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Books

The Structure of Thinking by Laura Weed

Scott O’Reilly gets quite excited about a new book on the nature of the mind by Laura Weed.

The poet Emily Dickinson wrote lines that seem to capture something of the complex and mysterious relationship between the mind and the world:

The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

I wonder what Ms Dickinson would think of the idea of conscious computers, particularly the idea that an algorithm could contain the essence of thought? For a large portion of the scientific and philosophical community the mind is a syntactical engine, a computational network of neurons that run the algorithm of thought. In the conventional parlance, the brain is 'hardware' while the mind is 'software.' This distinction has led many a philosopher to speculate that the essence of thought might someday be duplicated on a computer, producing, if you will, a silicon sentience.

In her incisive book The Structure of Thinking: a process-oriented account of mind, Laura Weed argues that syntactically based sentience is quixotic.

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