Basal Cognition Debate

Past conversation [0] on a SciAm article about basal cognition. I highly recommend the article [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39127028

Are we so sure human cognition isn't this too?

"Many people think that the human mind is the apotheosis of cognition.I don’t"

Explain to me how a brain can evolve, and yet not understand how itself functions?

There was a thread the other day here on HN[0] that discussed how the brain isn't actually broken into discreet sections that govern different parts of our biological process.I'm not sure how big an impact that has on this author's philosophical thoughts, but it's worth noting.[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26341218

Sounds like the brain works like this. It would be a great hubris that any of us are different.

Under that premise whatever our brains are doing won't count as reasoning either.I'd suggest you look into modern neuroscience and topics such as predictive coding if you're interested in refining your views.

It's not only language or some tasks - it's literally everything. Predictive Processing Theory proposes that our whole model is predicting future and only then confirming it through our input signals (eyes, ears etc). I highly recommend The Experience Machine by Andy Clark which explains and arguments this theory very convincingly to the point where I firmly believe it to be true.

You might like Dennett's multiple drafts hypothesis.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_drafts_model

To expand on this, healthy human brains seem to be made of many interacting systems which function in different ways. It may be that in the future we view the search for one simple formula for "intelligence" / "understanding" / "consciousness" (pick your poorly-defined poison) the same way biologists view the concept of elan vital.