Mazviita Chirimuuta

It could be distal because it happened a long time ago, but this is what biological memory is, things that happen to you when you were a baby affect how you are now.

physical systems like non-living physical systems they're much more constrained in their in their actions and I don't mean that in like action but just what they do what happens to them by what's proximal to them there's like the distal is always screened off by the proximal if that makes sense like the

Whereas for you, all of these things that happened in the past could be as relevant as anything that happens in the room right now, or your ideas about the future would be relevant to what you're saying right now.

So yeah, this notion of being sensitive to what's not immediately driving you in your surroundings, I think that's a really important, like,

thing to latch onto and like delineating at least the class of systems that we want to call cognitive to ones that we would say are sort of merely physical, not intelligent in any important sense of the word.

Oh, so actually it's kind of the reverse.

It's as if the physical stance has an ontological priority, like that's what's really there, but it's useful to use the design and the intentional stance.

Yeah, so that's part of the sort of metaphysical neutrality that I set out with the chapter.

It's to say, okay, let's not go in with the assumption that low-level physical causes are the primary causes of everything.

Yeah, it's a way of

of, if you like, taking intentional phenomena at face value, intentional in the sense of like bearing representations.

And I think one of my criticisms in that chapter is this agenda, which is there in philosophy of mind to say that, okay, if representation is real, we need to be able to tell a physical story about how it comes about.

And I'm just saying, why go along with that project?

And this is actually going, a Donatian view, you might see it as that.

If talking about representations and intentionality is useful within the sciences, why not just take that at face value and not say that that needs to be established by making it coherent with some

Causal story about what's going on in terms of non-intentional physical interactions.

So that was the position there.

When you're making a claim that, you know, the...

brain is a computer and that that explains cognition, what grounds have you got for saying that any arbitrary physical system is actually implementing a computation just from looking at its physical dynamics?

If it's purely a question of mapping the physical dynamics to a computational formalism, then any physical system can afford a mapping of that sort, whether it's a rock, whether it's the sofa,