poke comments on The Comedy of Behaviorism - Less Wrong

12 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 August 2008 08:42PM

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Comment author: poke 02 August 2008 09:32:17PM 0 points [-]

Skinner was correct that mind, intentionality, thought, desire, etc, are unscientific. Where behaviorism went wrong was ascribing behavior to conditioning and underplaying the role of biology (although Skinner never denied the importance of biology; unlike Chomsky and the computationalists). I'd accuse computationalism of being "cryptodualism" except that Chomsky's project was explicitly Cartesian and was only non-dualistic in the sense that he believed the laws of physics would have to change to incorporate non-biological computational models of the mind.

If your view is simply that the brain is performing computations and that it makes sense to talk about them in terms of algorithms then that's fine. I have no problem with that. If you're going to argue, as some philosophers do, that this somehow vindicates "the mind" and the posits of folk psychology then you're making a very different argument altogether. Skinner's belief that intentionality is on par with Aristotelian teleological physics is perfectly compatible with the first view. The notion that calling the brain a computer and talking about algorithms naturalizes dualism (i.e., the algorithms are the mind and the brain is the implementation), on the other hand, is pure mysticism.