Are Humans Like Computers? An Introduction.

Part 2 of a series on contemporary philosophy of mind

IBM 5100 Poster, 1975

-10 minute read time–

A few days ago, on my flight from Edinburgh, Scotland, to Dallas, Texas, Murphy’s law descended on me with a vengeance. My first flight was canceled, my bag went missing, and, in London, I went to the wrong terminal, nearly missing my connection.

Let me spin the tale of why I went to the incorrect terminal. Frustratingly, I needed to re-check my bag—and it was a close connection as it was. So, rushing, I asked an airline employee, whose job title was probably smiler-and-helper-of-befuddled-idiots, which terminal to go to for my connection. She kindly directed me to terminal three.

After about thirty minutes traveling across the massive Heathrow Airport to the new terminal, the self check-in station wouldn’t let me recheck my bag, and I started to sweat. Eventually, I realized I was in the wrong terminal. To make a grim situation even more embarrassing, I needed to go back where I started. As I sprinted to catch the train back, stress, shame, and anger all blended in a frantic stew.

How could the employee have told me the entirely wrong terminal?

In the moment, swearing and frantically running around, I felt like the situation was someone else’s fault. However, this mishap was, in retrospect, entirely my mistake. So far, I’ve neglected to mention that I told her my second flight was America Airlines when it was actually British Airways.

Now, here’s the first bit of philosophy in this essay—my strong, and very wrong, feelings possessed a kind of content. My fuming meant something.

Let’s dive in.

Folk Psychology

In philosophy of mind, there’s a concept called propositional attitudes. Desires or attitudes seem to always (or almost always) pair with a truth claim; so, “Taco Deli provides food” plus the attitude of “hunger” explains my behavior of going to Taco Deli. We may not always think this way consciously, but upon reflection, we use this method to predict and explain the behavior of others and ourselves constantly.

H did X because of Y.

If Y, then H will do X.

These can be probabilistic, of course. It’s likely that I will go to Taco Deli because I’m hungry, but maybe I went there to pick up food for a party later, and, actually, I wasn’t hungry at all. Regardless, most philosophers agree that propositional attitudes are a crucial aspect of our mental lives.

So, how do we use propositional attitudes to deal with other people? Well, the idea is we go about our day doing folk psychology, making unscientific, but extremely useful, generalizations about people’s psyche to explain why they do stuff. If we don’t understand why someone does something, and we ask them, we typically expect them to reference a propositional attitude.

“Ow! Why’d you hit me?”

“You had a bug on you!” (The attitude is implied—it’s bad to have a bug on you.)

More than predict and explain behavior, we seem to use attitude-belief pairs to regulate people. For example, I might say to my friend, “My sister’s feeling pretty sad. She wants to be left alone.” These statements don’t predict my friend’s behavior; I expect them to prevent him from bothering her.

The notion that everyone carries around a mental rule book that allows us to socialize and categorize psychology is called theory-theory. According to this theory, we run events through this unconscious rule book to ascribe reasons for actions and predict people’s behavior. We sometimes update this unspoken book of social rules as we go on in life.

Others say we sympathetically put ourselves in the shoes of others, simulating their perspective to predict what they do and understand how they act. For example, I predict Joe is going to Taco Deli because I put myself in his shoes and kind of unconsciously “feel out” or “imagine” what his experience is like, thereby predicting his visit to the Austin-originated Tex-Mex joint. This view is called simulation-theory. (If you’re wondering why I keep coming back to tacos, it’s because the UK has no good Tex-Mex, and I’m back in Texas, obsessed.)

Recently, some philosophers have tried to reconcile or combine these two views, so-called hybrid theory. They discuss cases where it seems like we do one or the other, and shrug—maybe we do both! The work goes into understanding how and why we tend toward each method.

Still others say folk psychology and even scientific understandings of psychology are radically, radically, false. People don’t act reasonably or psychologically, ever; instead, they act deterministically according to brain states, which don’t remotely map onto psychological theory, scientific or “folk.” Words like “emotions,” “feelings,” or “beliefs” are illusory and meaningless. In the future, these philosophers say, we’ll develop new technology or language to eliminate our everyday talk of people’s psychology, and instead, rely on neuroscience to understand behavior. This rather radical, and scarcely held, view is called eliminative materialism. It deserves a mention, despite being so unpopular and unattractive.

Computers and minds seem to be representational

Psychological attitudes, folk psychology, and theory-theory tend to support a representational view of the mind, meaning, our behavior is explained by the way our minds represent the outside world. Don’t fret, let me unpack the idea.

Representational is what it sounds like; it refers to when A represents B. For example, :-) represents a smiling human face. Say you set up two artists to paint a tree, one is five years old, the other is a lifelong, expert oil painter. They’ll produce two vastly different paintings, but both paintings will represent, or refer to, the same tree. The “the” represents the grammatical meaning of a definite article. “A” and “an” represent basically the same content, namely, indefinite article.

The mind seems to represent the world through thoughts, emotions, imagination, and more. The fact that the mind somehow represents the world, my thought “taco” seems to refer to tacos in the real world, is spectacular and baffling.

An analogy might help. What other thing can we think of that intelligently represents the world?

Hmm…

As such, understandably, many philosophers think the mind works like a computer. A computer represents ideas and reality through software. Hardware intelligently gives rise to representations of reality in a myriad of flexible ways; Turing-complete computers do so in a logical, universalizable manner. This is why people can use graphing calculators to run old Nintendo games—because they both rely on the same underlying logic, even if the computer language to express that logic differs.

Again, brains seem to work similarly (hardware to software). There are signals going in (sensation of hunger / typing “T-A-C-O” on the keyboard), complex, rule-based thinking happening inside (synapses firing / transistors tripping), then an output (eating a taco / representing the word taco in Google Docs). The view that the mind largely works like a computer is called computationalism.

Computationalism is a darned sight better than the now-defunct position called behaviorism. This is the view that the mental just is our behavior. In other words, the act of me eating a taco is my desire to eat a taco. Let me say that again: According to behaviorism, my desire to eat the taco is nothing more than me literally eating the taco. This theory is patently wrong. However,

I think we can also poke holes in, and improve upon, computationalism.

Embodied cognition

Most critiques of computationalism center around the way humans are embodied, in a field of cognitive science and philosophy called embodied cognition. This field of study undermines the analogy of humans with computers. For example, by showing how our body helps us think, how hormones color our emotions, or how we often seem to act without representing at all.

A fun little embodied cognition study, published in 2011, had psychologists compare two groups who had to identify the emotions of a person just from a picture of their eyes, eyebrows, and forehead area. One group was the control, while the others had recently received Botox for forehead wrinkles. The latter group was statistically slower at answering the question. The operative theory is that scrunching our eyebrows helps us more quickly comprehend negativity by acting out or embodying an expression of negativity. Since the second group couldn’t screw their eyebrows up, they were slower to correctly identify other people’s emotions.

This study, and many others, show how even the act of thinking might be located “outside” the brain, outside the so-called computer.

Non-representational feels—feelings of being

Matthew Ratcliffe, who I referenced extensively in my master’s thesis, argues that feelings can be “about” the world, possess content, without being representational.

For example, Ratcliffe picks out a class of feelings called existential feelings, which he thinks direct our beliefs, attitudes, desires, and embodied acting in the world at a fundamental level. These senses of reality undergird everything we believe, do, and feel. Without a felt grasp of existence, according to him, we couldn’t engage in the world at all.

For instance, we don’t believe in the existence of other people’s minds because of reasons, but because of a fundamental, existential feelings. Take another example: We reach for a cup and expect it not to be randomly and supernaturally intangible because of a pervasive feeling of being—a disposition toward reality—not a set of unconscious logical reasons or beliefs.

Seem strange? Consider how you’d answer if I asked, after you reached for a mug of coffee, “Why’d you reach for the coffee?”

“… Because, I’m thirsty.”

“That’s a propositional attitude.”

“… huh?”

“Never mind. Read my blog. Actually, what I mean is, why did you expect the coffee mug to still exist when your hand closed around the handle?”

“I didn’t think about it.”

“Exactly. But, okay, say you need to think about it. Why did you expect it to keep existing?”

“Well, I just did. It’s always been that way.”

“Yeah, but why is that reason enough to think it will happen this time?”

“…”

“…”

“Could you not, just for once?”

Seriously, how would you answer? If you genuinely pondered for a while, you might say because it’s useful to believe the coffee mug will continue to exist. You might say you only have a probabilistic belief towards its existing, but your certainty sits around 99.99999999%. This seems unwieldy to me. Rather than explain this general expectation of reality’s persistence in terms of reason, beliefs, propositional attitudes, or logic, it might be better to think of this in terms of pure feelings, deep, embodied, pervasive dispositions toward reality.

Notice, these existential feelings don’t represent anything in the world, but they’re still about the world in general. Ratcliffe’s schema of feelings of being seems to be on to something, though I’m not certain it’s the right way to express it yet. I am, however, quite convinced of what I’ve written in my Heidegger part 1 and 2 essays, that an existential orientation toward the world takes precedence over rational, reflective beliefs about the world. I deal with Cartesian skepticism (does the world outside me really exist, and how can I be certain?) in these essays, go check them out if you’re interested.

Were my airport frustrations “propositional attitudes?”

Sometime, I’ll explain Ratcliffe’s feelings of being in more depth. For now, I’ll turn to discussing propositional attitudes again. Philosophical study of ways that our minds are not like computers is fruitful work, in my opinion. Studying feelings of being, embodied cognition, and, all in all, making the boundaries of mental concepts fuzzier, less rigid, seems profitable.

The takeaway here is this: your everyday experience can’t always fit into clear conceptual buckets, like “propositional attitudes,” even though the concept is often remarkably informative.

So, how do these concepts stack up in my airport catastrophe? In my view, some parts of my shame, frustration, stress, and bewilderment on the train had a truth value—it possessed the content “my frantic mishap is someone else’s fault” and the attitude, roughly expressed, “$*#%.” (Truth value doesn’t mean it’s true, it means it can be evaluated as true or false. Some statements don’t have this property. For example, the exclamation “Wow!” has no truth value.)

My emotions were, for the most part, outwardly directed, especially at the employee I asked for directions. In the moment, my feelings made me forget a fact I propositionally knew: I had said my second flight was American Airlines when it simply wasn’t.

Feelings are regularly irrational, that observation isn’t groundbreaking. What’s interesting is that my feelings didn’t correctly correspond to the events given the facts that I knew, and when I left this emotional disposition for a more reflective one, I noticed the discrepancy immediately, but the feelings didn’t go away; neither did the feeling’s content, or propositional content, change.

The emotions presented one story, my more reflective state, another. Phenomenologically, I distinctly remember feeling like I could have continued down either avenue. If I listened to the story my emotions told, I would believe the airline was at fault, despite knowing otherwise.

I could also justify my rotten feelings, to myself and others, on the emotional path. For example, the statement “an airline employee told me to go to the wrong gate” would garner me sympathy, ease my embarrassment, justify my anger, and, on a logical truth table, come out “True.” Despite being technically correct, of course, that statement is a lie.

On the other hand, I could refashion the story after truth while needlessly disparaging myself. “I went to the wrong gate, like an idiot.” Or, I could give myself grace and keep in line with the truth. “I thought my second flight was American Airlines, so I went to the wrong gate.” This seems like a prudent way to talk about the misadventure.

What I’m driving at is that I had two roads I could go down, a propositionally false, emotional one, or a true, slightly more reflective one. In the latter state, I still felt frustrated at the airline, but I didn’t believe what the emotions represented to me. If I had “chosen” the former, I think my beliefs could have changed such that I entirely absorbed the emotion’s story, misremembering and rationalizing my new propositional-attitude.

This implies that something in my transcended the two positions to “select” one road to travel down, as they both represented reality differently. What is that part of the self, or mind, that “chose” between two views of reality, with two different resulting rationalizations? Is it another, higher-order belief? A deeper, more fundamental feeling?

I’d love to explore these questions more next time. This essay lays some groundwork basic to modern philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Next post, I hope to write something more original along these lines.

Thanks for reading.

Soli Deo Gloria.