I am really badly failing to communicate today. My fault, not yours. No, I am not asserting Cartesian dualism as a theory about the true nature of reality. I am a monist, a materialist. And in a sense, a reductionist. But not a naive one who thinks that high-level concepts should be discarded in favor of low level ones as soon as possible because they are closer to the 'truth'.
Yes, those were scare quotes around the word 'truth'. But the reason I scare-quote the word is not that I deny that truth exists. Of course the word has meaning. It is just that neither I nor anyone else can provide and justify any operational definition. We don't know the truth. We can't perceive the territory. We can only construct maps, talk about the maps we have created with other people, and evaluate the maps against the sense impressions that arrive at our minds.
Now all of this takes place in our minds. Minds, not brains. We need to pretend to a belief in dualism in order to even properly think the thought that the map is not the territory. Cartesian dualism is not a mistake. Any more than Newtonian physics is a mistake. When used correctly it enables you to understand what is happening.
No doubt this will have been another failure to communicate. Maybe I'll try again someday.
Okay this is much better and different from what I'd thought you'd been saying.
When you say "we" and "minds" you are getting at something and here is my attempt to see if I've understood:
Given an algorithm which models itself (something like a mind; but not so specific, taboo mind) and its environment, that algorithm must recognize the difference between its model of its environment, which is filtered through it's I/O devices of whatever form, and the environment itself.
The model this algorithm has should realize that the set of informa...
An article at The Edge has scientific experts in various fields give their favorite examples of theories that were wrong in their fields. Most relevantly to Less Wrong, many of those scientists discuss what their disciplines did that was wrong which resulted in the misconceptions. For example, Irene Pepperberg not surprisingly discusses the failure for scientists to appreciate avian intelligence. She emphasizes that this failure resulted from a combination of different factors, including the lack of appreciation that high level cognition could occur without the mammalian cortex, and that many early studies used pigeons which just aren't that bright.