Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 402.
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Date: 2024-01-18 07:55:41+00:00
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
Subject: Freud & workings of mind
For the purposes of argument, let's put aside whether Sigmund Freud's
theories of mind are correct or the latest word on the psyche. Let's ask
instead whether the great influence they have had and continue to have
tells us something important about how we construe mind. For some of the
world's inhabitants (e.g. at least some indigenous Amazonians) the idea
of 'the unconscious' (a black-box mind) makes no sense whatever. To
paraphrase a forthcoming paper, everyone in a specific tribe knows
what's going on in another person's mind; what they have no access to is
what this person’s unknowable relations with other humans and with
non-human others will lead him or her to do.
The question I want to ask is this: what do we do on discovering people
who think in radically different ways than we do? Would not the best
response be to question our possibly quite provincial assumptions about
mind?
Why is this significant for those interested in computing? For one
thing, taking radical diversity in the exercise of intelligence just
might sensitise us to the anomalies of the artificial kind, and suggest
that its failures to perform as expected just might open a window on
emergent radical diversity in smart machines.
Comments?
Yours,
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews; Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk
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