the mind is not a computer

"Any employment is better than no employment [even] if it's about flipping burgers or stacking shelves rather than being sat at home feeling sorry for yourself and vegetating. There are lots of other skills required and valued, like people skills: you could be on a counter in a store. It's all about building up your skills base."

---Carl Gilleard, The Association of Graduate Recruiters.

Skills: an input into some output (read: productivity or GDP growth).Which means that 'useless' subjects like philosophy and medieval history and literature should not be taught (what's their 'market value' goes up the cry...you've got limited resources and have to make a decision after all...). Well, yes, but decisions imply that we can compare along some dimension and also that the 'aggregating principle', the weights we give to the quantities along each dimension, is simply given and not a highly contested and deliberative process.

And this is not, perhaps, too dissimilar to the notion that the mind sifts through given data, computes, and then gets to some conclusion. But which data is selected, and what counts as 'data', is surely a matter of experience, desires, expectations-in short: our engagement with other people, language, and the world. Can we really just point to objects without language? And is repetition or processing-no matter how speedily done, no matter how extensive, the same thing as thinking, as judgement? [But if we don't have a mechanical explanation does that mean we're left with no explanation, no possible explanation? Is freedom of thought arbitrary, an abyss, not subject to theoria?]

~~~

People often talk about tradition and the way things are-and in most cases (at least now) you think this is a cover up for subjection and the stifling of thought or anything new. Traditionalists are pessimists in this sense: everything is a falling away from the origin and purity; the modern world is full of depravity and decline and the attempt to bring about progress ends up creating terrible dystopias and disenchantment.

Much has been lost. No doubt. But a simple question: would you really rather live in any other age than the one you're currently living in? {if you're blogging/have a computer, I'm assuming the answer is no, but surprise me}

‘I am contending for the rights of the living and against their being willed away, and controlled, and contracted for, by the manuscript-assumed authority of the dead.’
---Tom Paine.