HUMAN MIND V COMPUTER

Human Mind V Computer

Human Mind V Computer

Introduction

Today it is commonplace to compare the human brain to a computer, and the human mind to a program running on that computer. Once seen as just a poetic metaphor, this viewpoint is now supported by most philosophers of human consciousness and most researchers in Machine intelligence. If we take this view literally, then just as we can ask how many megabytes of RAM a PC has we should be able to ask how many megabytes (or gigabytes, or terabytes, or whatever) of memory the human brain has.

Machine intelligence researchers have used the digital computer as a model for the human mind in two different ways. Most obviously, the computer has been used as a tool on which simulations of thinking-as-programs are developed and tested. Less obvious, but of great significance, is the use of the computer as a conceptual model for the human mind. This essay traces the sources of this machine-modeled conception of cognition in a great variety of social institutions and everyday experiences, treating them as “cultural models” which have contributed to the naturalness of the mine-as-machine paradigm for many Americans, the roots of these models antedate the actual development of modern computers, and take the form of a “modularity schema” that has shaped the cultural and cognitive landscape of modernity. The essay concludes with a consideration of some of the cognitive consequences of this extension of machine logic into modern life, and proposes an important distinction between information processing models of thought and meaning-making in how human cognition is conceptualized. (Tugui 2006)

Key Categories of Knowledge and Belief

Knowledge is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as (i) expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, (ii) what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information or (iii) awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation. Philosophical debates in general start with Plato's formulation of knowledge as "justified true belief". There is however no single agreed definition of knowledge presently, nor any prospect of one, and there remain numerous competing theories.

Knowledge acquisition involves complex cognitive processes: perception, learning, communication, association and reasoning. The term knowledge is also used to mean the confident understanding of a subject with the ability to use it for a specific purpose if appropriate. (Bergeron, 2008)

Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true.

Epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge and belief. The primary problem in epistemology is to understand exactly what is needed in order for us to have knowledge. In a notion derived from Plato's dialogue Theaetetus, philosophy has traditionally defined knowledge as justified true belief. The relationship between belief and knowledge is that a belief is knowledge if the belief is true, and if the believer has a justification (reasonable and necessarily plausible assertions/evidence/guidance) for believing it is true.

A false belief is not considered to be knowledge, ...