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From: kissell@flairvax.UUCP (Kevin Kissell)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Re: More mirrors, more dust
Message-ID: <631@flairvax.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 8-Jul-84 04:39:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: flairvax.631
Posted: Sun Jul  8 04:39:13 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Jul-84 07:08:06 EDT
References: <620@flairvax.UUCP>, <827@pyuxn.UUCP>
Organization: Fairchild AI Lab, Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 27

(Rich Rosen enters a scene of general pandemonium - all demons in the machine)

> Is it behaviorism that is befuddled by the existence of the mind, or is it
> "mind-ism" that is afraid of the notion that our behavior could be manifested
> in the physical world rather than in some extraphysical entity?

I have not been holding the mind to be any more "extraphysical" than a computer
program.  It is a notion of process rather than of substance.  It is a word to
describe the way my brain experiences its own function.  Feedback, if you will.
Don Steiny does not find it to be a useful abstraction.  I do.  No problem 
there.   I think that behaviorists may be somewhat frustrated in their 
attempts to understand human behavior in that, for a given situation, a 
certain set of deterministic stimulus-response mechanisms may be at work, 
but a large, *unobservable* portion of the stimuli arise internally to the 
brain, and the nature and intensity of these stimuli may well be sufficiently 
complex and/or random to preclude a concise, predictive science of human 
behavior.

Kevin D. Kissell
Fairchild Research Center
Advanced Processor Development
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"Any closing epigram, regardless of truth or wit, grows galling
 after a number of repetitions"