Day 0326

Over-read and over-ate. Finished The Silk Roads, jumped into Chomsky's Necessary Illusions, then ploughed on with Tim Crane's Mechanical Mind.

Frustrated with the book on the philosophy of mind; following the hypothetical minutae of arguments and theories that can only ever be falsifiable by science -- what is the point? Either the brain is reducible to structures that are rule-describable or it isn't. If it is, we can in principle replicate it, and thought is fundamentally computational. If it isn't, then it lies outside of the understanding of science forever, and then that is a much bigger problem on our hands, and an interesting philosophical area for study. How to deal with the fact that there is something in the universe that is fundamentally beyond logical description? It's the question of the limits of science, like 'what is outside the universe' or 'what was before the big bang' or 'how can there be nothing'?

Can you reverse engineer the rules governing the behaviour of an arbitrary black box? No; you can never be sure you have tested all possible inputs and outputs. Therefore you can never be completely sure you can reverse engineer a brain. But you can asymptotically approach it, forever feeding more data and replicating the results.