, including language, are worked over, 'computed', by the brain to give coherent communications. The same kind of external-internal interaction can be arranged for computer-inputs to assimilate, collate, and print out words for.
This is the grand analogy.

This becomes a most pertinent observation in the scheme of things, because (continuing with the quotation) "Dietrich believes one key to how the brain's machinery works is analogies -- the wilder the better."

This paragraph, following the first, illustrates what is called a "text - token double" in psychosemiotics. First, a sweeping analogy is USED -- but being so, is not labeled as such.

Then, walla! what was implicit, 'there', but not singled out for recognition, turns up in one word, "key to how the brain's machinery works." What has been first conjoined under the text "computationalism", namely the analogy between brains and computers, appears as the very word "analogy" -- giving token to the unspoken. Is this Jim Smith's ordering? or Dietric's dynamics? It doesn't matter. It illustrates a particular way of analyzing the flow of sign-use through consciousness constitutive of mental processes in general.

That, at least, is the contention of psychosemiotics. This is the new analytical discipline that begins form content of consciousness under text and token of sign-use. This duality in the function of the sign in communication, by sense and sensation, has been overlooked and ignored by philosophers in general ever since Sumerian Marduk priests tricked the ancient, pre-Biblical Babylonians. What is processed by "the mind" first through text (signs used referringly, to stand for something other than themselves) may be re-processed, or "tokenized" later, as if some type of 'scanning loop' had found a match and come up with the right word.. Such a 'scanning loop' does the job of arranging the flow of conscious content in such a manner that token follows-up text. (Cf. use of the phrase "Descartes' cogito" as philosophical jargon.) But, also, we can consciously scan, then deploy tokens for what is getting unconsciously 'texted' -- particularly when experience is unfolding a drama. ("Hey! are you copping out?")

There is no question that we do this. The results could be elaborated in detail, contrasting "square" with "unsquare" tokening of text ( and paradox theory, e.g, "this is not a sentence"), and the introduction of self-contradiction and logical fragmentation by "squaring under self-contradiction". These require a formal apparatus to present succinctly. What the article proceeds to quote Deitrich on is the ubiquity of analogizing.

"Analogies happen nearly daily for most people," he says. (sic1) "Often it's more frequent than that. As near as we can tell, you have no control over it. (sic2) The mind uses these comparisons to understand new concepts." (sic3)

Comments: sic1 This is curious grammar, as if drawing analogies between this and that were something that "happens", an event. However, if processes flowing through consciousness are taken as a totality constituted by relating to sequences analogically, any actual noticing, or deliberate remarking on some specific, vivid analogy ("history repeating itself here"), implicitly bringing to mind both terms compared, then the content in this case is a "double" of textuality itself, in the token. That is what gives the phrase "happen nearly daily for most people" its communication -value: it is a tacit text-token double, "squaring" what the psychic apparatus carries out in mechanical linkage to arrange the double, by what is observe to "happen". using the psychic apparatus. Thus, a "douible-double". A kind of Grand Tautology: predicating text on token, and vice versa.

sic2 The question of "control" bridges the unconscious use of "analogy drawing" to "computation", what computers can be programmed to do in comparing "recognized" (scanned) patterns. This is a conceptual slide, or deflection, from conscious => textual, logical analogy-drawing, and unconscious (constitutive) analogy drawing. The issue of what philosopher's once discussed as "free will", back when psychology actually sanctioned use of the term "will" at all, edges in here. "Maybe everything I do and think is just a pre-programmed brain-pattern unfolding." This, however, again conflates the work of text and token. Actual acts of exercise of (what was once called) will, such as voluntarily raising or not raising one's hand, is textual, infused with intentionality, whether articulated or not. The meshing of gears in the psychic apparatus, including the head-brain, is called upon for the token side contribution. This is totally taken for granted in the process of intellectual mind-work. When reasoning is done in order to direct action, syntheses of the complexities in conscious content are subsumed under high-level text. The name for any Kantian "perceived object", for example, is a subject of sentences predicating various properties of it. (Truth or falsehood in any given case doesn't have to come in here.) What is synthesized under them can be taken apart, and re-appear as tokens, isolated and by analysis, prompted from consciousness. Now, "will" comes in in the ordering of these token elements isolated by analysis. Completion of the aim of this will, or meta-will, is in the unified schema of TokenSpace.

Quoting again: "What is really interesting about the mind is this: the farther apart two ideas are, the deeper the thinking involved." (sic4)

And that can be taken to absurd lengths. Lets.

Placenta Cosmos -
as the fetus first emerged from one,
so the soul of man emerges from the second

(isolates and analyzes belief in the survival of the soul after death, in a place beyond the stars.)

These are linked by the analogy between birth, gaining deliverance from the womb, and re-birth, taught by (some forms of what is called) Christianity as necessary to deliver the soul from the body.

This particular bit of analogizing can be readily explained by the idea of a template imprinted under trauma, making how we escaped the womb a model (analogy) of how ego-consciousness may survive the body. This goes with psychohistorian L. deMause's interpretation of Christ as fetal hero fantasy. Second birth to overcome death is the template. "Born again," however efficatious in sin-cleansing, is a token of the process lived through earlier. But having come thus far, tokening the very drama of emergence from womb into 'outer' cosmos, it is possible to take the isolate/analyze process further, and reconstruct the grammar of analogies derivative from THIS (rebirth) analogy. For instance: "salvation of the soul by believing in Christ". This is a "squaring double", taking sign-uses (S*n) predicated on sign-uses (predicated on....S*1) up to the highest level, thus completing the totality of consciousness under sign-use. In the psychosemiotic system modeled on the enneagram, n in S*n = 7 (or, alternatively, 9). The hierarchy of textual predicate levels is the sequence S*7 ......S*1. This is interpreted on the schema of TokenSpace as the totality of consciousness under sign-use, upper left (NW) quadrant.

The reference to templates of repeating cognitions and behaviors connects text and token through neuro-psychological functioning. A wholistic factor introduces itself at this point. The actual patterns "seen", "found", "used", by a person in daily life, when dealing with, recalling, and communicating experiences, are notoriously dependent on the functioning of the psychic apparatus. What the Mind Wills and what the Body does can be two entirely different things. The body responds to what Moves it; and this, again notoriously, is often less than ideas pertaining to the totality of conscious being. Quite the opposite it may be, in fact. It doesn't take a Freud to point predict pretty much where acting according to rational will leaves off, and acting according to what are now called "hormones" begins.

There is one major supplementation offered here to Deitrich's computationalism, is this. Recognize the gap between extensional (computerized) and intensional (mentalized) pattern-sequencing. This is illustrated by the diffeence between leter sequences such as ... AABBCCAABB ... are scanned by a computer, vrs. when "in the beginning" is scanned by a Bible believer.

Recognize a deep formal construction source of compilation of predicates of predicates of predicates....in a single system of unified conscious content. This yields a system of textual levels generated by 'loops' through conscious content assembled by three different contributing memory functions. The system as a whole distributes 'atoms of meaning' through the hierarchy of communicated meaning, from sense-data (S*2) to God (S*7).

This raises the question of soul. Two further quote of Deitrich is relevant here. "In my view, what lies at the core of being human will remain essentially mysterious." What is not clear, and he could clarify it, is whether what connects consciousness and soul, as used in traditional philosophical -religious contexts is not a distinct metaphysical substrate. I think would not object to that (might be inconsistent if he did),

The second quote is: "Computers are challenged by thinking that requires nuances. (ed.- these are Smith's words) "They're like savants," Deitrich says. "They do one thing very well, but they're only as good as their programming. The human mind may not be able to match them at what ever they're especially good at. But the human mind does so much more." We have taken him up on this, through psychosemiotics. There are loops, templates, ontogenic development, dreams and Freudian displacement to be accounted for -- thus far. We've got to hide what the soul is from them.
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The "anatomical preparation", Freud called it. The peripheral sense sense organs harvest stimuli that strike the body from without. These are blended, and conjoined under signs use, in in many, many ways, with stimuli that reach the brain from nerves terminating on various internal organs, In giving an account of, or mapping the constituent inner processes, Freud stayed strictly on the side of consciousness. It is not to be expected that ideas, thoughts, concepts, even motivating factors (such as desire) should be localized in organs, such as brain-firing routes, as if "mother" were stored in compartment Cx#94, or whatever.

The common omni-present flow of mind-body process carrying on the functions required for conscious sign use.

Elements Essential to S* (sign-use) Processing

1. synthesis of qualities of the 5 senses under signs for perception of objects ("It"'s: Hume perceiving melting wax, for example);

2. qualia of feelings and impulses (from W. Reich: feeling/libido, impulse/anxiety; ex. of blend: "I felt like I was going to hit him." (libido => Active element of Omnipresent Okidonakh);

3. memory-inputs from two sources, hippocampal and amygdalan
for the two segments of sign-use processes for objects (1.) and for organic states (2.) -- assertoric (Logical S*) expressive (Emotional S*);

4. a scene, setting, or 'theatre' onto which can be projected a duplicate of conscious content under sign use. This 4th essential condition of conscious sign use corresponds to Thoth's tablet, Locke's tabula rosa, Kant's phenomenal intuition. From this, tracing even to Descartes method of systematic doubt, comes the representation of TokenSpace: the space formed by signs used in the act of communicating.

Mapping Analogies:

Space and TokenSpace

"Dietrich believes one key to how the brain's machinery works is analogies -- the wilder the better. "Analogies happen nearly daily for most people," he says. "often it's more frequent than daily. As near as we can tell (modesty, modesty), you have no control over it. The mind uses these comparisons to understand new concepts." Dietric's team is drawn to this analogy-creating rendency because "what's really interesting about the mind is this: The further apart two ideas are, the deeper the thinking involved." (add: "to link them" ? -assume meant)

Comment: So wouldn't Kant say. (Dietrich having an undergrad flashback). Kant deduced a system of Analogies of Experience from the conditions of unity of representation. "The principle of the Analogies of Experience is: Experience is possible only through the representation of a necessary condition of perceptions. Proof "Experience is an empirical knowledge, that is a knowledge which determines an object through perceptions, It is a synthesis of perceptions, not contained in perception, but itself containing in one consciousness the synthetic unity of the manifold of perceptions......(continues) " (Critique of Pure Reason - Kemp Smith, 208)

But what, in metaphysical terms, ARE the conditions of unity of representation, as mediated by empirical knowledge (note: double meaning: what knows is empirically known, through perception.)? Here is exactly where Kant's transcendentalism, efficient as it is, leaves metaphysics in the lurch. The "transcental" notion of a provable "God" is a Transcendental Illusion ("He" isn't "out there" -- no use looking); but what of the "one consciousness containing the synthetic unity of the manifold of perceptions" when the word used for the transcendental illusion is tossed into the heap? -- becomes a one of signs among other representations? This is where a systematic metaphysics is required to complete Kant's unfinished project, from "above" and from "below". What happens when "God", previously projected as transcendent, is in effect imanentized through the flow-of-anatomical-process passing through regular stages to conscious sign-use in communication (the highest teleological product of the system as a whole ("totality")? That is the metaphysical question hanging "above" our (humanity's) head, of what completes its totality. "What happens when the empirical consciousness comes to an understanding of its material condition?" This is the question of what completes the totality from "below". One way these two poles of the totality link is in the old wives tale (encouraged by preachers) that God sends dreams. Your dream, properly understood, is a message from God (he will help you understand). "He is creator of all; therefore, surely, of your perceptions in the sleeping state. He is speaking through your sub-conscious, using the psychic apparatus to communicate.

Btw, Freud also described dreams as like communications -- "expressions", not intended for anyone but the dreamer. Like a drama put on the inner screen by some unseen producer. The "God" explanation wouldn't have been science, really. Dreams, empirically studied, link to re-flux quasi-perceptual (lowest level phenomena) content from external and internal sensory-motility stimuli in the altered (but recallable) psychic state. After coming across the 'flash-back' effects of trauma, hysterical conversion, hypnogogic waking states with acted-out fantasies, plus reckoning in the energy-components released at birth (after 'travail' -- little empathy is ever expressed with the fact that an infant comes closest to death from an-oxidation; with terrific heat, squeezing; than at any other time of life -- he . It is to be supposed these oldest, most common neural routes, organ-hookups, and emotional responses


suppose we posit an analogy between TokenSpace and (what is called) Space, as the container of' objects. Now suppose the words "The Holy Sun Absolute completing the Cosmic Totality" is written in the upper-left hand (NE) corner

space', by extensional measurement)

Contents of consciousness correspond to what B. Russell called "sense data", making explicit the blending of the two essential components of any actual articulate situation: the S*, and the non-S*: Quality and qualia.

Through these processing 'stations', taken as categories, or undefined (primitive) expressions needed for the metalanguage of talk about psychic processing, it is possible to trace a hypothetical "totality of input under quantity", namely, the neuro-physiological quanta (measurable multiplicities) of energy arising from several locations in the body that are "burned off", or used up in the process, as when light in an electric bulb goes off. That accounts for its metaphysics. The First Transformation that occurs in the process of communication, tracking In-Out S* loops, goes from anatomical expenditure, through Quality/Qualia content, to signification: an assembled whole, depositing a dream in sleeping (lowest brain-wave) states of consciousness. This is the derivation of the definition (verbal equivalents) of "Content of Consciousness" and "S*(Ql, v)") (v for qualia/intensity; correlated with amygdalan memory and motility):

C'C =df. S*(Ql, v)

This is not a construct intended for deductive use. It is a way of putting together a grammar for predicating on "contents of consciousness under sign-use" as a sell-determined form.