Imagine there's a Game of Life world with a society of evolved intelligent creatures inside it, and you're observing the world from the outside. The creatures communicate with each other, "refer" to things in their environment, introspect on their internal state, consider counterfactuals, make decisions, etc. You from the outside can understand all these cognitive processes fully mechanistically, as tools that don't require any ontologically fundamental special sauce to work. When they refer to things, it's "just" some mechanism for constructing models of
Suppose we run the GOL simulation. What we have ontological access to is the state at each time, as a Boolean grid. We do not, yet, have ontological access to: agents in the world, references made by these agents, the agents' cognitive processes, etc.
To find these things in the world, we need to do some philosophical work that bridges between GOL state-by-state data and these concepts (such as "references") that we are familiar with through use, and are actually using in the course of studying GOL-world.
Our notion of things like "imagination" has to star
Imagine there's a Game of Life world with a society of evolved intelligent creatures inside it, and you're observing the world from the outside. The creatures communicate with each other, "refer" to things in their environment, introspect on their internal state, consider counterfactuals, make decisions, etc. You from the outside can understand all these cognitive processes fully mechanistically, as tools that don't require any ontologically fundamental special sauce to work. When they refer to things, it's "just" some mechanism for constructing models of
... (read more)Suppose we run the GOL simulation. What we have ontological access to is the state at each time, as a Boolean grid. We do not, yet, have ontological access to: agents in the world, references made by these agents, the agents' cognitive processes, etc.
To find these things in the world, we need to do some philosophical work that bridges between GOL state-by-state data and these concepts (such as "references") that we are familiar with through use, and are actually using in the course of studying GOL-world.
Our notion of things like "imagination" has to star
... (read more)