Daniel Dennett: How Does the Brain Store Beliefs?
What if beliefs could be surgically inserted into a patient's brain? This is the basis of one of philosopher Daniel Dennett's thought experiments in exploration of ...
==========
One of the problems that's beset philosophers and cognitive scientists for the last 30, 40 years is how on earth the brain represents information. An eternally appealing idea is something like a language of thought that there's brain writing or mentalese and we write -- the brain writes sentences in mentalese that store the beliefs so that when you learn that giraffes are mammals, there's someplace in your brain where the word -- the mental word giraffe and the word mammal are tied together with a "is a" or something like that. So we have a big library of sentences. Those are our beliefs. We have a belief box with lots of beliefs. That's an attractive idea of nice -- it has a certain simplicity that -- and we think we understand how sentences work to store ...
==========
One of the problems that's beset philosophers and cognitive scientists for the last 30, 40 years is how on earth the brain represents information. An eternally appealing idea is something like a language of thought that there's brain writing or mentalese and we write -- the brain writes sentences in mentalese that store the beliefs so that when you learn that giraffes are mammals, there's someplace in your brain where the word -- the mental word giraffe and the word mammal are tied together with a "is a" or something like that. So we have a big library of sentences. Those are our beliefs. We have a belief box with lots of beliefs. That's an attractive idea of nice -- it has a certain simplicity that -- and we think we understand how sentences work to store ...
