Output patterns that aren’t instructions
There are tens of millions (or whatever) of neural pathways leading out of my brain (or neocortex, or whatever) into various muscle fibers in my fingers, hands, wrists, arms, shoulders, and so on, and also from various tactile and proprioceptive cells back again. Each time I type a letter, a substantial fraction of these fire at various frequencies, and in various temporal relations to one another. But that some particular pulse pattern, on some occasion, should result in my typing an ‘A’ depends on many contingencies, over and above just which pattern of pulses it happens to be.
In the first place, it depends on the lengths of my fingers, the strengths and quicknesses of my muscles, the shapes of my joints, and the like. Of course, whatever else I might do with my hands, from typing the rest of the alphabet to tying my shoes, would likewise depend simultaneously on particular pulse patterns and these other concrete contingencies. But there need be no way to “factor out” the respective contributions of these different dependencies, such that contents could consistently be assigned to pulse patterns independent of which fingers they’re destined for. That is to say, there need be no way—even in principle, and with God’s own microsurgery—to reconnect my neurons to anyone else’s fingers, such that I could reliably type or tie my shoes with them. It would be like trying to assemble the cubes from a thousand tv sets into a single new one. But, in that case, what any given pattern “means” depends on it being a pattern specifically for my particular fingers—or, to use Dreyfus’s phrase, for fingers with my “muscular gestalts”.
—Haugeland, J., 2000: Mind Embodied and Embedded, p. 19. Chapter 9 in Haugeland, J., 2000: Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind. Harvard University Press.
author:haugeland-john book:haugeland-having-thought paper:haugeland-mind-embodied-and-embedded snip:output-patterns-that-aren’t-instructions brain anatomy output pattern intimacy perception specificity complexity muscular-gestalt list:mind-body-world
