Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1998 12:39:38 -0400
From: Bill Benzon <bbenzon@meta4inc.com>
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: Re: On Gatherer's behaviourist stance
Paul Marsden wrote:
> Precisely it is just a model and has nothing to do with what is occurring in
> the brain, so it makes no sense to talk of them as internal mnemons or
> whatever - they are not internal at all they are abstract models.
But they are abstract models of a process that is happening somewhere. Now, it
could be that they are happening in an immaterial soul; but I doubt that many
cognitive scientists believe in such things. They probably believe that it is
happening in the brain. Now, they may not believe that they are modelling the
bottom-level brain processes. But they are, at some level, brain processes.
A computer program written in, for example, C++, is certainly executed in a
computer. Now, the instructions which are actually executing on the CPU aren't
C++ instructions; they're machine code, machine code that implements C++
commands and constructions.
Bill B
-- William Benzon Senior Scientist Meta4 Incorporated 33-41 Newark Street Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA voice: 201.656.0906 fax: 201.656.0901 home page: www.newsavanna.com/wlb/
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