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===Behaviourism and {{br|The Ghost in the Machine}}=== | ===Behaviourism and {{br|The Ghost in the Machine}}=== | ||
Now it | Now it wasn’t always like that. Fifty years ago psychologists were waging a battle royale against the positivist branch of their own discipline, which insisted on on proceeding by reference, exclusively, to “public events” and ignoring private mental events. Can you imagine it: a ''psychology'' which ''ignores private mental events''? Can you imagine an approach to artificially reconstructing natural intelligence which ignores private mental events? | ||
{{Quote|On the strength of this doctrine, the Behaviorists proceeded to purge psychology of all intangibles and unapproachables. The terms ‘consciousness’, ‘mind’, ‘imagination’ and ‘purpose’, together with a score of others were declared to be unscientific, treated as dirty words, and banned from the vocabulary. ... <Br> | {{Quote|On the strength of this doctrine, the Behaviorists proceeded to purge psychology of all intangibles and unapproachables. The terms ‘consciousness’, ‘mind’, ‘imagination’ and ‘purpose’, together with a score of others were declared to be unscientific, treated as dirty words, and banned from the vocabulary. ... <Br> | ||
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—Arthur Koestler, {{br|The Ghost in the Machine}}}} | —Arthur Koestler, {{br|The Ghost in the Machine}}}} | ||
You might ask what has changed, for it seems that the contemporary interest in in neural networks, big data and natural language processing, all of which eschew the intentional fallacy, adopt ''exactly'' the Behaviourist disposition. Don’t they? | You might ask what has changed, for it seems that the contemporary interest in in neural networks, big data and natural language processing, all of which eschew the intentional fallacy, adopt ''exactly'' the Behaviourist disposition. Don’t they? On one hand, they have no choice: if human psychologists are struggling to understand how consciousness works in situ, ''in the actual mesh of living veins, in cell of padded bone'', is it any wonder people looking at its proxy in a digital network might not bother? | ||
{{Sa}} | {{Sa}} | ||