Re:There’s no homunculus in our brain who guides us
by joe_the_user on Saturday February 22, 2020 @02:16PM
(#22392736)
I don't really understand what the argument is about here.
Indeed, this "theory" seems to involve talking some particular "thing" the brain "does" very prematurely, at the level where the speaker just knows too little about the brain's internal model to make their concept even meaningful.
Article: "At the time, the dominant theory in psychology for how people find their way was the cognitive map, which posits that humans and many animals create representations of the environment in the brain that they use to navigate the world."
As you say, pretty much tautologically, an organism that navigates its environment has a model of its environment. But to make the above statement falsifiable, the theorists apparently put the theory as "a uniformly coded model existing in a particular spot in the brain", which is a big, big step.
The thing is, if one has ever worked on a large computer system, one knows that just because a program shows some functionality, that doesn't mean that there will be discreet module separable from other other modules that implement this functionality (there might be such a module but it's functions are likely wrapped with many other modules). Yet it seems like cognitive scientists reason in this constantly.
Indeed, this "theory" seems to involve talking some particular "thing" the brain "does" very prematurely, at the level where the speaker just knows too little about the brain's internal model to make their concept even meaningful.
Article: "At the time, the dominant theory in psychology for how people find their way was the cognitive map, which posits that humans and many animals create representations of the environment in the brain that they use to navigate the world."
As you say, pretty much tautologically, an organism that navigates its environment has a model of its environment. But to make the above statement falsifiable, the theorists apparently put the theory as "a uniformly coded model existing in a particular spot in the brain", which is a big, big step.
The thing is, if one has ever worked on a large computer system, one knows that just because a program shows some functionality, that doesn't mean that there will be discreet module separable from other other modules that implement this functionality (there might be such a module but it's functions are likely wrapped with many other modules). Yet it seems like cognitive scientists reason in this constantly.